Roman Vishniac's eyes

Beside Menachem Kipnis and Alter Kacyzne, Roman Vishniac was the photographer, to whom we are grateful for the most photographs from the vanished world of the Polish Jews between the two world wars. El País published yesterday an essay about him by Antonio Muñoz Molina, of whom we have already translated a number of other essays on great photographers. His text is illustrated with the photos of Vishniac’s Children of a vanished world.


It seems impossible that the eyes of a single human being can embrace all that those of Roman Vishniac saw throughout his life. He looked with the same curiosity at humans and animals. He ran his gaze over more than a dozen countries and two continents. He enjoyed the beauty and bustle of the golden age of big cities that were the twenties and thirties in Europe, but he wandered with the same energy on the inhospitable roads that could be trodden only by foot or mule, searching for villages with isolated Jewish communities living engrossed in religion and poverty. To get where it was forbidden or where he knew they would not receive him well, Roman Vishniac posed as a traveling fabric seller, which justified his luggage in which he carried his photographic equipment.

From a young age he had a special inclination towards photography, disguises, and changes of crafts and trades. When he was seven years old and lived in Moscow, he managed to couple a primitive camera with the lens of a microscope he was just given by his grandmother, and to take a picture of a cockroach’s leg enlarged hundred and fifty times. He studied biology and Far Eastern art. When life became unbearable in Soviet Russia, Roman Vishniac dressed up as a bolshevik, and succeeded in having an outlet pass for all his family, signed by Trotsky himself.

His father  had made a fortune in Russia from umbrella manufacturing. When they settled in Berlin, and sold the few family jewels his mother had saved, they found themselves in poverty. His father was ill and collapsed. Roman Vishniac, just over twenty, had to maintain all his family, including his wife, because he had just married. He worked in a dairy, an insurance company, a typewriter shop, a car factory. Somehow he managed to pursue university studies in endocrinology, optics and Oriental art. He invented a way to use polarized things to reveal the internal structure of living things. With his two handheld cameras, a Leica and a Rolleiflex, he went around Berlin to take pictures of places and people, almost always unnoticed. He installed himself in a doorway, and from there he shot the street, so that the dark rectangle of the door became the front side of the stage on which featured the casual inhabitants of the city. It is a Berlin of cobbled streets, bicycles, trams, black cars, gleaming bikes, shop signs, large posters of theaters and cinemas.

Slowly, first in such a subtle way that one cannot notice it, in the Berlin photos by Roman Vishniac start appearing swastikas: a swastika painted on a shop window, a flag hanging from a balcony. Since the Jews were forbidden to have cameras, Vishniac sometimes went out disguised as a Nazi. He also had anothe trick to take photos without risk about the monstruous visual drift slowly occupying the city: he went out with his daughter, and let her stand smiling in front of an anti-Semitic poster, or at the door of an orthopedic shop where they advertised by large print an apparatus to measure the differences between the size of the skull of the Aryans and Jews. In 1935 he launched one of the big projects of his life: to wander about Central and Eastern Europe and to photographically document Jewish life. Most of his friends dismissed the mortal threats of Hitler as the delirium of a demagoge. Roman Vishniac, whose active and jovial disposition did not hinder his perspicacity, was soon convinced that Hitler spoke seriously. For almost four entire years he toured the Jewish villages and little towns, broke his way on roads blinded by snow, visited small rural communities and populous suburbs. He portrayed peasants, Talmud students, long-bearded patriarchs, children with big and frightened eyes, entire families huddled in basements, women of a pensive beauty surrounded by gloom, street vendors, rogues. His photos invoke the world of Isaac Bashevich Singer’s stories. In a village in Czechoslovakia they took him for a spy and held him in a dungeon for a month. In Zbaszyn, on the border between Germany and Poland, in December 1938, he managed to sneak in a camp, crowded by blocks and barracks in the mud and snow: the camp of Polish Jews expelled from Germany, whom the Polish government refused to accept. He left the camp by jumping over the fence with his suitcase, and sent the pictures he  had taken there to the League of Nations.

