Costume Design (Bearded Male) for Peretz’s At Night in the Old Marketplace

The painter and set designer Robert Falk was born in Moscow and received a secular Russian education. Although he converted to Christianity in 1907, prior to his marriage, critics identified him as a Jewish painter. During World War I, he became closer to the Jewish art world, and in the interwar years he frequently designed scenery and costumes for the Soviet Yiddish theater. In the 1940s, the Soviet regime banned him from exhibiting publicly because of the “formalism” and “political indifference” of his work.