Silent Places: Landscapes of Jewish Life and Loss in Eastern Europe

Jeff Gusky, a doctor of emergency medicine decided, at the age of 42, that he wanted to better confront the reality of modern Jewish history. A self-taught photographer who subsequently learned to make museum quality prints, he "bought a good, journalist-type camera and some lenses" and traveled to Polandonce the home of the largest concentration of Diaspora Jews." He read the instruction manuals on the plane en route. Four trips later, accompanied each time by a top Polish guide, he traveled through the country, beyond the city ghettos and the sites of concentration camps, into remote villages where Jews had lived and worked for almost 1,000 years before the Holocaustcapturing on film the austere landscapes and the remains of a once thriving Jewish culture.

The silence is deafening: here are Jewish cemeteries full of broken gravestones, ruined synagogues filled with trash and disfigured with graffiti, a Jewish home now used as a public toilet"where people lived, walked, worshipped, and were, ultimately, exterminated," says Gusky. The doleful, understated clarity of what he saw and photographed capture a poignant sense of lossmaking at the same time, an indelible connection to the past.

The images in this book are artistically composed and printed with great attention to detail. Viewing the large printed images give one of the feeling of standing in the place itself. I strongly recommend this book as one of permanent importance. With the rapid changes now underway in the area, it may also be the look we have at the communities that made up such an important part of the cultural fabric of Eastern European life prior to WWII.