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

by Sarah Kaminsky, Mike Mitchell (Translator), Adolfo Kaminsky (Photographer), Deborah Dash Moore (Contribution by), Paul Salmona (Contribution by)

Overview

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. 

The Forger of Paris presents Adolfo Kaminsky’s biography in its only authorized edition, expanded with photographs from Kaminsky's 2019 exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris and accompanied by essays from MAHJ director Paul Salmona and National Jewish Book Award winner Deborah Dash Moore.

"This necessary book provides unforgettable insights into hidden worlds of the Jews, intellectuals, and partisans who fought back.... has a thriller dimension that outshines even the best undercover fiction." —Jewish Book Council

At 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, technical 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 Jewish 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 forge documents in secret for activists, refugees, human rights causes, and pacifists throughout the world.

"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 for The New York Times

"A triumphant wartime biography, full of heroism and near-alchemistic craftiness." —Foreword Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954600997
Publisher:	DoppelHouse Press
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sarah Kaminsky is a French author, screenwriter, and script doctor born in Algeria. She immigrated to France at the age of three with her father Adolfo Kaminsky, two brothers and her mother Leïla, a Tuareg Algerian law student and anti-colonial activist whose father was a progressive imam. Her 2009 best-selling book about her father, A Forger’s  Life, is now translated into fourteen languages. With numerous screenplays and writing credits, she is best known for her comedies in France, as well as for recent award-winning films seen around the world, Gauguin Voyage to Tahiti, How to Make a Killing, The Braid, and Farewell, Mr. Haffmann, which has earned 19 awards to date at U.S. film festivals. She has a son and 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 and recently completed his one hundredth translation. 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, Jesús 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 Carné, René Clair and others. Late in life, he began to publicly show some of the thousands of artistic photographs he took since the 1940s, with a major exhibition in 2019 at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris.

Paul Salmona is Director of the Museum of Jewish Art and History (MAHJ) in Paris. He has worked in museums for over forty years. He directed the Louvre auditorium (1992–2005), before creating the direction of cultural development of the Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives (rescue archaeology) in 2005, which he directed until moving to the MAHJ in 2013. Hispanist by training, he has organized many notable conferences about Jewish life in France and Europe and is the author of Archéologie du judaïsme en France (La Découverte, 2021).

Deborah Dash Moore is an American Jewish historian, author of nine books, and is Jonathan Freedman Distinguished UniversityProfessor of History and Professor of 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.

Table of Contents

Author's Preface to the English Edition
Prologue
Chapters 1–16
Epilogue and Addendum by Sarah Kaminsky

Adolfo Kaminsky, Forger and Photographer by Paul Salmona, Director of the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism
Commentary by Deborah Dash Moore
Photographs by Adolfo Kaminsky from 1940s and 1950s Paris
Biographies and Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"An engrossing literary debut." —Kirkus Reviews

"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

"Kaminsky’s 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​​ ​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

"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

From the Publisher