Little Fairy Tales by Itsik Kipnis

The St. Petersburg publishing house Jaromír Hladík Press published two children’s books by Itsik Kipnis, Little Fairy Tales and A Bear Flew, translated from Yiddish into Russian by a number of local translators and edited by the renowned literary scholar Valery Dymshits. The books contain the original illustrations by Sarah Shor, Mark Epshteyn and Nisson Shifrin.
Itzik Kipnis (1896-1974) was one of the central figures in Soviet Yiddish literature who authored many short stories, several novels and plays. He also translated numerous Russian and Western European literary works into Yiddish. In 1948, he was arrested on charges of “bourgeois nationalism”. After his release from the Gulag in 1954, his house in Kyiv once again became a major informal center of Jewish culture in the USSR. Kipnis’s children’s fairy tales combine fantasy, traditional folklore and elements of Soviet life.