Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life
by Sarah Kaminsky, Mike Mitchell, Adolfo KaminskySarah Kaminsky
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Subject of The New York Times documentary "The Forger," winner of a World Press Photo Award and an Emmy Award
As seen on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper
"[An] engrossing literary debut. ... Writing in Adolfo's voice gives this suspenseful narrative candor and immediacy." – Kirkus Reviews
Reader's Choice Award –Elle Magazine, France
Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Most Anticipated Non-Fiction: Fall Books 2016
"Every resistance movement had its forgers, but few have told their tales. Many, like Kaminsky, were very young technicians and chemists when they began their work. Sarah Kaminsky's affectionate rendering of her father's life, with all the intricacies of his trade, is a book not just about a remarkable craftsman, but a man who strove to save 'every life that was in danger.'" –Times Literary Supplement
Best-selling author Sarah Kaminsky takes readers through her father Adolfo Kaminsky's perilous and clandestine career as a forger for the French Resistance, the FLN, and numerous other freedom movements of the twentieth century. Recruited as a young Jewish teenager for his knowledge of dyes, Kaminsky became the primary forger for the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Then, as a professional photographer, Kaminsky spent the next twenty-five years clandestinely producing thousands of counterfeit documents for immigrants, exiles, underground political operatives, and pacifists across the globe. Kaminsky kept his past cloaked in secrecy well into his eighties, until his daughter convinced him to share the details of the life-threatening work he did on behalf of people fighting for justice and peace throughout the world.
DoppelHouse Press
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Sarah Kaminsky (b. 1979 in Sidi M'hamed, Algeria) is a French actor, screenwriter and author. She was 3 years old when she immigrated to France with her father, of Russian Jewish origins and carrying an Argentinean passport, and her mother Leïla, a Tuareg Algerian. Her first book is the biography of her father, Adolfo Kaminsky, published by Editions Calmann-Lévy in 2009. It has sold over 12,000 copies in France and has since been translated into Italian, Hebrew, German, Spanish, Turkish, and Arabic. Sarah Kaminsky is currently employed as a screenwriter by several production companies in France and lives in Paris with her partner Alban and her son.
Mike Mitchell (b. 1941 in Rochdale, England) is an award-winning translator of French and German who has been active as a translator for over thirty years. He is the recipient of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translations of German works published in Britain, has won the British Comparative Literature Association translation competition three times, and has been shortlisted for many awards including the French-American Translation Prize, the Weidenfeld prize, the Aristeion prize, the Kurt Wolff prize, and the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger. In 2012 the Austrian Ministry of Education, Art and Culture awarded him a lifetime achievement award as a translator of literary works. He lives in Scotland.
Adolfo Kaminsky (b. 1925 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) made his living as a photographer in various fields: postcards, advertising photos, but also photo reportage on industry (for example, the coal mines of the North and the French sugar refineries). He took numerous photographs of works of art for exhibition catalogues and posters, and he was the regular photographer for the painters who were the precursors of kinetic art such as Antonio Asis, Jésus Soto, Carmelo Ardenquin, and Yacov Agam. As a specialist for giant-format photography he produced photos for film sets for Alexandre Trauner, the set designer for Marcel Carné, René Clair and others. He also took thousands of artistic photographs through his life, but has only recently started exhibiting them.
Author's Preface to the English Edition
Chapters 1 - 16
Appendix of Photographs by Adolfo Kaminsky from 1940s and 1950s Paris
"[An] engrossing literary debut. . . . Writing in Adolfo's voice gives this suspenseful narrative candor and immediacy." —Kirkus
Sarah Kaminsky has done a masterful job. A suspenseful, captivating, and thrilling account of an exceptionally brave and daring man. … So absorbing that I read it in one sitting.
Portland Book Review - Don Messerschmidt
A detailed and touching story traversing a century in clandestine shadow crossings, where Adolfo's skill meant life... or death.
A thrilling book.
Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life is "worthy of the best spy novels" and tells the story of Sarah Kaminsky's father, "the genius-forger who committed his know-how and convictions to serve the French Resistance during World War II, saving thousands of Jewish families, and many others over the course of 30 years for various causes around the world.