With an Estonian passport he fled Germany in 1939 and settled in France. But the Soviet occupation of the Baltic republics made him a stateless person, and the Vichy government sent him into a camp for undesirable foreigners. He made it with his family to New York in 1940, and, for the third or fourth time, had to start a new life in a world alien to him. He spoke Russian, German, French, Polish, Slovak, Rusyn Italian, but he was lost, since he did not know any English. Pretending to be sent by a mutual friend, he introduced himself in Einstein’s house in Princeton, and taking advantage of his oversight, he made his best portrait. After the war he returned to Europa, and took photos in the same streets of Berlin where he lived less than ten years earlier, now ranges of ruins. They told him that his childhood home in Moscow had been demolished to make room for an expansion to the Lubyanka prison. The vast majority of the people portrayed in the over five thousand photos he took during his travels had been killed.

He invented a system to take photos through the eyes of a firefly. Back in New York, in the fifties, he took stunning color photos of wasps in flight, jellyfish, unicellular algae, red blood cells, insect larvae, the cell tissue of the human hand, the interior of a root, the section of a pine needle, the metamorphosis of tadpoles, snow crystals when the sun begins to melt them. In order not to scare the insects he studied, he rubbed himself with grass and dirt to hide his scent, and had learned to hold his breath for up to two minutes. He refused to take photos of dead animals. As a child, he was taken to fishing, and when he caught a fish out of the water, and saw the blood and the hook across his mouth, he w shaken by a remorse he did not forget in his life. He died in New York, in the same neighborhood of European refugees where he had arrived in 1940. He was 92, and had seen so many things that sometimes he attributed his own memories to a large number of other people.

Los ojos de Roman Vishniac

Junto a Menachem Kipnis y Alter Kacyzne, Roman Vishniac fue el fotógrafo a quien estamos más agradecidos por haber hecho la mayoría de las fotos que nos quedan de aquel mundo desaparecido de los judíos polacos entre las dos grandes guerras. El País publicó ayer un artículo sobre él de Antonio Muñoz Molina, de quien ya hemos traducido algunos otros textos suyos sobre grandes fotógrafos. Su ensayo va ilustrado con las fotos del libro de Vishniac, Children of a vanished world.


Parece imposible que los ojos de un solo ser humano puedan abarcar todo lo que vieron los de Roman Vishniac a lo largo de su vida. Miró con la misma curiosidad a los seres humanos y a los animales. Paseó su mirada por más de una docena de países y por dos continentes. Disfrutó de la belleza y la bulla de esa edad de oro de las grandes ciudades que fueron los años veinte y treinta en Europa, pero con igual energía recorrió caminos inhóspitos que sólo podían ser transitados a pie o en mulo buscando las aldeas donde vivían comunidades judías aisladas, absortas en la religión y en la pobreza. Para llegar adonde estaba prohibido o donde sabía que no iban a recibirlo bien, Roman Vishniac se hacía pasar por viajante de telas, lo cual justificaba la maleta en la que llevaba su breve equipaje fotográfico.

Desde muy joven había tenido una inclinación extraordinaria hacia la fotografía y hacia los disfraces, y hacia los cambios de saberes y oficios. Cuando tenía siete años y vivía en Moscú se las arregló para acoplar una cámara primitiva a la lente de un microscopio que acababa de regalarle su abuela y tomar una foto de la pata de una cucaracha ampliada ciento cincuenta veces. Estudió biología y arte del Extremo Oriente. Cuando la vida se le volvió irrespirable en la Rusia soviética, Roman Vishniac se disfrazó de bolchevique y consiguió que el mismo Trotski le firmara un salvoconducto de salida para toda su familia.

