The photographs that Beile Delechky brought with her when she left Europe for the United States in 1938 belong to the shattered legacy of Lithuania’s small-town Jews between the two world wars. The term “shtetl” too often conjures up “Fiddler on the Roof” stereotypes of pious Jews mired in a folkloric past. These pictures from the hamlet of Kavarsk (Kavarskas, in Lithuanian), many of them taken by Beile herself, unselfconsciously reveal a more nuanced view of everyday reality for Jews and Lithuanians during the 1930s...
...Kavarsk was not frozen in amber; indeed, the young people in these photographs would not have stood out at all elsewhere in 1930s Europe. Under normal circumstances, they would doubtless have achieved many of their aspirations for a better life and a better world; the times, however, were anything but tranquil. Beile Delechy’s photographs are thus all the more valuable for having captured a moment in the history of a civilization that was soon to be irretrievably extinguished.
From the Introduction
by Zachary M. Baker
Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections
Stanford University Libraries
