Last Jews of Rădăuți

Cornell Capa invited Salzmann to show this work at the International Center of Photography in New York, which led in 1983 to its publication with Doubleday as The Last Jews of Rădăuţi (Figures 58–74). It was accompanied by a film, Song of Rădăuţi, which was broadcast nationwide on PBS. The Last Jews of Rădăuţi, and its companion work La Baie/Bath Scenes (discussed later in this book), remain among Salzmann’s best-known works.

The 1970s–1990s saw several notable projects on “last” or “final” European Jewish communities—small groups of Jews managing to hang on with some measure of dignity and tradition a generation after the Holocaust. These projects included Chuck Fishman’s 1977 Polish Jews: The Final Chapter; Malgorzata Niezabitowska and Tomasz Tomaszewski’s 1985 Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland; Edward Serotta’s 1991 Out of the Shadows: A Photographic Portrait of Jewish Life in Central Europe Since the Holocaust; the ethnomusicologist Yale Strom’s photographic archive made during four decades of travel and research in eastern Europe (1981-2020); and Rita Ostrovskaya’s 1996 Jews in the Ukraine. The ur-project for these works is Roman Vishniac’s iconic prewar documentation of Polish Jewry, published in 1983—the same year as Salzmann’s book, in the middle of the period of publications of its type—as A Vanished World. Vishniac’s work is a classic example of a body of photographs changing its meaning over time, acquiring an intensity of historical witness because of events that framed it retrospectively. Intensely nostalgic, Vishniac depicts the Jewish world that the genocide destroyed as pious, persevering, long- suffering, full of sorrow and spiritually indomitable—a holy world of holy people who in his images are given a measure of posthumous life beyond their evil destruction.