Su padre había hecho una fortuna en Rusia fabricando paraguas. Cuando se instalaron en Berlín y vendieron las pocas joyas familiares que su madre había salvado, se encontraron en la pobreza. Su padre estaba enfermo y derrumbado. Con poco más de veinte años, en Berlín, Roman Vishniac tenía que sostener a toda su familia, incluida su esposa, porque acababa de casarse. Trabajó en una lechería, en una empresa de seguros, en una tienda de máquinas de escribir, en una fábrica de coches. De algún modo se las arregló para proseguir estudios universitarios de endocrinología, de óptica y de arte oriental. Inventó una manera de usar la luz polarizada para revelar la estructura interna de los seres vivos. Con sus dos cámaras portátiles, una Leica y una Rolleiflex, iba por Berlín tomando fotografías de los lugares y la gente, casi siempre inadvertido. Se instalaba en un portal y disparaba hacia fuera, el rectángulo de sombra de la puerta convertido en el marco y en la boca del escenario en el que se perfilaban los personajes casuales de la ciudad. Es un Berlín de calles adoquinadas, de bicicletas, tranvías, coches negros, motos rutilantes, rótulos de comercios, grandes carteles de teatros y cines.

Poco a poco, al principio de una manera tan intermitente que pueden no ser advertidas, en las fotos berlinesas de Roman Vishniac empiezan a aparecer esvásticas: una esvástica pintada en el escaparate de una tienda, una banderita colgada de un balcón. Porque a los judíos se les prohibió tener cámaras fotográficas, Vishniac salía a veces con la suya disfrazado de nazi. Tenía otro truco para tomar fotos sin peligro de la deriva visual monstruosa que iba tomando la ciudad: salía con su hija, y la hacía pararse sonriente delante de un cartel antisemita, o de la entrada de una tienda de ortopedia en la que se anunciaba con letras grandes un aparato para medir las diferencias entre el tamaño del cráneo de los arios y de los judíos. En 1935 emprendió uno de los grandes proyectos de su vida: recorrer la Europa central y oriental para documentar fotográficamente la vida judía. La mayor parte de sus amigos descartaban las amenazas de exterminio de Hitler como delirios de un demagogo. Roman Vishniac, a quien se ve que su disposición activa y jovial no le interfería con la lucidez, estuvo convencido muy pronto de que Hitler hablaba en serio. Durante casi cuatro años enteros recorrió barrios judíos en ciudades, se abrió paso por caminos invernales cegados de nieve, visitó pequeñas comunidades rurales y arrabales populosos. Retrató a campesinos, a estudiantes del Talmud, a patriarcas barbudos, a niños de ojos grandes y asustados, a familias enteras amontonadas en sótanos, a mujeres de belleza pensativa rodeadas de penumbra, a vendedores ambulantes, a pícaros. Ver sus fotos es invocar el mundo de los cuentos de Isaac Bashevis Singer. En una aldea de Checoslovaquia lo tomaron por un espía y lo tuvieron en un calabozo durante un mes. En Zbaszyn, en diciembre de 1938, en la frontera de Alemania y Polonia, se las arregló para colarse en un campo donde se amontonaban en cuadras y barracones en medio del barro y la nieve judíos polacos expulsados de Alemania a los que el Gobierno polaco se negaba a aceptar. Salió de allí saltando la alambrada con su maleta y mandó las fotos que había tomado a la Sociedad de Naciones.

Con un pasaporte de Estonia escapó de Alemania en 1939 y se instaló en Francia. Pero la ocupación soviética de las repúblicas del Báltico lo convirtió en un apátrida y el Gobierno de Vichy lo mandó a un campo para extranjeros indeseables. Logró llegar con su familia a Nueva York en 1940 y se encontró por tercera o cuarta vez teniendo que empezar otra vida en un mundo ajeno a él. Hablaba ruso, alemán, francés, polaco, eslovaco, ruteno, italiano, pero estaba perdido porque no sabía inglés. Fingiendo ir de parte de un amigo común se presentó en casa de Einstein, en Princeton, y aprovechando un descuido le hizo su mejor retrato. Volvió a Europa después de la guerra y tomó fotos de las mismas calles de Berlín en las que había vivido menos de diez años antes, ahora cordilleras de ruinas. Le contaron que la casa de su infancia en Moscú había sido derribada para hacer sitio a una ampliación de la cárcel Lubianka. La inmensa mayoría de las personas a las que había retratado en las más de cinco mil fotos que tomó durante sus viajes habían sido exterminadas.

