The Lost World of Tarnów

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

This is a book I would like to get:

The photos are really impressive. Although their photographers are mostly unknown, many of them are worthy counterparts of Menachem Kipnis’, Alter Kacyzne’s or Roman Vishniac’s famous series. This also indicates how many more pictures may still be hiding depicting this world, which only twenty years ago was widely considered to have passed almost without a trace. And the book’s great merit is that, apart from the images, it also helps to revive this world with long texts. The Tarnów Jews that survived the destruction started to record and collect their remembrances in Israel since the late 1940s, and in 1954 they published them in Yiddish, Hebrew and Polish; the latter under the title Tarnów. Egzystencja i zagłada żydowskiego miasta (Tarnów: Life and destruction of a Jewish town). These excerpts from the book come from this collection.

The excerpts begin with the vivid description of the everyday Jewish life, the typical figures of the squares and streets; the coachmen, the barber, the restaurants, the porters. They present the festivities of the religious Hasids, the misery of the slums, the struggle of the workers for a better life. They report on how the twentieth century settled over the city, the destructive Russian occupation of 1914-1915, the bourgeois life between the two world wars. And then about 1 September 1939, the first day of the war, the German occupation, the establishment of the ghetto, the deportations. About escape, with Polish help. About survival.

It is such a rarity to have such rich visual material and together with detailed account of a Jewish town, that I consider it worthwhile to quote from it a number of stories over a few consecutive posts. The shtetl evoked in this way will help to form an image of the many other shtetls, from which no similar memories have survived. We start in medias res, and, leaving the description of the city’s everyday life to the next post, we first present the Al Capone of Tarnów, Idele Muc, on the basis of a report from Mordechai David Brandstetter, the great Tarnów master of Hebrew literature, as mediated by Jozef Hajman. The figure of Idele Muc shows that the sort of king of the Jewish underworld, like the Odessite Benya Krik, were not created or embellished merely by the fantasy of Isaac Babel, but they really existed, and formed a separate type, and they might have been present in many more cities, than only those from which we have a reports.

Post external references

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    http://riowang.blogspot.com/2014/08/tarnow-tales-1-al-capone-of-tarnow.html
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