TED.com
Penned in unassuming, unembellished language, perhaps as discreet as Adolfo's self-effacing personality, and rendered in a smooth translation by Mike Mitchell, […] Sarah Kaminsky dons her father's persona seamlessly by transcribing Adolfo's account to her in his own voice, so the book reads like a memoir. It is a powerful homage, written with a casual, if poignant, simplicity, often masking heartfelt conundrums.
Undoubtedly one of the most captivating books of the season.
Paris Today
Riveting.
– Haaretz
A pointed, sober biography ... of one of the world's best forgers.
A thrilling, novelesque account of how a young man became a sought-after subversive force. […] A triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness.
Foreword Reviews
While Adolfo, as the book's narrator, remains center-stage, the story is filled with dozens of courageous, intriguing characters, cogs in the wheels of freedom fighting. From them Adolfo learns that "the line between 'resistance' and 'terrorism' is sometimes very fine, difficult to feel." This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hidden worlds of the Jews, intellectuals, and partisans who fought back.
Jewish Book Council
At a moment when someone's passport, or religion, can still mean the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminsky's story remains painfully relevant, but inspiring. — Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia and Pamela Druckerman
If made into a film, the life of Adolfo Kaminsky would have the ingredients of suspense thriller, war movie, historical tragedy, intimate drama, romantic comedy and scenes of terror.
– O Globo
Kaminsky has lived, in the shadows, the brightest hours of the Resistance.
Technical prowess, creativity, and self-denial drive the plot in the incredibly lucky life of Adolfo Kaminsky narrated in this exciting historical document.
2010 Reader's Choice Award
Elle Magazine
Fascinates as a case study of a man driven by a lifelong compulsion, a psychological need, to combat oppression...a moving portrait of a compelling figure in a field rarely occupied by noble persons struggling to combat evil and right wrongs.
Every resistance movement had its forgers, but few have told their tales. Many, like Kaminsky, were very young technicians and chemists when they began their work. Sarah Kaminsky's affectionate rendering of her father's life, with all the intricacies of his trade, is a book not just about a remarkable craftsman, but a man who strove to save "every life that was in danger.
Times Literary Supplement
A brilliant forger's 29-year resistance against oppression.When she was 24, Kaminsky proposed to her 78-year-old father, Adolfo Kaminsky, that she write the story of his life as a forger of documents that saved thousands of lives, beginning with French Jews under Nazi occupation and continuing to include Algerians, anti-Franco activists, and others who fought against "inequality, segregation, racism, injustice, fascism and dictatorships." He agreed but had one question: "do you know if there's a statute of limitation?" In her engrossing literary debut, Kaminsky chronicles Adolfo's career, which began when he was 17, a self-taught chemist who had gained incomparable technical knowledge from working as a dyer. Forged papers saved his own life and those of his father and siblings after they were released from the Drancy concentration camp, and soon he joined the Resistance, proving himself tireless, talented, and inventive. Once his expertise became known, he and a clandestine team were overwhelmed with orders for passports, identity papers, "travel permits, rent receipts, library card, sales slip for a store, bus or cinema ticket, railway ticket," drug prescriptions, and even crumpled personal letters: in short, "everything a man might carry with him and which, should he be caught, might save his life." After the war, he worked for a secret network to transport concentration camp survivors to Palestine, and later his forgeries aided freedom fighters in Algeria, Greece, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and across Latin America. Throughout his career, Kaminsky refused to accept payment for his work, believing that taking money would be mercenary: "I'd make working for nothing an absolute principle, for it alone guaranteed my total independence of the networks and kept my commitment incorruptible." He gave up forgery only when he knew his cover had been blown, requiring him "to vanish into thin air." Writing in Adolfo's voice gives this suspenseful narrative candor and immediacy.
Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger's Life 4 out of 5 based on 0 ratings. 1 reviews.
Anonymous More than 1 year ago
I found this book very interesting and liked reading it. It did get a little slow after WW II.
book by l ann wheeler
book by ilya kaminsky
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