Había inventado un sistema para tomar fotos a través de los ojos de una luciérnaga. De vuelta a Nueva York, durante los años cincuenta, logró asombrosas fotos en color de avispas en vuelo, de medusas, de algas unicelulares, de glóbulos rojos, de larvas de insectos, del tapiz celular de una mano humana, del interior de una raíz, de la sección de una aguja de pino, de las metamorfosis de renacuajos, de los cristales de nieve cuando empieza a derretirse al sol. Para no espantar a los insectos a los que estudiaba se frotaba con hierba y tierra disimulando su olor y había aprendido a contener la respiración durante un máximo de dos minutos. Se negaba a fotografiar animales muertos. De niño lo habían llevado a pescar, cuando atrapó un pez y al sacarlo del agua vio la sangre y el anzuelo que le atravesaba la boca lo estremeció un remordimiento que no olvidó en toda su vida. Murió en Nueva York, en el mismo barrio de refugiados europeos al que había llegado en 1940. Tenía 92 años y había visto tantas cosas que a veces se extraviaría por sus recuerdos como por las vidas de muchos otros hombres.

Book of kings

Who are these three kings on the Persian miniature, so resolutely marching on their horses? Were it not clear from the flags on their saddle-clothes, it is made clear to us by their traits, well known from the photographs and cartoons: the cigar of the stocky one, the pipe of the large-mustached one, and the elongated visage of the third one. Truly, these are here Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt as conquering generals, on their way to the 1943 Tehran conference.

The British and Soviet forces invaded Iran from the north and south between August 25 and September 8, 1941. The reason for the invasion was that after the German offensive against the Soviet Union in June, they felt threatened the Iranian petroleum resources in their management, and they also intended to transmit war material from the Persian Gulf via rail to the Soviet Union. Although Iran was neutral, the Shah had basically done the inter-war modernization of the country with German help, and he refused to expel the German advisors on British request. After the peace treaty the British deposed him and expelled him to Egypt, and raised on the throne his son Reza Pahlavi, who represented the Anglo-American policy, and declared war on Germany. Subsequently, in November 1943 opened the Tehran conference with the participation of the three above kings, with the aim of coordinating the common war efforts and to open the second, western front.

Iranian women watching an Allied convoy somewhere on the “Persian Corridor”, 1943

The easy defeat of the Persian army and the humiliation of the occupation hit very hard the country’s public opinion. This was acerbated by the fact that the massive British buying-up of food for the troops caused a severe famine in the occupied zone, and that, on the principle of “divide and conquer”, both occupying forces excited the ethnic minorities living under their power against the Persian rule. All this is described in detail in Simin Daneshvar’s Savushun (1969), the key novel of 20th-century Iran.

It is understandable therefore, that on the occasion of the Tehran conference the British saw it opportune to present the purpose of their arrival in an easily perceptible visual form to the Persian people. The London propaganda office asked the renowned Iranist of Cambridge and Rumi translator Arthur Arberry to design a series of posters. Arberry asked for the advice of the Persian historian Mojtaba Minovi, at that time working for the BBC Persian service, who suggested that instead of the usual victory posters, they should take the motifs and manuscripts of Ferdowsi’s Shahname, the Book of Kings, the Persian national epic as a model for the transposition of the western message into Persian visual language.

The end result was not a poster, but a booklet, which contained six rippable postcards, and which was distributed in the Persian tea houses, where the professional naghâls at that time still recited the verses of the Shahname. The drawings were made by the Egyptian-born British graphic designer Kimon Evan Marengo (“Kem”, 1904-1988), who was equally at home in the western and Islamic iconography, and who created nearly three thousand British propaganda graphics in various languages during the war.

