Bookvica

[KVITKO & CHAIKOV] 1919. Lieder [i.e. 1919. Poems]

Kvitko, L.

Item #2632

Berlin: Jüdischer Literarischer Verlag, 1923. 163, [5] p. 19x12,7 cm. Original illustrated wrappers by Joseph Chaikov. Rear wrapper is detachable, otherwise in good condition.

First edition. In Yiddish.

Lev (Leib) Moiseevich Kvitko (1890-1952) was a Soviet Jewish (Yiddish) poet. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by his grandmother and received some education in a cheder. He commenced his poetic endeavors at the age of 12. From 1921, he resided and published in Berlin and later in Hamburg, where he worked at the Soviet trade mission and contributed to publications in both Soviet and Western contexts. During this period, he joined the Communist Party, engaging in communist outreach among workers. In 1925, apprehensive of potential arrest, he returned to the USSR, where he authored numerous books for children, with 17 published in 1928 alone. Facing accusations of "right-wing deviation" due to his sharp satirical poems in the magazine "Di Roite Welt" ("Red World"), he was expelled from the editorial board. In 1931, he joined the Kharkov Tractor Plant, continuing his literary pursuits alongside his professional endeavors. Throughout the war, he played a significant role in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) as a presidium member and part of the editorial board for the JAC newspaper "Einikait" ("Unity"). Arrested on January 23, 1949, as one of the prominent figures of the JAC, he faced accusations of treason. On July 18, 1952, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to capital punishment, and on August 12, 1952, he was executed.
In 1923, Kvitko published this book of poems, 1919, in Berlin, an outstanding monument of avant-garde poetry and, at the same time, a testimony to the terrible Jewish pogroms that broke out in Ukraine in 1919. The unique expressionism of the collection 1919 has two sources: childhood and horror. “Kind” (child) and “pahad” (fear, horror) are perhaps the most frequent words in this book. Its poems are made in much the same way as Kvitko’s children’s poems: from simple, raw words, from rough, improvised things, and the further we go, the more simple, ready-made, “childish” meters become.

These rhythms, into which free modernist verse breaks every now and then, create a strange and frightening effect of hopelessness, as if words, under the influence of fear coming from outside (from the street along which the “blood-stained punks” are moving), begin to beat inside a narrow, closed space (a cellar where mothers and children are hiding, a nightmare, the subconscious). Notable book design work by Joseph Chaikov (1888-1979), Jewish Russian sculptor, co-founder, along with El Lissitzky, Boris Aronson, of the Jewish socialist Kultur Lige in Kyiv in 1910s. Later the same year as this book came out Chaikov moved to USSR to teach at the sculpture faculty of the VKHUTEMAS.

Price: $650.00