Following the February Revolution of 1917, Lissitzky moved from Moscow to Kiev, where he participated actively in a movement to create a modern secular Jewish culture in Russia. The new Provisional Government abolished laws that had barred Russian Jews from citizenship and repealed a decree that prohibited the printing of Hebrew letters. Between 1917 and 1919, at a time when publishing books in Yiddish was suddenly possible, Lissitzky devoted himself to illustrating Yiddish books.

His first designs appeared in Sihas hulin: Eyne fun di geshikhten (An Everyday Conversation: A Story, #7-8), published in 1917. The ornament-drawings in this book incorporate Hebrew letters into a curvilinear art nouveau design. In his illustrations from 1919 for the Passover song, Had gadya (One Goat, #5-6), where text is short and image has a more prominent role, Lissitzky integrated letters with images through a system of color coding that matched the color of the characters in the story with the word referring to them. He would return to this novel typographic device in later designs. In his setting of the final verse of the Passover song, Lissitzky depicts the mighty hand of God slaying the angel of death, who wears the czar's crown. This representation links the redemption of the Jews with the victory of the Bolsheviks.