In the images Hitler takes the shape of the evil ruler Zahhāk, from whose shoulders two snakes hiss, and who would be finally expelled from the throne by the popular uprising incited by Kaveh, the righteous blacksmith. In this way the British propagandist makes clear the good and the bad side, as well as the role of the Persian people in the worldwide cataclysm.

Hitler-Zahhāk sitting on the throne among his bodyguards. The two snakes on his shoulder are Mussolini and the Japanese Prime Minister and Commander in Chief Hideki Tōjō. Göbbels as a small hoofed evil – Iblis – serves them coffee. The verse: On Zahhāk’s shoulders two serpents grew by magic and destruction was rained down on the people

Hitler-Zahhāk and Göring find their pleasure only in torturing and killing. The iconography follows a later episode of the Shahname, the execution of the socialist and anti-clerical Mazdak and his disciples. The verse: The law of the wise became hidden, and the desires of madmen became widespread; the hand of the government grew long in evil purpose, goodness was only heard of in secret.

Hitler-Zahhāk sees a dream about the three kings who come to kill him. The verse: Then, from the palace of the emperor, he saw three warriors suddenly appear.

Left: Kaveh, the blacksmith rises against Hitler-Zahhāk. The verse: He cried and raised his hand before the Shah: O Shah I am Kaveh in demand of justice. There must be a limit to oppression; oppression must always have a just cause.
Right: The three kings (Churchill always in the lead!) with Kaveh carrying Hitler-Zahhāk fastened to the saddle and crushing Göring. The onlookers, seeing Zahhāk’s defeat, take off their swastikas. The verse: Strongly he tied his two hand and waist, so that his fetters could not be broken, even by a raging elephant.

The sixth, last postcard was only found in a small black and white version. On this, Hitler-Zahhāk is nailed to Mount Damavand. The verse: Swiftly, as a post-messenger, he brought Zahhāk away and bound him to Mount Damavand and, when the name of Zahhāk became as dust, the world was cleansed of his evil.

The series is complemented by yet another large poster, on which the three kings happily chase away by arrows, sword and spear the three evils: Hitler, Tōjō, and Mussolini. The latter, wounded by Churchill’s arrow, already fell on the ground, as a reference to the British landing in Italy. However, this image formally does not belong to the above series, since it was made in a different style, ad Hitler is not represented in the guise of Zahhāk. Its designer was not Kem, but Musavver al-Molk from Isfahan, and its commissioner the son of the former Kerman and Mashhad consul Sir Percy Spikes, who came to the mountains above Isfahan to prepare the Bakhtiari tribes against an eventual German invasion. The verses running around the edges recount how Rustam, personified by Churchill in the poster, fits eagle’s feathers on his arrow and shoots them on his enemies.

We're traveling!

In Eastern European folk tradition, February 2nd is the day, when the bear comes out of the cave, and he stays out or goes back depending on whether he feels the end of the winter or not. Now he came out and he did not go back, so spring is surely coming. We also come out then with the list of the trips planned for the next months, which has been asked of us so much over the last few weeks.

I urge everyone who is interested in one or another trip, to write until February 15 with no obligation (but a serious intent) at wang@studiolum.com. Subsequently, we will publish on the basis of the applications the detailed program and price as well as the deadline of registering and payment.

• I would have liked to start the series of our exotic tours with a really exotic one, to go at the occasion of the Lunar New Year on a few-hour city tour to Asia in Budapest’s Kőbánya district, to visit the city’s best Chinese restaurant, the Chinese market, to hold a tasting and vegetable show in the famous Vietnamese eating-house, to walk down the mysterious labyrinth of the huge block of the former Ganz railway factory, converted into an international store ensemble, and finally visit the cradle of an absolutely modern Chinatown – by showing during the walk everything I know about this world as a native of Kőbánya on the one hand, and as a Chinese interpreter on the other hand. Unfortunately, due to an unexpectedly sprained ankle, I cannot walk so much on this weekend, at the Lunar New Year, but soon I will organize this trip by all means.

