Unseen Soundwalks

Długa 26 housed the socialist Bund party headquarters from 1936 onwards, as well as the capital’s first school with Yiddish as the language of instruction. Other political organisations based here included the Masada Zionist youth union. Alter Kacyzne had his professional photography studio in one of the three courtyards the building had before the war. Born in Vilnius, he came to Warsaw in 1910. Kacyzne was a writer, journalist and publisher, as well as co-author of the screenplay for The Dybbuk, perhaps the best-known and most celebrated film in Yiddish produced in Interwar Poland. However, he was probably best-known for being a much sought-after photographer. Apart from taking snapshots of Warsaw’s bohemian scene, he also documented the everyday life and the poverty of Jewish shtetls in Interwar Poland and beyond, sending his photos to New York to be published in ‘The Forward’, or ‘Forverts’, the long-running Yiddish newspaper. Israel Joshua Singer, the older brother of writer and Nobel laureate Isaac B