Menachem Kipnis - Hardcover

About the Book

Menachem Kipnis brings together for the first time folktales and photographs by one of the early 20th century's most popular Yiddish folklorists. Placing these striking images and memorable tales in dialogue, it suggests new ways of understanding how East European Jewish culture was depicted between the two World Wars.

Book Synopsis

Menachem Kipnis (1878-1942) was one of the early twentieth-century's greatest Jewish eastern European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States. Now, for the first time, Kipnis's stories and photographs are published together in a single book.

Menachem Kipnis brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their coreligionists in the "Old Country" and eastern European urban Jews sought to distinguish themselves from their Jewish compatriots who were still living in the shtetl. Including an introductory essay, annotations, and an epilogue by Sheila E. Jelen, Menachem Kipnis suggests new ways of understanding both visual and literary depictions of eastern European Jewish culture between the two world wars.

Review Quotes

"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."

"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."

About the Author

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.