by Barbara Gingold
An appreciation
“Going back to a cherished place is so hazardous and can be so disillusioning and sad that 1 would advise never going back…” Thus writes the late photographer Leni Sonnenfeld in the personal essay that opens her book, The Eyes of Memory: Photographs from the Archives of Herbert & Leni Sonnenfeld (Yale University Press, $50). Yet even after her death, I disagree with her (as sometimes happened during our long friendship). For in this book she indeed creates a cherished place, a place that demands to be visited and revisited, a repository of history and of twentieth-century Jewish lives, foremost among them those of Leni Sonnenfeld and her husband, Herbert.