(LISSITZKY, ELIEZER)

Yiddisher Folks-Ferlag

Moscow (i.e. Kiev-St. Petersburg)

1919

Yingel Tzingel Chvat [“The Mischievous Boy”]. Delightful childrens’ story by the Yiddish poet MANI-LEIB [Brahinsky] about a Shtetl where the Summer ran away, but the Winter did not come and the rainy Autumn lingered endlessly until one day the magical intervention of Yingl Tzingl brought the eagerly awaitied snows of Winter

Israel Museum Catalogue, Tradition and Revolution, no. 79 i-x (illustrated); Busch-Reisinger Museum Catalogue, El Lissitzky (1987) no. 1919/7; Museum of Modern Art Catalogue , The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934 (2002) no.235, pp.174-5 (illustrated)

El Lissitzky’s Expressionist and Cubo-Futuristic style drawings here are full of poetic fantasy and playfulness and create a panoramic picture of life in the Jewish Shtetl. He depicts the buildings, the children playing, the busy housewife, the business activities of the men, the birds, the beasts, the Rebbe with his students and especially dramatic, the wild horse which carries Yingl Tsingl out into the big wide-world. Decorated typographic vignettes containing the page numbers depict the Priestly blessing, a goat, a fish, a bird and the cock crowing. Lissitzky incorporates the title letters of the text into his illustrations and in this way creates a symbiosis of text, illustration even page numbers. The illustrations merge with the lines or letters of the text to occupy the space of the verse, with the human figures fusing with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Lissitzky experiments with the decorative possibilities of the Hebrew letter is influenced by his studies of the inscriptions on the walls of wooden synagogues and of medieval illuminated Hebrew manuscripts. See A. Kampf, Jewish Experiance in the Art of the Twentieth Century (1984), pp. 44-6. For an English translation by Jeffrey Shandler of Mani-Leib’s poem, see Yingl Tsingl Khvat, Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, (New York), n.d