Der Shokhet

Born in Yelisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine), Issachar Ber Ryback studied at the Kiev School of Art with the influential cubo-futurist artist Alexandra Exter. Attracted by the region’s Jewish cultural renaissance movement during World War I, he grew interested in traditional Jewish folk art and how it might be recast via modernist techniques to become a Jewish national art. In these years, Ryback became affiliated with the Yiddishist Kultur-Lige (Culture League) in Kiev and cowrote a manifesto elaborating his theories of a Jewish national art with its own distinctive style and formal language. He produced some of the most striking illustrations for the Yiddishist publications of the era. Among the most famous of these are his riveting primitivist illustrations of everyday shtetl life, from a child’s standpoint, done for Miriam Margolin’s multivolume Mayselekh far kleyninke kinderlekh (Little Stories for Little Children) and his fantastic playful images for the Yiddish poet Leyb Kvitko’s Foyglen (Birds) and In vald (In the Forest). Witness to the devastation of Jewish life in Ukraine during the monstrous wave of mass murder in 1918 and 1919, in which his father was killed, Ryback also painted terrifying expressionist works depicting the pogroms. While living in Berlin between 1921 and 1925, he produced a famed graphic album on prewar shtetl life. He returned briefly to the Soviet Union to design sets for the Yiddish theater and then moved to Paris in 1926, where he remained until his death.