Search all library resources

Grief : the biography of a Holocaust photograph

In January 1942, Soviet press photographers came upon a scene like none they had ever documented. That day, they took pictures of the first liberation of a German mass atrocity, where an estimated 7,000 Jews and others were executed at an anti-tank trench near Kerch on the Crimean peninsula. Dmitri Baltermants, a photojournalist working for the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia, took photos that day that would have a long life in shaping the image of Nazi genocide in and against the Soviet Union. Presenting never before seen photographs, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph shows how Baltermants used the image of a grieving woman to render this gruesome mass atrocity into a transcendentally human tragedy. David Shneer tells the story of how that one photograph from the series Baltermants took that day in 1942 near Kerch became much more widely known than the others, eventually being titled "Grief." Baltermants turned this shocking wartime atrocity photograph into a Cold War era artistic meditation on the profundity and horror of war that today can be found in Holocaust photo archives as well as in art museums and at art auctions. Although the journalist documented murdered Jews in other pictures he took at Kerch, in "Grief" there are likely no Jews among the dead or the living, save for the possible NKVD soldier securing the site. Nonetheless, Shneer shows that this photograph must be seen as an iconic Holocaust photograph. Unlike images of emaciated camp survivors or barbed wire fences, Shneer argues, the Holocaust by bullets in the Soviet Union make "Grief" a quintessential Soviet image of Nazi genocide.

Online Oxford Scholarship Online

Through Soviet Jewish eyes : photography, war, and the Holocaust

Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust. This passionate work tells their stories and highlights their work through their very own images-never-before-published phot.Finalist for the 2011 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, including Arkady Shaykhet, Alexander Grinberg, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Max Alpert, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust. These wartime photographers were the first liberators to bear witness with cameras to Nazi atrocities, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and Dachau. In this passionate work, David Shneer tells their stories and highlights their work through their very own images-he has amassed never-before-published photographs from families, collectors, and private archives. Through Soviet Jewish Eyes helps us understand why so many Jews flocked to Soviet photography; what their lives and work looked like during the rise of Stalinism, during and then after the war; and why Jews were the ones charged with documenting the Soviet experiment and then its near destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

Yiddish and the creation of Soviet Jewish culture, 1918-1930

Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture gives voice to the activists empowered by the state to create a Soviet Jewish national culture. These activists were striving for a national revolution to create a new culture for Jews to identify as Jews on new, secular, Soviet terms. This book explores the ways in which Jews were part of, not apart from, both the Soviet system and Jewish history. Soviet Jewish culture worked within contemporary Jewish national and cultural trends and simultaneously participated in the larger project of propagating the Soviet state and ideology. Soviet Jewish activists were not nationalists or Soviets, but both at once. David Shneer addresses some of the painful truths about Jews' own implication and imbrication in the Soviet system and inserts their role in twentieth-century Jewish culture into the narrative of Jewish history.