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had barred Russian Jews from citizenship and repealed a decree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.
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