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Leivick, H. Woodcuts by Max Weber. Drawings by Y. Topol : DER GOYLEM: A DRAMATISHE POEME IN AKHT BILDER

New York: Farlag Amerike, 1921

1st illustrated edition. Original boards. 8vo. 222 pages. 1st Illustrated Edition of Leivick’s most famous work, published the same year as the unillusrtated edition, with wonderful drawings by Y. Topol and breathtaking woodcuts by Max Weber interspersed throughout, 21 cm. In Yiddish. Title translates to “The Golem: A Dramatic Poem in Eight Scenes.” H. Leivick (1888-1962) was a famous Yiddish language writer best known for this 1921 work. “Leivick's style was neo-Romantic and marked by a deep apocalyptic pessimism combined with an almost naive interest and yearning for the mystical and messianic, themes that continually appeared in his writing, particularly The Golem, which depicted the Jewish Messiah and Jesus Christ as representatives of a peaceful redemption, only to be chased away by the Maharal of Prague and his violent Golem, who ultimately rampaged through the streets of Prague injuring large numbers of people, both Jews and Christians. In The Golem, Leivick simultaneously condemned any attempts to heal the world through violence, but also highlighted the fallibility and impotence of all would-be Messiahs. The poem was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled critique of the Bolshevik Revolution and caused Leivick to be criticized by the Soviet Union and Communist Yiddishists. Leivick stopped writing for the Communist papers in 1929 following their public support for the Arab riots in Palestine and broke off all connections with the left following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Max Weber (1881-1961) “was a Jewish-American painter and one of the first American Cubist painters who, in later life, turned to more figurative Jewish themes in his art. He is best known today for Chinese Restaurant (1915), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art....Born in the Polish city of Bialystok, then part of the Russian Empire, Weber emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn with his Orthodox Jewish parents at the age of ten. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under Arthur Wesley Dow. … In 1909 he [Weber] helped to introduce Cubism to America. He is now considered one of the most significant early American Cubists, but the reception his work received in New York at the time was profoundly discouraging. Critical response to his paintings in a 1911 show at the 291 gallery, run by Alfred Stieglitz, was an occasion for ‘one of the most merciless critical whippings that any artist has received in America.’ The reviews were ‘of an almost hysterical violence.’ He was attacked for his ‘brutal, vulgar, and unnecessary art license.’....Weber was sustained by the respect of some eminent peers, such as photographers Alvin Langdon Coburn and Clarence White, and museum director John Cotton Dana, who saw to it that Weber was the subject of a one-man exhibition at the Newark Museum in 1913, the first modernist exhibition in an American museum. For a few years, Weber enjoyed a productive if rocky relationship with Stieglitz, and he published two essays in Stieglitz's journal Camera Work. (He also wrote Cubist poems and published a book, Essays on Art, in 1916.) So poor was Weber in these years that he camped out for some weeks in Stieglitz's gallery. Weber was also closely acquainted with Wilhelmina Weber Furlong and Thomas Furlong, whom he met at the Art Students League, where he taught from 1919 to 1921 and 1926 to 1927….He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1982….In time, Weber's work found more adherents, including Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1930, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work, the first solo exhibition at that museum of an American artist. He was praised as a ‘pioneer of modern art in America’ in a 1945 Life magazine article. In 1948, Look magazine reported on a survey among art experts to determine the greatest living American artists; Weber was rated second, behind only John Marin. He was the subject of a major traveling retrospective in 1949. He became more popular in the 1940s and 1950s for his figurative work, often expressionist renderings of Jewish families, rabbis, and Talmudic scholars, than for the early modernist work he had abandoned circa 1920 and on which his current reputation is founded” (Wikipedia). SUBJECTS: Golem - Drama. Cloth is lightly worn, inside hinges show repair. Foxing, pre-war Yiddish institutional stamps, spine label, otherwise Good+ Condition. (YID-33-60-L-’ex)xx

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