ABSTRACT
The last disastrous earthquake in Japan that had destroyed the capital and many other cities, directed author's thoughts towards the cosmic, the realm most dangerous for the balance of the mind. From these icy heights, the author's thoughts were torn towards the utter hell of the Ukraine of 1919 to 1920. Leyb Leyb Kvitko's cycle of poems will be analyzed in this wider aesthetic literary and visual context. In the cover for Kvitko's pogrom cycle, Joseph Tchaikov highlights the date 1919 as the year that has found entrance into the Yiddish language as the khurbn Ukraine. As is typical of his 'poetry of black and white', Kvitko heightens the tension between — lost — paradise and the hell of the pogroms by means of aesthetic devices. Consequently, his poetic voice casts a shadow over the utopian vision of the 'Jewish Awakening', at a time when Jewish-Yiddish art and literature flourished for the last time in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic.
