Földvári Books

With Marek Szwarc’s Linocut

Greenberg, Uri Zvi; [Szwarc, Marek]

[In Hebrew:] Emah gedolah ve-yareach. [Great Horror and a Moon.]

Tel Aviv: Hedim, 5685 [1924]. With a linocut by Marek Szwarc. First edition. Printed in only 600 copies. In publisher’s half cloth, with printed front panel in red and black. 64 p. Panels rubbed, corners bumped. First and last leaves are discolored. Foxing on many pages. Otherwise in very good condition.

With Marek Szwarc’s striking linocut in Greenberg’s first book of poems in Hebrew, which is considered as the foundation of modern Hebrew literature.

Marek Szwarc (Mark Shvarts/Schwartz; 1892–1962) was a Polish-born Jewish painter and sculptor. Szwarc lived and studied in Paris in the first half of the 1910s where he got associated with fellow avant-garde artists. Back in Poland, he became the co-founder of the first Yiddish literary and artistic avant-garde circle in Poland, the Yung-Yidish movement, and the editor of all three issues of its magazine in 1919. Szwarc’s collaboration with Greenberg dates back to 1922, the launch of Greenberg’s Yiddish Expressionist magazine Albatros, whose chief illustrator was Szwarc.

Uri Zvi Greenberg (Cvi Grinberg; 1896–1981) was one of the major figures of modern Yiddish and Hebrew poetry. He was a contributor of the most important and influential avant-garde Yiddish magazines, the Yung-Yidish, Khalyastre and editor of Albatros. Greenberg published poems in Hebrew and Yiddish from 1912 onward. His first book of poems in Yiddish Mefisto (1921), and the magazine he edited the Albatros (1922–1923) are considered the first appearance of Expressionism in the Yiddish avant-garde scene. The present book is Greenberg’s first book of poems in Hebrew, contains ten long poems, and a short manifesto, an immodest announcement of his rise into the modern Hebrew literary scene.

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Price: €6,000.00