Overview

Menachem Kipnis: Yiddish Folklore and Photographs from Interwar Poland showcases photographs of East European Jews alongside Yiddish folk stories documented by Menachem Kipnis (1878-1942), an ethnomusicologist, performer, and folklore collector who died in the Warsaw Ghetto. Kipnis' photographs were originally published in the American Yiddish press throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The folk tales, published originally in Yiddish as Chelmer Mayses (Chelm Stories), were published in the East European Yiddish press during those same years. This volume, for the first time in single book, brings together these two bodies of Kipnis’s work, suggesting new ways of understanding the image, both literary and visual, of East European Jewish culture between the two World Wars. With an introductory essay, annotation, and an epilogue, Menachem Kipnis provides a glimpse into the aspirations for modernization that characterized Jewish life before the Holocaust, both in Europe and in the United States.

Full Product Details

9781978846104

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Reviews

""Standing on the blurry but oh-so-firmly-felt border between folk tale and photographic reality, Menachem Kipnis helped to shape Yiddishland in the pre-Holocaust popular imagination more than almost anyone else. This highly welcome volume, with its sensitive translations and its wonderful reproductions, helps rescue this vital figure from undeserved obscurity."" --Jeremy Dauber ""author of The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Te"" ""This beautifully illustrated translation of Kipnis's essential writings is an important companion to the canon of primary sources on Jewish life in Poland before the Second World War. Kipnis's own photographs stand close to the monumental work carried by Roman Vishniac and, sadly, very few others. An essential volume."" --Francesco Spagnolo ""coauthor of The Jewish World: 100 Treasures of Art and Culture""

Author Information

Menachem Kipnis (1879-1942) was born in Ushomir, Ukraine into a family of cantors. Kipnis’s work as an ethnomusicologist, singer, photographer, and folklorist unfolded at the height of Jewish folkloristic activity in Europe between the World Wars. Kipnis died of a stroke in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942. Sheila E. Jelen is a professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies and Testimonial Montage: A Family of Israeli Holocaust Testimonies from the Cracow Ghetto Resistance. Raphael Finkel is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Kentucky. He compiled the first version of the Jargon File. Finkel is also an activist for the survival of the Yiddish language.

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