In a slide-illustrated lecture titled The Life, Vision and Artistic Work of Roman Vishniac, the celebrated late photographer’s diverse body of work will be remembered by his daughter Mara Vishniac Kohn and Yiddish scholar Miriam Hartman Flacks on Monday, February 28 at 8 p.m. in UCSB Campbell Hall. Kohn will discuss her father’s background and his early fascination with microscopes, showing some of his famous images of microscopic life in glowing color. Miriam Hartman Flacks, co-editor with Kohn of the book Children of a Vanished World, which features Vishniac’s photographs of children, will discuss the role of Yiddish in the lives and culture of Eastern European Jewry. Slides from this branch of Vishniac’s work, accompanied by the sounds of Yiddish folklore’s best-loved songs, will highlight his deeply moving images of shtetl life. Admission to this event is free.

Born in Russia in 1897, Roman Vishniac was a biologist by training, having earned a doctorate in zoology and a medical degree from Moscow universities and a doctorate in Oriental art from the University of Berlin. For many years he was prevented from working in any of those fields because of war, revolution and political persecution. He instead pursued a career in microphotography, the photographing of insects, cells, plankton and other small organisms. His images in this area regularly appeared in Life magazine.

From 1934 to 1939, Vishniac explored on foot the cities and villages of Eastern Europe, recording life in the Jewish shtetlekh (villages) of Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania—communities that even then seemed threatened by routine change as much as by violence and extermination.

Using a hidden camera and working under difficult circumstances that included evading the police and later Nazis, he was able to take thousands of photographs. Before he finished the tour, he had been jailed eleven times and placed in a concentration camp in Vichy France. Vishniac told The New York Times in 1982, “I sewed some of the negatives into my clothing when I came to the United States in 1940. Most of them were left with my father in a small city in central France. He survived there, hidden. He concealed the negatives under floorboards and behind picture frames.” Two thousand of the images still survive.

Thirty of the photographs were assembled and published in 1947 in Polish Jews: A Pictorial Record. Two hundred of them appeared in A Vanished World, which was published in 1983. “I felt it was my duty to my ancestors to preserve a world that might cease to exist. I wanted to save the faces,” he said. “I especially wanted to take pictures of children, since Hitler eventually killed more children than old people. He wanted to destroy the young.”

Inspired by her father’s passion for photographing children, Kohn selected and edited with Flacks seventy of her late father’s photographs to be published (thirty-six for the first time) in Children of a Vanished World. Kohn describes her original idea for the book, “I conceived it as book about the lives of these children. I did not want to focus on children as victims. Instead I wanted to show them playing, studying and simply being children in their world.”

Flacks culled her own memory and conducted extensive research to provide the accompanying traditional Yiddish nursery rhymes, songs, poems and chants that face each photograph in the book. Text appears in its original Yiddish with English translations. A music section rounds out the volume, showing musical notation for thirteen of the songs.

Roman Vishniac died in 1990. A collection of his work, To Give Them Light: The Legacy of Roman Vishniac, was published in 1995.

Mara Vishniac Kohn is an educational therapist who has spent most of her professional life working in private special education. Miriam Hartman Flacks, a Brooklyn-born native speaker of Yiddish, seeks to preserve the rich tradition of Yiddish folk songs.

This event is presented as part of the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Symposia in Jewish Studies by UCSB Arts & Lectures, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of Religious Studies and Hillel.

For more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
Roman Baratiak at (805) 893-2080.