Auction 15 - Jewish and Israeli History and Culture

Di Kupe – Peretz Markish – Warsaw, 1921 – Cover Design by Henryk Berlewi

Opening: $250
Sold for: $400
Including buyer's premium
Di Kupe (The Pile), Peretz Markish. Warsaw: Kultur-Lige, 1921. First edition.
The cover illustration is by Henryk Berlewi, pictorializing the name of Markish's poem with a visual resemblance of a 'pile'. The obvious brutality and coarseness of the composition's elements – the title-letters and the triangles beneath them – match the tragic mood of the poem, and the purposely-provocative naturalist, anti-aesthetic quality that is the main tone in the poem's description of the victims of the pogrom; the murdered Jews were "piled up" in the town square.
32pp, 33.5cm. Fair condition. Cover and first and last leaves detached. Tears to margins, stains.
Avant-Garde and Modernism
Avant-Garde and Modernism