Lithograph half-title and title and 29 additional full-page lithographs portraying personal memories of life in the shtetl, conveyed in images. Oblong folio (13 1/8 x 19 1/4 inches). Boards with title and striking image to front cover. Some paper loss to corners of cover, binding and spine professionally repaired, some scattered foxing mostly concentrated on first and last few images, a couple of small marginal tears, overall good. Berlin: Verlag Schwellen, n.d. (1923).

Issachar Ryback (born in Elisavetgrad, Ukraine in 1897, died in Paris in 1935) was a leading figure in the Yiddish avant-garde and had close associations with the likes of El Lissitszky (with whom he accompanied on expeditions for the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society), Alexandra Exter (with whom he was active in the Jewish Theater Studio in Kiev), and Boris Aronson. He established with El Lissitszky and Iosif Chaikov a department of art for the Kultur-lige and coauthored, with Aronson, an important theoretical article on Jewish Art which appeared in the journal Oyfgang in 1919, addressing the difficulty of establishing a Jewish national style. Ryback considered his work as growing out of Jewish folk art traditions and its iconography; he was exposed to the international avant-garde movements in the post WWI era and incorporated many progressive aesthetic elements as well. He is perhaps best known for his series of illustrations for Yiddish children's books but the present work (loosely translated as: "Shtetl: My Destroyed Home, a Memory") is considered his masterpiece.

Based on themes remembered from his youth, including a pogrom in which his father was murdered by Cossacks, the images vividly provide an intimate view of a way of life that was erased within a couple of decades. The images show influences of Cubism, Expressionism, and Constructivism, with asymmetrical designs, exaggerated facial features and other progressive aesthetic concerns, incorporating and transforming prototypical images of Jewish life in rural Eastern Europe. They are reminiscent of Chagall but with a more somber and tragic sentiment.

See "Futur/Anterieur: L'Avant Garde et le Livre Yiddish (1914-1939)", catalogue of an exhibition at the Musee d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaisme in Paris in 2009.

Book ID: 53576

Price: $6,500.00