In 1921, photographer Alter Kacyzne was commissioned by the New York Yiddish daily, Forverts, to document images of Jewish life in the old country. Kacyzne's assignment became a ten-year journey across Poyln, as Poland's three million Yiddish-speaking Jews called their home, from the crowded ghettos of Warsaw and Krakow to the remote villages of Otwock and Kazimierz. Candid and intimate, tender and humorous, Kacyzne's portraits - of teeming village squares and primitive workshops, cattle markets and spinning wheels, prayer groups and summer camps - tell the story of a way of life that is no more. For the last sixty years, Kacyzne's Forverts photographs - the sole fragment of his vast archive to survive World War II - lay unseen. In this volume the lost work of this master is restored to the world in a volume of extraordinary force and beauty.