Old Kacyzne

Old Kacyzne

Alter Kacyzne (born May 31, 1885 in Vilnius , Russian Empire ; † July 7, 1941 in Tarnopol , today's Ukraine ) made significant contributions to Yiddish literature , but made a name for himself as a photographer of the Jewish people in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s .

Life

Kacyzne was born into a poor family of artisans. His father was a bricklayer, his mother a seamstress, and his grandfather a blacksmith. Although he attended a traditional cheder and a Russian-Jewish comprehensive school for a few years , he later acquired his extensive language skills in Russian, Polish, German and French in addition to Yiddish and Hebrew by himself.

After the early death of his father, at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a photographer in Yekaterinoslav in southern Ukraine . There he began to write poems in Russian, two of which were published in 1909 in the Russian magazine Yevreiski mir (Jewish World). During this time he married his wife Chana Chaczanow.

Influenced by the stories of Leib Peretz , a pioneer of modern Yiddish literature, Kacyzne moved with his wife to Warsaw in 1910 and became his pupil. Beginning in 1918, and until the end of his career, he published numerous Yiddish poems, dramas, short stories, a novel, scripts, essays, travelogues and feature pages.

Kacyzne founded and published several magazines and was chairman of the Yiddish PEN , worked with various theater groups and Yiddish filmmakers. His summer house in the vicinity of Warsaw, which he bought around 1920, was at times a meeting place for writers: Israel Joshua Singer and his more famous younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer were among the guests.

Alter Kacyzne ran a flourishing photo studio until his family fled Warsaw in 1939. The camera was also his constant companion on his reading and lecture trips, which took him to the most remote corners of Poland, so that over the years an extensive archive of photographs of everyday life across all social classes was created. However, his historically valuable collection was destroyed during the Nazi occupation, with the exception of a selection of around 700 pictures, most of which he had sent to New York as contributions to the Yiddish daily Forverts . As a photographer, he also toured Romania, Italy, Palestine, Spain and Morocco.

Although the exit papers for the United States were in Kacyzne's hands on the eve of World War II , he could not make up his mind to leave home. It was only after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 that Kacyzne fled from Warsaw to Soviet-occupied Lemberg . In 1941 the German Wehrmacht invaded Lemberg: Mrs. Khana and daughter Sulamita stayed behind, while Kacyzne fled to Tarnopol with thousands of others on foot .

In the now Nazi-occupied city, Alter Kacyzne was beaten to death by a Ukrainian collaborator on July 7th in the Jewish cemetery. The eyewitness report published in 1945 by the Yiddish poet Nachman Blitz , who survived the Ukrainian pogrom, was one of the first descriptions of the horrors of the Nazi extermination of Jews. While Kacyzne's daughter Sulamita survived the World War and devoted her life to her father's estate, his wife Chana was murdered in the Belzec extermination camp .

Works

Books

• Shtarke and shvache . 1930, novel.
• Poyln. A lost Jewish world . Published by Marek Web, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-351-02497-5 .
• Age Kacyzne as a writer. Original and translated. A little book show. Catalog for the exhibition for the 8th Symposium on Yiddish Studies in Germany Ed. Ane Kleine & Nora Hahn. University of Trier (56 S). At the same time special issue of the "Yiddish Communications. Yiddish in German-speaking Countries", ISSN  0947-6091 .

Plays

• Dukus . 1925 (The Duke)
• Hurdus . 1926 (Herod)
• The yidn's opere . 1937 (Judenoper)
• Shvartsbard . 1937 (via Scholom Schwartzbard )

Web links

Commons : Alter Kacyzne  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Alter Kacyzne in the catalog of the German National Library