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In 1992 Canadian documentary filmmaker and photographer David Kaufman found himself in Poland shooting footage for a television program about hidden child survivors of the Holocaust. A decade later, he returned to make films about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Łódź Ghetto. Deeply moved by the quality of Jewish material culture—the remnants of Jewish life—that he saw on these trips, he set out over the next 20 years to record the vivid afterlives of apartments, factories, and synagogues that were part of everyday Jewish life in pre-war Poland, western Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia, as well as the places of despair and death that followed.
The Posthumous Landscape is more than an act of preserving memory. Kaufman brings his decades of documentary storytelling experience to bear, bringing life to these places left behind.
These are the stories of the lives and deaths of the individuals and communities that built grand industrial complexes, lived in urban apartments, passed through crowded ghettos, worshipped in small rural synagogues, are buried in vast cemeteries and mausoleums, and are commemorated by memorials. And they are the stories of the afterlives of those places, the ones repurposed, the ones lovingly cared for by non-Jews who remember, and the ones slowly returning to the earth, but which are preserved in these pages.
Some readers will find here names from their own family histories. All will discover a new visual vocabulary of an Eastern European Jewish community before the destruction caused by World War II.With introductory essays by political commentator Bernard Avishai and Polish journalist and heritage preservationist Joanna Podolska, The Posthumous Landscape is an tribute to the beauty of lives cut short and a testament to how our internal landscapes are inextricably bound to the places of our past.
“As a stone on a Jewish grave represents the permanence of memory that will not die, Kaufman’s sadly telling photographs of Jewish sites of memory in Eastern Europe—photographs of remnant stones, bricks and mortar—serve as visual testament to the existence of a vibrant Jewish world that once was but is no more. The Posthumous Landscape is a moving, human document, artfully delivered and devastatingly compelling in its impact.”
—Harold Troper, historian, professor emeritus, University of Toronto
“A luminous silence radiates from these pristine photographs. They record at this precise moment what can and cannot be recovered from a world destroyed with the disappearance of those who created it. An inspiring volume that invites the reader to follow in the photographer’s footsteps.”
—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
“The Posthumous Landscape will be deeply meaningful to any person with a personal tie to, or interest in, the civilization that was created by Eastern European Jewry. As someone whose parents grew up in and survived the entire war in Poland/Ukraine, and who has researched issues related to the Holocaust, this book has spoken to me like no other.”
—Morton Weinfeld, Professor of Sociology, McGill University, co-author with John Sigal of Trauma and Rebirth: Intergenerational Effects of the Holocaust