Adolfo Kaminsky The Forger of Paris: Authorized Biography. New and Expanded Edition

(Paperback)

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As seen on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper and in the Emmy-award-winning New York Times documentary, the gripping true story of a Jewish teenager who became "The Forger of Paris" for the French Resistance, saving thousands of lives during Nazi occupation and later with humanitarian causes throughout the world.

At the age of seventeen Adolfo Kaminsky had narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz and was recruited to join the Jewish underground. Due to his expert knowledge of dyes and an artistic ability to reproduce official documents, he soon became the primary forger for the Resistance in Paris, creating papers that would save an estimated 14,000 men, women and children from certain death. Upon the Liberation and for the next twenty-five years Kaminsky worked as a professional photographer. But, recognizing the fight for freedom had not ended with the defeat of the Nazis, and driven by his own harrowing experiences, he continued to secretly forge documents for refugees, anti-fascists, student activists, freedom fighters, and pacifists.

"An engrossing literary debut."-Kirkus Reviews

"... has a thriller dimension that outshines even the best undercover fiction." -Jewish Book Council

"A thrilling, novelesque account ... [and] triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness."-Foreword Reviews

Reviews

"At a moment when someones passport, or religion, can still mean the difference between life and death, Mr. Kaminskys story remains painfully relevant, but inspiring." Filmmakers Samantha Stark, Alexandra Garcia and Pamela Druckerman forThe New York Times

"Ably translated, the prose carries the tension of a spy novel. [] Sights and smells of laboratories are vividly rendered, along with the nuances of photoengraving and careful interactions with strangers and colleagues. [] This is a fascinating tribute to a humanitarian and a glimpse at the nuts and bolts of covert operations."Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews

"He was a discreet hero. One of those who act in the shadows. An anonymous guardian angel [... doing] untiring work for freedom. ... Adolfo Kaminsky was also a remarkable photographer, ... wherever he went, he would try to find humanity, which puts him in the same rank as Sabine Weiss, Robert Doisneau, and Willy Ronis. In 2019 the Museum of Jewish Art and History devoted a remarkable exhibition to him, paying tribute to his photographic work."Blind Magazine

"Kaminskys career as a forger is remarkable by any standard. He served almost every major revolutionary or subversive cause in the world from the upheavals of the 1940s until the end of the turbulent 1960s. [] He was driven by principles, took no payment for his work [] and kept his secret well until the new millennium. Only then did he decide to tell his incredible story, under the gentle prodding of his youngest daughter, actress Sarah Kaminsky. [] The result is a riveting book."Haaretz

"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 fathers 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

"Mr. Kaminsky was a self-taught master of forgery and lent his skills over the years to Algerians during their struggle for independence from France, to opponents of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco of Spain, to revolutionaries in Latin America, to anti-apartheid activists in South Africa and to American deserters during the Vietnam War. He sought no pay for his services; it was not money, he insisted, but rather principle that motivated his work, which he first undertook as a teenager in France. The Holocaust, he said, had taught him that 'on every document rests the life or death of a human being'. Washington Post

Author Bio

Sarah Kaminsky is a screenwriter, author, and actor. Born in Algeria in 1979 to an Ashkenazi Jewish father from Argentina and a Tuareg Algerian mother, Kaminsky immigrated to France at the age of three. Her 2009 book about her father, Adolfo Kaminsky, has sold widely throughout the world and has been translated into more than nine languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese, and Arabic. Her screenplays and writing credits are numerous and noteworthy, including for recent films "The Braid" (2023) and "Farewell, Mr. Haffmann" (2021), which earned an Audience Award at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. She lives in Paris.

Mike Mitchell 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 twice for translations from German and received commendation for a translation from French. He 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; d. 2023 in Paris) 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 catalogs and posters, and he was the regular photographer for the painters who were the precursors of kinetic art such as Antonio Asis, Jess Rafael 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 Carne, Rene Clair and others. Late in life, he began to publicly show some of the thousands of artistic photographs he took since the 1940s, the first being a major exhibition in 2019 at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris.

Deborah Dash Moore is an American Jewish historian, author of nine books, and is Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her influential scholarship in the field of modern Jewish history focuses on Jewish urban life, women and gender, the creation of ethnic identity, and Jewish photographers. Her books have regularly garnered awards, including a National Jewish Book Award. Her most recent book is Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York (2023). She also serves as Editor in Chief of the ten-volume The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization.