In a preliminary attempt to provide the cultural and historical context for a rare Russian children's book, the authors uncover the career of a prominent Ukrainian Jewish publisher and suggest questions and keys to further research.

Sometimes the circumstances surrounding the publication of a single book can lead one into an unfamiliar realm of publishing and cultural history. Such is the case with a book recently acquired by the Library of Congress, an early twentieth-century Russian-language edition of the classic European folk tale Little Red Riding Hood: Krasnaia shapochka. Bound in boards and only ten pages long, this appealing edition includes black-and-white lithographed drawings and four full-page chromolithographs with movable parts. A fifth chromolithograph on the front cover incorporates two illustrations from the story, a frame within a frame. (See Figure 2.)

As is customary with many children's books, Krasnaia shapochka was published without a title page. In this case the only publication information appears on the bottom of the front cover: Kisv-Kolomea: Izdatel'stvo Ia. Orenshteina [Kisv-Kolomea: Ia. Orenshtein Publishing].¹ At first it seemed to us that Kisv was an earlier or perhaps Yiddish dialectical form of Kosiv, and Kolomea a German or Yiddish form of Kolomyia. Kosiv and Kolomyia are nearby towns in southeastern Galicia, now southwestern Ukraine.² Further research revealed that Kolomea is also the Russian spelling of Kolomyia. It became apparent that Kisv was almost certainly a misprint, and that Kiev-Kolomea was the intended imprint. Most likely, the cross bar was lost from the Cyrillic 'e' in Kiev, producing a Cyrillic 's'. Catalogs of Orenshtain's publications in the 1920s list some books with the imprint Kiev-Kolomea (the Russian form) or Kyiv-Kolomyia (the Ukrainian form), but none with a Kisv or Kosiv imprint.³

But who was the publisher "Ia. Orenshtein?"⁴ And why did he publish this children's folk tale in Russian in the town of Kolomyia, which was under Austrian rule ostensibly from 1772 to 1918, or even in Kyiv? Recent scholarship has begun to examine such questions, although traditionally published sources are few.

The previously unexplored contribution of Jews to the culture of the stateless Ukrainian nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their integration into Ukrainian society, are the subject of Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern's book, The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew.⁵ However, the scope of this seminal work is limited to writers and poets, and does not include the extraordinary accomplishments of Ukrainian-Jewish publisher Yakiv Orenshtain (1875-1944?).⁶

Fortunately, Orenshtain's life and career have been the topic of a surprising number of articles and conference papers published on the Ukrainian Internet. In one of these, historian and Kolomyia native Ivan Monolatii observes, "What distinguishes Orenshtain as a publisher of Ukrainian books is that he, being an educated person, well-acquainted with world and Ukrainian literature, as well as with the Galician literary and cultural milieu, began his career by collaborating with [the leading figures of] this milieu."⁷ In a letter to one such figure, the Ukrainian political and community activist Oleksandr Barvins'kyi, Orenshtain had written, "I am less interested in material than in moral profit."⁸

In 1903, in Kolomyia, Orenshtain established the Halyts'ka Nakladnia, which quickly became a major publishing firm. In a city of insular Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish communities, he employed young Ukrainian scholars and wordsmiths to publish high-quality, affordable Ukrainian-language books. He launched the Zahal'na Biblioteka series, which did much to educate and raise the level of knowledge in the broadest circles of society. Among the 238 titles he would eventually publish in this series were classics of Ukrainian literature and history by Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Panteleimon Kulish, and Ol'ha Kobylians'ka, as well as translations into Ukrainian of Rudyard Kipling, Bernard Shaw, Leo Tolstoy, Anatole France, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. Orenshtain also published textbooks, music, maps, the beautifully crafted Atlas heohrafichnyi [Geographical atlas] and Pershyi atlas v ukrains'kii movi [First atlas in the Ukrainian language], hundreds of postcards on Ukrainian themes, and dozens of books for Ukrainian and Jewish children.⁹

