Content area
Full text
On March 2, 1942, the Soviet illustrated weekly Ogonyok published a two-page photo essay titled "Hitlerite Atrocities in Kerch." Eight images of corpses and wailing residents amounted to what was the first photojournalistic account of the Nazi murder of Soviet Jews. The Germans had occupied Kerch in mid-November, but only held the city for six weeks before the Soviet army liberated it, giving journalists and photographers one of the first opportunities to witness Nazi crimes. (And a brief opportunity at that: the Germans quickly retook Kerch, in May 1942.) Among those who arrived in Kerch were three Soviet Jewish photojournalists. Based on interviews with townspeople and witnesses, they ascertained that the dead were Jews. The Ogonyok article only obliquely noted the Jewish identity of the victims. While it did not occlude the particularity of the Nazi genocide of Jews altogether, it universalized the atrocity as a crime against the Soviet population in general and not one specifically against Jews. Still, the photo essay powerfully documented mass murder, and to careful readers it was clear that the victims were Jews.
In Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, David Shneer unearths little-known accounts such as this in his stimulating new book on Soviet Jewish photojournalism. While Shneer focuses on Jewish photography during the Holocaust—and these chapters are bound to be of most interest to scholars—his book stretches far outside the wartime period and beyond Eastern Europe. It moves from the 1830s to the 2000s; from Eastern Europe to Central Asia; from photos of Jewish colonial agriculturalists to an image of Mao Zedong. The book's analytical coverage is equally...