Ein Ghetto Im Osten (Wilna).
The Warsaw Ghetto As It Was:
The Photographic Work Of Moi Ver
[Judaica]. Moishe Raviv-Vorobeichie (Moi Ver). Ein Ghetto Im Osten (Wilna). Zurich: Orell Fussli Verlag, 1931.
Small, thin 8vo.; red cloth, with black and white photographic reproductions affixed; black and white photographs throughout; fine.
First edition of Ein Ghetto Im Osten (Wilna), the modernist photographic masterpiece of the Jewish Lithuanian Moishe Raviv-Vorobeichie, better known as Moi Ver. A scarce book, especially in fine condition, this work constitutes one of the last pre-Holocaust records of urban Eastern European Jewish life. It also ranks among the most complete surviving documentation of the Warsaw ghetto as it was before its destruction.
The photographer who would later become known as Moi Ver began his experiment with photography in Dessau in the early 1920s, apparently stimulated by the work of Moholy-Nagy. In 1928 he moved to Paris, where he attended the Ecole Technique de Photographie et de Cinematographie, learning camera and darkroom techniques. On a 1929 trip to his hometown of Vilnius at Easter, Moi Ver took photographs in the old Jewish quarter with a newly acquired Leica camera. Later that year, on the occasion of a Zionist congress in Zurich, Moi Ver exhibited his Vilnius photos for the first time. The images attracted the interest of Emil Schaeffer, who immediately offered to fund Ein Ghetto Im Osten (Wilna), in which Moi Ver married the traditions of photojournalism to an ancient subject, using the innovative techniques of Cubism. The result is one of the most beautiful, enduring, and uncommon records of pre-World War II Jewish life.
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