Alter Kacyzne

Alter-Sholem Kacyzne was born on 31 May 1885 to a poor working-class family in Vilna in Imperial Russia (now Vilnius in Lithuania), within the Pale of Settlement (the mandatory territory allowed as residence for Jews).[1] His father worked as a bricklayer and his mother worked as a seamstress. Kacyzne spoke Yiddish at home and was educated in a cheder and in a Russian-Jewish school. An avid reader, he taught himself Hebrew, Russian, Polish, German and French.[1]

Following the death of his father in 1899, when Kacyzne was fourteen, he went to work as an apprentice in his uncle's professional photography studio in Ekaterinoslav, New Russia (now Dnipro, Ukraine). While engaged in self-education, he began to write short stories in Russian. He also wrote poems and sent some of these to the Yiddish author S. Ansky.

Alter Kacyzne with his wife Khana and daughter Sulamita in Warsaw, Poland ca. 1930.

Around this time he married Khana Khachnov. In 1910, greatly attracted by the Yiddish works of I. L. Peretz, he moved to Warsaw, where he developed a close relationship with Peretz, who became his literary mentor.[1] In Warsaw he opened a photographic studio.[1]

In the 1920s, he worked as a photojournalist for the New York City-based newspaper Forverts (Forward).[1] He travelled as a photographer to Poland, Romania, Italy, Spain, Palestine and Morocco.[1] In the years 1927–1928 Kacyzne's photographs, accompanied by his travel essays, were published in the Warsaw magazine Our Express.

His work as a photographer was combined with his literary work. As a critic and essayist, he published articles on literary and social issues in Warsaw and Vilna. He was co-editor of several journals.

In the early 1920s he founded the literary series The Ark (Di Teyve, 1920, together with David Einhorn), the short-lived magazines Bells (Glokn, 1921) and The Links (Ringen, 1921–1922, in cooperation with Michal Veiherte ). In 1924 he became co-founder of the magazine Literary Pages (Literarishe Bleter, 1924–1939; together with Israel Joshua Singer, Peretz Markish, Melehom Ravichem and Nachman Mayzilem).

In 1930 he participated in newspapers with a communist orientation: Literary Tribune (Literarishe Tribune; 1930–1933), Tribune (1934), Comrade (Der Fraynd, 1934–1935, Yiddish: דער פֿרייַנד), Literature (Literatur; 1935) In 1937–1938, he issued the fortnightly magazine, My film speaks (Mayn redndiker film), the contents of which were critical articles, translations and satires.

In 1939, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, he fled with his family to Soviet-occupied Lvov (today Lviv, Ukraine).[1] He was put in charge of the literary section of the Lvov State Jewish Theatre. When Germany went on to attack the Soviets in 1941, Kacyzne tried to escape the Nazis and moved farther east to the also Soviet-occupied city of Tarnopol (today Ternopil, Ukraine). By the time he arrived, the Nazis had already occupied Tarnopol. Kacyzne was beaten to death by Ukrainian collaborators during a pogrom directed against the town's Jewish population on 7 July, 1941. His wife Khana was murdered in the Belzec extermination camp, while his daughter Sulamita survived by hiding in Poland as a non-Jew.[2]