In 1935, Roman Vishniac, a Latvian Jew living in Berlin, was asked by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Central Europe to aid its fund-raising efforts by travelling to the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe to make a photographic record of life in the shtetlekh. Even then it was recognised that this isolated world was under threat, though few realised that within less than a decade it would be utterly destroyed.
As Vishniac's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, observes in her brief but charming introduction to Children of a Vanished World, which she has edited with Miriam Hartman Flacks, (University of California Press), once her father arrived in Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania", he knew that "he had entered the world he had heard about as a child from his father and grandfather".
He spent three years travelling from Lithuania through Poland, Romania, Hungary and Russia, bringing back thousands of photographs that would go to make an incomparable memorial to the "vanished world" of poor European Jews. Poor in material terms, that is; the Jews of the Diaspora carried with them the traditions of a civilisation which the Nazis set out finally to destroy. They failed. It is likely that the majority of the children portrayed in this book perished in the Holocaust, but thanks to Vishniac, something of them survives, even if it is only their images, these shadows made of light. As he told his daughter, "I wanted at least to save their faces."
This is a heartbreaking and beautiful book. The superb pictures are accompanied by children's rhymes, printed in the original Yiddish, the mame-loshn (mother tongue) of the shtetlekh, with transliterations into the Roman alphabet, as well as English translations. Anyone who knows Vishniac's previous books, To Give them Light: the Legacy of Roman Vishniac (1995), and A Vanished World (1983), will want to have this latest volume; for others, Children of a Vanished World will be a perfect introduction to a great humanitarian monument of the 20th century.