Alter Kacyzne
| Alter Kacyzne | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
May 31, 1885 Vilnius, Russian Empire, (now Lithuania) |
| Died | July 7, 1941 (aged 56) Ternopil, Occupied Polish Territories (Now in Ukraine) |
| Nationality | Lithuanian |
| Occupation | Photographer, writer |
Alter Kacyzne (May 31, 1885 in Vilnius, Russian Empire – July 7, 1941 in Ternopil, General Government for the Occupied Polish Territories) was a Jewish (Yiddish) writer, poet and photographer. One of the most significant contributors to Jewish-Polish cultural life in the first half of the 20th century. Among other things, he is particularly known as a photographer whose work immortalised Jewish life in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s.
Alter-Sholem Kacyzne was born on the 31st of May, 1885, to a poor working-class family in Vilna in Imperial Russia (now Vilnius in Lithuania), within the Pale of Settlement. His father worked as a bricklayer, and his mother worked as a seamstress. He was educated in a Cheder and in the Russian-Jewish school. He spoke Yiddish at home. An avid reader, he taught himself Hebrew, Russian, Polish, German and French.
Following the death of his father in 1899, when Kacyzne was fourteen, he went to work as an apprentice in his uncle's professional photography studio in Ekaterinoslav, New Russia (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine). While engaged in self-education, he began to write short stories in Russian. He wrote poems and sent some of these to the Yiddish author S. Ansky. Around this time he married Khana Khachnov. In 1910, greatly attracted by the Yiddish works of I.L. Peretz, he moved to Warsaw to be closer to the teacher. He became a member Peretz's circle, and an ardent literary disciple.
Kacyzne opened a photographic studio in Warsaw. In the 1920s, he worked as a photojournalist for the New York City-based newspaper Forverts (Forward). He travelled as a photographer to Poland, Romania, Italy, Spain, Palestine and Morocco. In the years 1927-1928 Kacyzne's photographs, accompanied by his travel essays, were published in the Warsaw magazine "Our Express".
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