Silent Places: Landscapes of Jewish Life and Loss in Eastern Europe

Hardcover - October, 2003 - Overlook Hardcover
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By: Jeffrey Gusky and Judith Miller
ISBN: 1585673161

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Reviews by readers

Silent Places to Contemplate Loss of Life and Community

The somber and quiet images in this book appear to be from the past, but were photographed within the last few years. This unique book offers views of Jewish communities depopulated by the Holocaust and left today much as they were after WWII. Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe left many of these areas undeveloped and frozen in time.

The images in this book are artistically composed and printed with great attention to detail. Viewing the large printed images give one of the feeling of standing in the place itself. I strongly recommend this book as one of permanent importance. With the rapid changes now underway in the area, it may also be the look we have at the communities that made up such an important part of the cultural fabric of Eastern European life prior to WWII.

Deafening Silence

Silent Places, by Jeff Gusky, takes us on a poignant, and incredible photographic journey to Eastern Europe, where he documented (in B&W photographs) the architecture and landscape of the Holocaust era...Synagogues, houses, landscapes, windows, doors, parks, all images from the past, but actually taken recently. The B&W aspect gives a ghost-like and haunting composition to the photographs...the aura of life within the frame illuminating our senses.

Time erodes the landscape, and even the architecture, but the sense of humanity and life still exist within the confines. We feel the aura of the past, brought into the present, the sounds of silence and former life, and activity resounding, for all of us to view. The ghosts of the past, sing their song, through broken windows, deteriorating doors, ruined homes, leaving an indelible mark in the time continuum, compelling us to wonder WHY?

Gusky's book is a a work of brilliance, one that we soon not forget, a book both compelling and haunting. It is a historical journey into the depths of loss, destruction and places that once hummed with Jewish life.

It matters not what our beliefs are, because we are all one underneath the sun, the umbrella of life on the planet. The history defined within the illuminations of this book define us all on some scale. We all have history, all have ancestral pasts, villages and cities of life, that run through our genetics. Time erodes much of our past, our life's history...and in that aspect...this book gives us to ponder and realize, that each person's history is a part of the universal whole.