For more than a decade in Kolomyia, Orenshtain's enterprise was favored by the relatively benevolent policies of the Austrian Empire toward the language and culture of its citizens, including liberal attitudes toward publishing in Ukrainian and other languages. But the atmosphere changed with the First World War. Russia invaded eastern Galicia in September 1914 and occupied the region until it was recovered by the Austrians in May 1915. A year later it was reoccupied by the Russians, then returned to an Austrian administration in the summer of 1917. In Russian-occupied eastern Galicia, according to historian Orest Subtelny, "on the orders of the tsarist administration, all Ukrainian cultural institutions, cooperatives, and periodicals were shut down. Limits were placed on the use of Ukrainian and efforts were made to introduce Russian into the educational system."¹⁰

At first this circumstance seemed to provide an explanation for the appearance in Russian of Orenshtain's Little Red Riding Hood. If the book was published during the Russian occupation, possibly it was to be part of a Russian-language curriculum for Ukrainian-speaking children. Or the Russian-language edition might have had a broader motivation, a special item to be marketed among Russians and Russophiles in eastern Galicia or the Russian-speaking population of other regions.

Further research revealed a different reality. The Russian occupation of eastern Galicia had devastating socioeconomic consequences for its Jewish inhabitants, including Orenshtain, whose publishing business was plundered by Russian troops. Orenshtain himself was arrested and temporarily exiled to Russia.¹¹ And so it is unlikely that Orenshtain was able to publish at all during that period.

After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, at the end of World War I, Orenshtain reemerged in Kyiv. There he operated a large bookstore and maintained commercial ties with the government of the young Ukrainian state.¹² Then, with the Bolshevik victory and the demise of Ukraine's independence, Orenshtain reestablished his firm in Leipzig and Berlin under the name Ukrains'ka Nakladnia and expanded its market from Europe to North America.¹³ During the 1920s the Ukrains'ka Nakladnia had an affiliate, Ukrainian Publishing, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In a December 1924 letter to the governor of the Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivs'k) region, Orenshtain wrote that in 1921 he had visited Canada and the United States "to expand my publishing activity, because there is a large group of Ukrainians there among whom there has been a great demand for my books."¹⁴

Between 1919 and 1932, Orenshtain published Bohdan Lepkyi's Mazepa trilogy, a complete collection of Shevchenko's works, and Serhii Iefremov's Istoriia ukrains'koho pys'menstva [History of Ukrainian literature].¹⁵ A catalog of Orenshtain's publications from 1919 to 1921 included dramas by Goethe, Arthur Schnitzler, Oscar Wilde, and Vasyl' Pachovs'kyi; several dictionaries and atlases; works of music; about thirty textbooks; several series of postcards; political, philosophical, and pedagogical works; and almost forty works of children's literature.¹⁶

Some catalogs from this period also include Ukrainian-language editions of Little Red Riding Hood. Orenshtain's 1921 catalog, for example, lists Chervona shapochka among 25 children's books with color illustrations.¹⁷ The 1927 catalog of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSH) Bookstore lists two Ukrainian-language editions, one among "illustrated tales from world literature: publications of the 'Ukrains'ka Nakladnia' in Berlin" and the other as one of two "booklets for children three to five years old, with movable figures and illustrations."¹⁸

The 1924 NTSH Bookstore catalog also lists two illustrated Ukrainian-language editions of Little Red Riding Hood. Neither listing includes publication information nor mention of a Russian-language edition, but one volume is described as having "four colored movable figures and five black [and white] illustrations," like Orenshtain's Krasnaia shapochka.¹⁹ Moreover, this catalog includes Russian editions that appear to be translations of Orenshtain's Ukrainian-language children's publications. In such listings, the Ukrainian-language edition is followed by the Russian-language edition. Examples are Wilhelm Hauff's Tales, where Kazky (Kyiv-Kolomyia) is followed by Skazki (Kiev-Kolomea, 1921), or the Ukrainian- and Russian-language editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales (Kyiv-Leipzig, 1919, and Kiev-Leipzig, 1920, respectively). Although the publisher is not identified, these now familiar places of publication (Kyiv-Kolomyia and Kyiv-Leipzig) point to Orenshtain and the possibility that Krasnaia shapochka, too, was published in the late nineteen-teens or early 1920s.²⁰

