"Abraham Cahan has hired me to be the photo correspondent for the Forverts. My task is to cover all the places in Poland that may be of interest to the reader in America..."

Alter Kacyzne

In 1921, photographer Alter Kacyzne was commissioned by the New York Yiddish daily, the Forverts, to document images of Jewish life in the "old country." Kacyzne's assignment would become a ten-year journey across Poland—or "Poyln," as more than three million Yiddish-speaking Jews called their home—from the crowded quarters of Warsaw and Lublin to the remote towns of Husiatyn and Ostrog. His candid and intimate views of teeming village squares and rustic workshops, synagogues, and spinning wheels give us a privileged view of a world that is no more.

For more that sixty years, Alter Kacyzne's Forverts archive—the sole fragment of his vast collection to survive World War II—lay unseen. Now, for the first time, the work of this lost master is restored to the world in a volume of extraordinary poetic force. At once tender and humorous, Poyln tells the story of a way of life and recalls the warmth and spirit of a community on the edge of destruction; it is both a rare treasure and an indispensable portrait of a people.