The Posthumous Landscape

A photographic tribute that highlights the stories behind remnants of Jewish communal life in post-war Poland, western Ukraine, Lithuania, and Latvia.

In 1992 Canadian documentary filmmaker and photographer David Kaufman travelled to Poland to produce 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. Kaufman was deeply moved by the quality of Jewish material culture—the physical remnants of Jewish life—that he saw on these early visits. In 2007 he set out on the first of many trips over two decades to record images of tenements, factories, synagogues, and cemeteries that were part of everyday Jewish life in pre-Holocaust eastern Europe. He also made photos of some of the places of despair and death where Jews were killed during the war.

The Posthumous Landscape is more than an act of preserving memory. Kaufman brings his decades of documentary storytelling experience to bear, illuminating these places left behind. His photographs and accompanying texts describe a historic community that played a major role in the development of eastern European society and which left behind grand industrial complexes, urban neighbourhoods, architectural landmarks, beautiful synagogues, as well as vast cemeteries, and haunting memorials. The photographs also tell the stories of the afterlives of those places, many repurposed, some lovingly cared for by non-Jews who remember, and others slowly returning to the earth, but which are preserved in this book’s pages.

Some readers will find here names from their own family histories. All will discover a visual landscape that bears witness to the vitality and creativity of Eastern European Jewry before its destruction.

With introductory essays by political commentator Bernard Avishai and Polish journalist and heritage activist Joanna Podolska, The Posthumous Landscape is a tribute to a community that met a tragic end and a testament to how our internal landscapes are inextricably bound to the places of our past.