Richard Scheuer, a Day in Muranów
Jeffrey Shandler
Among the dozens of photographs that Richard Scheuer took on his tour of Europe in the summer of 1934, the images from Warsaw stand out for more than one reason. Apparently made during a one-day visit to Poland’s capital, almost all were taken in one location— Muranów, a densely populated neighborhood in northern Warsaw, where the great majority of its residents—some 90 percent—were Jews. At the time, Warsaw was home to over 350,000 Jews, close to one-third of its total population, constituting the largest number of Jews living in any city in Europe. In their religious, political, and economic lives, this was a diverse and, at times, divisive community. Warsaw also played a central role in the wide-ranging cultural and intellectual life of Polish Jews, who then comprised ten percent of the nation’s population.
In Muranów’s busy commercial streets and courtyards, Scheuer took over a dozen pictures, more than at any other single location he chose to photograph during his travels, except for images documenting theater performances he later attended in Moscow. This extended, close attention to street life in Muranów provides a vivid sense of what it had been like to stroll through the neighborhood on a summer day, as people milled about, shopping, chatting, eating—and, in some instances, looking at this young man from abroad with his camera. The neighborhood’s commercial streets and courtyards were lined with small shops, most of those seen in these photographs selling various types of clothing. This merchandise was sometimes promoted on signs in Polish and Yiddish; storefront windows also afforded glimpses of what was for sale and, occasionally, of people inside. Other commercial activity took place in the street, including coachmen waiting for fares, what appear to be prayer shawls for sale from a pushcart, and a man selling slices of watermelon from a basket.
In most of Scheuer’s photographs of Muranów the action is multilayered, with people at various distances from the camera as well as moving in and out of the frame, artfully capturing the urban bustle. The attention that Scheuer’s subjects paid to the photographer ranges from those who were most likely unaware of him and his camera to those eager for his attention. In particular, one young man—tall, clean shaven, wearing a short cravat and a skullcap—appears in a sequence of three shots, suggesting that he followed Scheuer as the photographer moved along the street (Watermelon Seller #1 and #2, Men with Prayer Shawls). By contrast, another image depicts an elderly man in traditional Jewish dress, sitting in a chair in front of a shop, who eyes Scheuer quizzically, perhaps leery of being photographed (Seated Man Outside Store).
Among the dozens of different people who appear in this sequence of photographs are a number of children, including an infant barely visible in a baby carriage at the edge of one frame (Men in Front of Clothing Store). But most of Scheuer’s subjects are adults. In particular, his attention was drawn to older men with beards and sidelocks, most wearing visored caps and long coats, which distinguished them as pious Jews. These men are the central subjects of almost every image, whether photographed in full length at some distance or at closer range, individually or in small groups. In some of these photographs, other men, younger and in modern dress, are visible as well, though at times only at the margins of the image or out of focus. Their presence testifies to the dynamic of Warsaw’s Jewish population, as younger generations were increasingly more likely to be modern in their appearance and secular in their convictions. In one photo (Bearded Man with Cane), the central figure of an old Jewish man in traditional dress moves through a crowd of younger men and boys. Their figures are blurred, indicating that they were moving quickly, in contrast to the older man. He appears static, oblivious to the others, and they to him; it is as if the modern world is rushing past him.
By the 1930s, these older, traditionally observant Jewish men had become iconic figures of East European Jewry. For decades, Jewish writers and artists visiting from further west in Europe or from America were intrigued by the presence of these men—and, moreover, by the pious way of life that they embodied in dress, gesture, and language. For example, travel writings by authors Alfred Döblin and Joseph Roth, published in German during the 1920s, offer a complexly ambivalent response to observing the East European Jew.2 On one hand, they viewed Ostjuden as exotic, atavistic figures. On the other hand, they were encountered as fellow Jews, though they inhabited their Jewishness with a conspicuous forthrightness that contrasted with that of these assimilated writers. What drew Scheuer—a young American of German Jewish heritage—to focus his attention on these older pious Jews? Did the encounter entail any reflections on his own Jewishness? We can only wonder.
The special character of Scheuer’s approach to photographing street life in Muranów emerges when his pictures are compared with other images of the neighborhood during the interwar years, including film footage recorded by other American tourists in the 1930s.3 These images often present a wider expanse of the urban landscape, including the trams that ran along its cobblestone streets, than are seen in Scheuer’s more closely framed images, centered on his encounters with individuals or small groups of people. These other photographs and films also document a more diverse crowd on the streets, compared to Scheuer’s primary attention to older men in traditional garb. And rare color footage of the neighborhood reveals that many shop signs in the neighborhood were brightly painted, especially with an eye-catching red, a vibrancy absent from interwar Muranów’s more familiar documentation in black-and-white photography.
It may be difficult, if not impossible, to view any of these images without thinking about the fate awaiting Polish Jews during the Holocaust, which began only a few years after Scheuer took these pictures. The same could be said about all the photographs he took on this trip, which depict life in Europe on the eve of war—first the Spanish Civil War, then World War II. But there is a reason why the Warsaw photographs are especially evocative of what lay ahead for their subjects and the larger population that they represent. Similar pictures, most famously those taken by Roman Vishniac a few years after Scheuer’s trip, have long been presented to postwar viewers as a final glimpse of what came to be called the “vanished world” of East European Jews. It is most unlikely, however, that Scheuer regarded the Jews of Warsaw as being on the verge of annihilation. Moreover, they did not see themselves as imperiled in the way that they are now often viewed, retrospectively, through the lens of the Holocaust. Instead, Scheuer’s lively photographs of Jews on the streets of Muranów provide us with a sense of what intrigued him about the neighborhood and enable us to glimpse its residents, as he did, going about their business on an ordinary summer day.