• The first tour, which already has a sure date, will be on March 15-16 (Friday and Saturday) to Szabadka/Subotica, which in we have thoroughly explored last October (see our posts here). The apropos of the trip is that, according to recent news, the downtown of Subotica, the cradle of Hungarian Art Nouveau is threatened by an incredible destruction: the city management plans to demolish more than a thousand buildings in the city center. Maybe that’s the last time to see this gem of the architecture of the turn of the century. We will walk about the Art Nouveau city center, will get acquainted door to door with the society and architecture of a booming city in the early 20th century, will enter the most beautiful synagogue and city hall of old Hungary, will visit the exhibition on Art Nouveau in Subotica (still open until May), then go out to the pre-war holiday district, the Palić lake, the last remnant of the geohistorical Pannon Sea. Planned costs (bus from/to Budapest + accommodation in double room): ca. 50-70 euro.

• Hasidic villages in the Tokaj wine region (Northern Hungary), March 23-24 (Saturday and Sunday). The most ancient wine region of Hungary was long a traditional region of Hasidic wine traders, and several tombs of their great tsaddiks are still important pilgrimage sites visited by Jews from all over the world. A special feature of this journey is that our Hebrew expert Két Sheng, who knows the Jewish monuments and history of this region like the back of his hand, is willing to fly to Hungary from Copenhagen for this weekend, and to undertake the guide of this tour, while our wine-producing friends in the hills around Tokaj will also offer wine tasting for us. A continuation of this tour, organized together with the Hungarian Jewish Cultural Association, will follow in next July, when we will go through the pearl of traditional settlements along the historical “Jewish wine route” from Tokaj to Poland. Planned costs: ca. 80-100 euro.

• The journey Czernowitz-Kamenets-Podolsk-Odessa we made last October – about which see here our joint report – will be repeated on the long weekend of April 25 to May 1st (Thursday to Wednesday). The outline of the program can be read here. We will reach Odessa in two days through the breathtakingly beautiful Maramureș mountains of the Eastern Carpathians, and the hills of Bucovina, and after three days spent at the Black Sea we come home in two more days. During the twice two day long travel we will stop in a number of historical places. the Hasidic pilgrimage sites of the tomb of Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism in Medzhibozh and at that of Rabbi Nachman of Breslav in Uman, and at the magnificent medieval castle of Khotin along the Dnester. On the way there we will stay for the night in the city of Czernowitz still preserving the air of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, while on the way back in the city of Kamenets-Podolsk with a traditional Armenian presence, in a hotel under the old town’s fantastic central rock surrounded by a mountain river. In Odessa we walk about the city, the Neoclassicist seaside promenade, the 19th-century trading city, the Moldavanka, the Jewish and Greek neighborhoods, the Sunday flea market. Planned costs: ca. 400-430 euro.


• Eastern Easter in Lemberg/Lwów, May 3-6 (Friday to Monday). One of the most beautiful weekends, a veritable festival in the multi-ethnic, multi-confessional city, when the Greek Catholic, Armenian Catholic and Orthodox Easter coincide with each other. I will indicate the date of the most beautiful Easter celebrations of the various confessions, at which the participation is of course optional, just like at the peak of the feast, the Resurrection Mass at Saturday night. In Saturday and Sunday we will walk about the old city of Lemberg, the Armenian and Jewish quarter, the Art Nouvea neighborhoods and the surviving monuments of the Jewish suburb, and will also visit the open air museum of Rusyn wooden churches. On the way to Lemberg we will visit the little town of Drohobycz, birthplace of Bruno Schulz, and on the way back we will stop to look around above the Carpathians on the Pass of Verecke. Planned costs: ca. 200-230 euro.

