Exile at Home - Hardcover

Amichai, Yehuda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810932695 ISBN 13: 9780810932692

Publisher: Harry N Abrams Inc, 1998

Synopsis

Frederic Brenner has traveled for nearly two decades to photograph Jews in more than forty countries, capturing the diversity of their experiences in the Diaspora. Now, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Israel, Brenner has photographed fourteen recent immigrant families, all of whom he had previously photographed in their native countries, whether Ethiopia, Yemen, Russia, Yugoslavia, the United States, France, England, or India.

About this title

Review:

What happens when the wandering Jew comes home? For 20 years and across five continents, photographer Frederic Brenner documented the lives of members of the Jewish Diaspora. Then in 1997 he learned that 14 of the families he'd photographed around the world had immigrated to Israel. So in celebration of the Israel's 50th anniversary, Brenner photographed them again in their new homeland. The before and after photos of each family are on facing pages, posed, but still representing the truths of their particular situations. Stark or sophisticated interiors, crowded and dirty but smiling families, and dancing children tell more than meets the eye. Some families have grown since they were first photographed; some have become smaller. Are these families better off for having moved to the land of milk and honey? What do Jews from Yemen, Russia, Europe, Tunisia, and the United States have in common? Brenner's photographs are so rich in content that the details he provides about them prompt deeper probing. There is so much more to ask as readers compare the families to one another and to their past and current situations. In keeping with Jewish tradition, this collection is truly a book of questions.

From Library Journal:

"We are still a people in exile, wandering in the desert," said David Ben Gurion, quoted at the beginning of Brenner's wondrous photographic essay celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of Israel. Brenner, winner of the 1992 Prix de Rome and creator of Jews/America/A Representation (Abrams, 1996), spent nearly two decades photographing Jews throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. Here he presents photographs of individuals and families who have since emigrated to Israel. Stark, powerful, and artfully posed, the black-and-white photographs showing these strangers in their strange new land are juxtaposed with their original photos: a Russian steelworker with her teenaged son, the mother now retired and the son a draftee; a group of Russian barbers bathing?and barbering?in the Dead Sea; a Yugoslavian banker (now a gas station attendant) and his family picnicking at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; an Estonian girl on her wedding day in Jaffa. In the stillness of these images one can hear the silent cries of exile, the anguished whispers of "Who am I? Who was I?" American photographer Wolke presents an entirely different view of the Jewish experience: his color photographs, exhibited this year at the Art Institute of Chicago (this book is the catalog), show Jews of Chicago and its suburbs, full of life and passion, glorying in their communal life: a baby's bris, men reading the Torah, boys at a morning service, a Passover seder, Chanukah candle lighting. As University of Chicago art historian Joel Snyder remarks in his introduction, Wolke's snapshot-like photographs allow "a view of the complex culture of a people whose devotion to the past everywhere intersects with the anxieties and pressures and pleasures of the present." These two very different documentary volumes are highly recommended for both Judaica and photography collections.?Marcia G. Welsh, Guilford Free Lib., CT
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N Abrams Inc
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0810932695
• ISBN 13: 9780810932692
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 77