Only edition. 231, [1] pp., illus., 213:154 mm., wide margins, light age toning. A very good copy bound in the original illustrated cloth over boards, rubbed.

Wonder tales of Old Prague by David Ignatoff (1885–1954), Yiddish novelist and dramatist. Born in the Ukraine, Ignatoff was active in the revolutionary movement in Kiev (1903–06) before leaving for the United States. In 1907 he helped to found the literary group Di Yunge ("The Young Ones") which rebelled against the dominant emphasis on proletarian themes and current socialist ideas in American Yiddish literature, and advocated art for art's sake and the importance of form rather than subject matter. Together with I. J. Schwartz, Ignatoff edited and published the annual Literatur (1910). In 1912 he began to issue a periodical, Shriftn, which appeared irregularly and in which he published original works by young writers, translations of world literature, and reproductions of works by Jewish painters. Ignatoff also edited the annual Velt-ayn, Velt-oys (1916). Ignatoff alternated between a colorful romanticism which idealized Jewish traditions and a radical realism which allied him with proletarian literature. The former tendency was best embodied in his Vundermayses fun Altn Prag ("Wondertales of Old Prague," 1920) and in Dos Farborgene Likht ("The Hidden Light," 1918), tales based on the narratives of R. Nahman of Bratslav; and the latter tendency in the novel In Keselgrub ("In the Cauldron," 1918), which deals with the struggle between degeneracy and spiritual rebirth among Jewish immigrants, and in the fictional trilogy Oyf Vayte Vegn ("Vistas," 1932), which describes the rise of the American Jewish labor movement. His later work included the biblical plays Yiftokh (1939) and Gideon (1953). A collection of essays, Opgerisene Bleter, was published posthumously in Buenos Aires in 1957.

Benjamin Kopman (1887-1965), American painter, lithographer, etcher and illustrator, Benjamin Kopman came to the United States from Russia in 1903. He studied art at the National Academy of Design, Washington, DC., and held his first one man shows in 1912 at the Scott Thurber Gallery in Chicago and the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. During the following years, Kopman exhibited at such major institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, La Napoule Art Foundation, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public collections that today include Kopman's original prints and paintings are the Carnegie Institute, Colgate University, Brooklyn Museum, University of Michigan and the University of Tel Aviv, Israel.

EJ