CAMERA OBSCURA

Members of Klaipėda's Kibbutz Hachshara. August 18, 1934

Leon Balk

THE LIFE & TIMES OF LEON BALK

An obscure footnote in the history of Edwardian portrait photography, Leon Balk (1878-1939) was a naturalised British citizen who arrived in England from Lithuania in about 1900 and who briefly ran two successful photography studios in the fashionable English seaside resorts of Eastbourne and Bexhill-on-Sea before getting involved in a series of scandals and temporarily vanishing from public life during the First World War. After the early death of his first wife in 1923, Mr. Balk returned to the country of his birth, where he inadvertently reinvented himself as the foremost photographer of Jewish life and culture in the Lithuanian port city of Klaipėda in the years immediately before the Holocaust. Dying suddenly at the age of 61, and consequently one of the very last people to be buried in Klaipėda’s 200-year-old Jewish cemetery, Leon Balk’s British nationality ensured that his second wife and two young children were able to escape to safety in England in April 1939, unlike almost every other member of the family, who were to soon perish in the ghettos and concentration camps of Eastern Europe. 

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