• Maramureș and Bucovina, through two countries, May 24-29 (Friday to Wednesday). Today two countries, but in fact a lot more, since these two regions, today both cut in half, belonged to at least six different countries, with dozens of ethnic groups, religions, traditional settlements and monuments in the valleys of the Carpathians: an isolated, independent, archaic world. Traveling through the northern, today Ukrainian part of Maramureș, in two days we arrive to Czernowitz, where we pass two days to visit this easternmost city of the former Monarchy, and go about the historical sites of Bucovina, the medieval fortress system along the Dniester, the traditional villages, the medieval city of Kamenets-Podolsk. Crossing the Ukrainian-Romanian border, we descend to the southern part of Bucovina, to visit the most beautiful Orthodox monasteries, and come back to Hungary through the mountains of the Romanian Maramureș. On the way there and back we stop at several places, in the little historical towns of Khust, Yaremche, Kolomea, Sighetul Marmației, Baia Mare, at Hungarian historical monuments, Ukrainian and Romanian wooden churches, Jewish cemeteries, walk up to the source of the Tisza river. Planned costs: ca. 400 euro

• Shtetl tour in Galicia, June 21-27 or August 16-22 (both Friday to Thursday: if you want to participate at it, write us which one would be the better date, especially if you also participate on an earlier tour and another long trip would be too close immediately after that). A discovery of the disappeared, archaic world of the former Galician Jewish little towns. Through the Slovakian Prešov, Bardejov and the Dukla Pass we reach the western, Polish part of the former Galicia, where we visit the fortress synagogue and cemetery of Lesko in the Beskady, Poland’s most romantic mountain region, then after a visit to Premyśl, an important fortress in WWI, we cross the Ukrainian border. In Eastern Galicia we follow the path of the Jewish towns: Sambir, Brody, Tarnopol, Buchach, Bolechov, Stryj… We will see surviving Jewish quarters, synagogues magnificent even in ruins, intact cemeteries, and through the stories accompanying them the one-time liveliness of this world will emerge. In Halicz we will go to the street of the still existing Turkish-Polish-Yiddish-language Karaite community and also their cemetery with a special air high above the rocky bank of the Dniester. And wherever possible, we will also meet the surviving Jewish community. If many of the participants have not yet been to Lemberg, then we will also spend a half day in the city’s Jewish neighborhood. Planned costs: ca. 400 euro.

• The renowned “route of the Jewish wine” from Tokaj to Poland, July 18-23. The Hasidic wine merchant settlements, which we will visit in March, traditionally delivered the wine of Tokaj along the Košice-Bardejov-Nowy Sąncz route to the largest importer, Poland, establishing a pearl of Hasidic settlements along the road, whose rabbis gradually arrived from the opposite direction, the greatest Southern Polish Hasidic center, Nowy Sąncz. By visiting the largely intact Jewish centers and the historical cities on the way, we arrive back through Krakow and Banská Bystrica. Planned costs: ca. 400 euro.

• Klezmer Festival in Lemberg, early August. On the international klezmer festival, organized for years, there feature mainly Eastern European, Ukrainian, Russian, Moldavian traditional klezmer groups. On the festival of last year you can see good photos in the joint report of our tour to Lwów. During the weekend festival we also walk about the city with everyone who comes for the first time to Lemberg. The date is only approximate, because the organizers usually publish it in the springtime, but it will be certainly in the first days of August as usual. Planned costs: ca. 200-230 euro.

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These are, then, the trips planned until early August. After two weeks, when the first applications will have arrived, we will include them with final data on the meanwhile reorganized “Come with us!” page. But we are already thinking on the next ones: the surviving medieval Jewish quarters in Moravia and South Bohemia from Trebitsch to Nikolsburg, a visit to the Gábor Gypsies in the Romanian Mureș as the guests of our anthropologist friend working among them since twenty years, a fortress church tour in the Transylvanian Saxon Land (while they still stand…), weekend trips to Oradea, recently admitted into the club of European Art Nouveau cities, or to the mining towns of Slovakia, city tours in the lesser-known parts of Budapest… And the big dream, if there will be enough applicants: the already much-talked ten-day or two-weeks autumn tour to the Crimea, the port and resort towns, in the mountains, to the Khan’s palace in Bakhchisaray, the Orthodox and Armenian monasteries, the Tatar and Karaite villages…

Any further suggestions and amendments are welcome. Join us in planning the trips together. And of course, come with us.