Menachem Kipnis

Menachem Kipnis: Yiddish Folklore and Photographs from Interwar Poland showcases photographs of East European Jews alongside Yiddish folk stories documented by Menachem Kipnis (1878-1942), an ethnomusicologist, performer, and folklore collector who died in the Warsaw Ghetto. Kipnis' photographs were originally published in the American Yiddish press throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The folk tales, published originally in Yiddish as Chelmer Mayses (Chelm Stories), were published in the East European Yiddish press during those same years. This volume, for the first time in single book, brings together these two bodies of Kipnis’s work, suggesting new ways of understanding the image, both literary and visual, of East European Jewish culture between the two World Wars. With an introductory essay, annotation, and an epilogue, Menachem Kipnis provides a glimpse into the aspirations for modernization that characterized Jewish life before the Holocaust, both in Europe and in the United States.