Cover Illustrations for Peretz's Dramen

Born Aron Ber (Bernard) Szymon Kratko (Kratka) in Warsaw to a poor, traditional religious family, Ber Kratko apprenticed as a lithographer at the age of twelve. From 1901 to 1906, he studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts under Xawery Dunikowski, and then, after a two-year sabbatical touring Palestine, Egypt, and Italy, he appears to have studied in Berlin under Max Liebermann, perhaps informally. Returning to Warsaw around 1909, Kratko made contact with the Yiddish literary and cultural circle around the era’s preeminent Yiddish writer Y. L. Peretz; it was in this context that he produced the striking series of cover illustrations for a 1910 edition of Peretz’s dramas from which these three samples are drawn. Founding an artists’ group called the Jewish Artistic Circle around 1910, he would later help establish the Ukrainian National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in 1917, and thereafter make a career in the Soviet academy, focusing primarily on sculpture.