Shoeless Yosuf...

Shoeless Yosuf...

Shoeless Yosuf... One of this westerner's childhood memories is children's books from Europe. They were in French, German, Russian, and thus "unreadable" but beloved just the same, and linguistic barriers contributed to their mystique. This department has a good collection of children's books, many in languages other than English, like this one perfect for the beginning language student. Samuil Marshak was a leader of the Leningrad producers of children's books. He founded, in 1920, one of the first children's theaters in the Soviet Union, and wrote plays for it. But even this group of authors did not escape interrogation, deportment and execution in Stalin's purges of the 1930s when 30,000 Leningraders – scholars, scientists, poets, artists, writers, composers – were sent to labor camps in Siberia and the Arctic. "Kiddie Lit" would not in general serve as a good cover for clandestine operations. Marshak had taken coursework in the art department at the University of London, had translated Shakespeare, Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Kipling, Lear, and Milne (as well as verse of Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Armenian poets) and so was as suspect as those Russian ballerinas who might have had a second dance or lingered too long with a western diplomat at an official Leningrad reception. For many Soviet intellectuals, life was nasty, brutish and short. Marshak was one of those who in spite of torture and exile managed to survive, ultimately to receive two Orders of Lenin and a number of medals. AND to live until late into his 70s.

Children 5192