Frank Seiden: A Galician Jewish Jack-of-all-Trades in Turn-of-the-Century New York

By Daniel Carkner Frank Seiden is an enigmatic figure of the early Jewish entertainment world in the United States. Born in Galicia in 1860, he arrived in New York’s Lower East side in 1877 and eventually became known as a street performer, magician, and vaudeville actor. By 1900 he became […]

The Broderzingers: Galicia’s Itinerant Yiddish Folk Troupes

The Broderzingers The Broderzingers (“singers of Brody”) were itinerant troupes of folksingers who performed in taverns and inns initially in Galicia, and later in Bukovina, Transcarpathia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Emerging in the early nineteenth century, these performers were among the first to perform Yiddish-language songs outside of Purim […]

Przemyśl at the Turn of the Century: From the Notes of Feliks Mantel

Below is a translation from Polish of the article Przemyśl na przełomie wieków …z zapisków Feliksa Mantela Feliks Mantel (1906-1990) came from a family of Przemyśl Jews. His father, Józef Mantel (1875-1920), was a lawyer and a close associate of [lawуer and socialist politician] Herman Lieberman. Józef Piłsudski, who stayed in […]

Nataliya Kobrynska: Organizer of the Feminist Movement in Galicia

The tour company Pro Lviv with Love has initiated a project dedicated to giving new life to the women’s almanac Pershyi Vinok (First Wreath), originally published in Lviv in 1887. The almanac was the first work in Galicia and Ukraine to raise the “woman question” — in addition to works […]

Kosiv: Former Center of Natural Medicine and Vegetarianism

Back during Austrian times and up until World War II, the Carpathian Hutsul town of Kosiv (formerly Kosów) was a center of natural medicine and vegetarianism. This is thanks to Dr. Apolinary Tarnawski (1851-1943), a Polish physician who at the end of the nineteenth century founded a private sanatorium in […]

Galicia’s Adventurous and Free-Spirited Sofia Jablonska

From Lviv Today – a bilingual lifestyle magazine Here is the astounding story of the Galician girl who managed to conquer thousands of fans with her poetic travel essays and become Ukraine’s first internationally renowned travel writer, documentalist, and journalist. Early beginnings Sofia Jablonska was born in 1907 in the […]

The ‘Galician Gaudi’: Teodor Talowski & His Fanciful Architecture

Teodor Talowski is one of the most important Polish architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has been described as the “Galician Gaudi” or the “Polish Gaudi” because he combined late Historicism with Secession (Art Nouveau) and Modernist influences. His works include apartment buildings, churches, chapels, and […]

Engineer Słowik and His Enduring Mark on Lviv

The Recovered Story of a Prewar Metalworks Owner Countless people contributed to the urban development of Lviv and left their enduring mark on the city. It is thanks to these architects, urban planners, engineers, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, construction workers, and factory workers that we have the beautiful architecture, cobblestone roads, infrastructure, […]

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch: Much More than Masochism

While today the term “masochism” is widely known, few know its origin, let alone anything about the man behind the name—Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. A while back I posted about this Lviv native’s childhood experiences in the Galician capital (found here), but now I’d like to share a few curious, lesser-known facts […]

Some Like It Not – Billy Wilder: Fame, Fortune & Fate (From Galicia to Hollywood to the Holocaust)

By Chris Wilkinson “To know me, you must think of me in terms of what Austria was like in 1906, when I was born. Austria in those days was a huge monarchy of 56 million people – the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The monarchy seemed indestructible.”– Billy Wilder One of Hollywood’s greatest movie […]