Rafael Goldchain

I bought this book because it had received a lot of positive press here in Toronto (where the author, Rafael Goldchain, lives). I am normally fairly wary of hype -- but in this case, I'm very glad I believed the hype.

This book is gorgeous, but more importantly it is intellectually fascinating. It is a compendium of portraits of the author's real and imagined relatives from the past hundred years or so -- except all of the photos are actually of the author himself, made up and in costume. The author's technical prowess is incontestable -- the photographs are believable portrayals that seem to reveal character, biography and emotion. However, the work is more than technically brilliant. Indeed, it is a moving meditation on the meaning of family and of heritage. It is made particularly poignant because so much of Mr Goldchain's heritage was lost in the upheavals that characterized 20th century Jewish history, as his family moved from Poland (pre- and post-WWII) to South America and then to Canada; many of his relatives died in the Holocaust. In this book he has lovingly recreated the family album of a past that was largely destroyed and brought it movingly into the present.… (meer)