Three volume Russian-language edition of poems, short stories and essays by Jabotinsky (pseudonym "Altalena.”) Illustrated by Arthur Szyk

JABOTINSKY, VLADIMIR (ZE’EV).

Voltaire

Paris

1930

Limited edition of 200 numbered copies. All three volumes signed on front fly leaf in Russian "V. Jabotinsky." Three frontispiece photographs of Author. All three titles have signature of a former owner (in either Cyrillic or Latin characters) "Alexander Gurvitch, Harbin (Manchuria), 1930."

Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky (1880-1940), celebrated as the leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, was also a Russian man of letters. In 1930, in honor of Jabotinsky's fiftieth birthday, his admirers issued this limited edition of his literary ouevres. See EJ, Vol. IX, cols. 1178-1186. The illustrator of this work, Arthur Szyk, was a great admirer and close friend of Jabotinsky. On the second anniversary of Jabotinsky's death, Szyk remarked: "I will always consider the deceased as the greatest leader who ever was given to the Jewish people…I consider his untimely death an irreparable loss for world Jewry." See S. Luckert, The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk (2002), p. 94. According to Szyk's biographer, Joseph P. Ansell, "Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Russian Jewish journalist and an ardent Zionist…was a friend of Szyk's in Paris and for many years after." See J.P. Ansell, Arthur Szyk: Artist, Jew, Pole (2004) p. 39. Curiously, Ansell's list of "Books with Illustrations by Szyk" fails to record the present work