Alter-Sholem Kacyzne (Katsizne) (1885-1941) was born in Vilnius (Vilno) to a working-class family. Yiddish was his mameloshen or mother-tongue, but he taught himself Hebrew, Russian, German, Polish, and French. At age 14, he went to work in his uncle’s photography studio in Dnipro (Ekatrinoslav). He became a professional photographer, and documented Jewish life in Poland, Palestine, and North Africa. Many of his striking photographs are available online.
Kacyzne is well known for his photography, literary works and plays, but lesser so for his poetry. He founded his own Yiddish literary journals, and also contributed to the Yiddish Forward, and a number of periodicals with Communist leanings including Literarishe Tribune, Der Fraynd, and Literatur.
He lived in Dnipro, and later Warsaw where he became a good friend of Y L Perets. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he fled to Lviv (Lemberg), and as the Nazi armies advanced, fled further east to Ternipol, where he was tortured to death by Ukranian collaborators in July 1941.
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