Łódź - Typical Street Characters

Łódź. Typical Street Characters. Published by Abram Icchak Ostrowski, Łódź.

Postcards with this rather touching motif were mass-produced during the First World War by Abram Icchak Ostrowski, who owned a substantial printing enterprise and was a major vendor of postcards with premises first at 66 and later at 55 Piotrkowska Street. Although the caption here does not expressly identify the children as Jewish, other versions do, and the image is easily recognizable as one of several focussing on the city’s Jewish population. It has been suggested that the image owes its emotive punch to the fact that the children patently look neglected, arousing pity and the desire to help. This raises an interesting general problem. For starters, such images might inspire empathy in some, yet others might feel that they vindicate their anti-Jewish prejudices. More fundamentally, it is doubtful whether the six boys shown here would really have looked neglected to observers at the time. They obviously fell short of middle-class standards of respectability. Yet at the time, the overwhelming majority of the population was, by today’s standards, desperately poor, and it seems a moot point whether these six boys look any more or less destitute compared to other working-class children in the same place at the same time. In a colorized version of the motif also circulated at the time, the boys look positively snazzy (for working-class kids).

We hope you are enjoying the images and words on our web page. Please help us run this page by buying one of our books.