Orenshtain's exile in Russia during World War I may have brought him into contact with potential buyers of his books, some of whom may have emigrated soon afterward as a result of the revolutionary turmoil. These contacts may have contributed to Orenshtain's decision later to publish some books in Russian as well as Ukrainian. In the late nineteen-teens and especially the early 1920s, there was a heavy influx of Russian refugees into Germany, which was among the countries where Orenshtain was marketing his publications at the time and where he eventually reestablished his publishing firm.²¹

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Orenshtain fled to Warsaw where he is thought to have perished in the Jewish ghetto during the Second World War. Long after the post-war immigrants from Ukraine arrived in America, New York City's Ukrainian bookstores continued to offer books published by Yakiv Orenshtain.²²

Looking again at Orenshtain's Russian edition of Little Red Riding Hood, we find that questions still surround this small, colorful piece. Who was the artist? And who supplied the chromolithography and movable paper technology in what is otherwise a modestly produced book, printed on rough paper and fastened with staples?

In a current bookseller's catalog, almost by chance, we discovered an English-language Little Red Riding Hood published with the same four movable chromolithographs as Orenshtain's Russian version and with some of the same lithographed drawings. The English-language edition has a title page with the imprint "New York: Sully and Kleinteich" (prolific publishers of the nineteen-teens) but no date. Above the title on the cover is what is perhaps a series title, "The Moving Picture Books." These observations are no doubt insufficient evidence to construe that Ethel Dewees was the illustrator of Krasnaia shapochka.²³ The cover illustration in the Sully and Kleinteich edition is a repeat of one of the movable chromolithographs from inside the book (the same illustration as in Orenshtain's Russian edition, shown in Figure 5), instead of the frame-within-a-frame cover illustration used for Krasnaia shapochka. The Krasnaia shapochka cover was probably borrowed from still another edition of Little Red Riding Hood, as the little girl's features and coloring are different from those in the Orenshtain and Sully and Kleinteich texts. Over all, the New York edition and Orenshtain's have all of the same internal illustrations, although in a somewhat different order.

At first we wondered whether Orenshtain obtained the movable color plates for his Ukrainian and Russian editions on his 1921 trip to the United States. This would be more evidence for a 1920s publication date. Another possibility is that both Orenshtain and Sully and Kleinteich obtained their Red Riding Hood illustrations from the same European source. According to Ann Montanaro, whose Pop-Up and Movable Books: A Bibliography is the standard reference for English-language movable children's books, beginning in the late nineteenth century the major publishers of American and British children's illustrated books had their color printing done in Germany.²⁴

Among the prominent figures in this arena, Montanaro points to Ernest Nister as the printer/publisher who distributed his books not only throughout Europe, but in the United States as well.²⁵ Following this lead, we looked for illustrations from some of Nister's books that might bear a resemblance to those in Orenshtain's Krasnaia shapochka. Nister's own Little Red Riding Hood (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1890, with text by Maria A. Hoyer) clearly was illustrated by a different hand. But Nister, like Orenshtain, was also a prolific publisher of postcards, and among those we found several images that appeared to have the same simple outlines and relatively unadorned style of the Orenshtain and Sully and Kleinteich Red Riding Hood illustrations. These postcards, including Christmas postcards, are signed by Ethel Dewees, or with her initials, EHD, and, like most of Sully and Kleinteich's publications, were printed between 1910 and 1920. Ethel Dewees also designed and illustrated folded Christmas cards in the same style.²⁶ (See Figures 8a-b and 9 a-d.)

These observations are no doubt insufficient evidence to construe that Ethel Dewees was the illustrator of Krasnaia shapochka. As Montanaro explains, "identifying the illustrators of Nister titles is often impossible. Nister's printing methods repeatedly lost the artist's name either because of the color process or because of the cropping of the picture from a larger size."²⁷ Also, the popular illustrators and printers of successful children's books of this period were widely imitated.

But the cover of another of Nister's books bears a resemblance to the cover of Krasnaia shapochka in that it presents one illustration superimposed over another in a similar manner: the frame within a frame. That book is Moving Pictures: Action Surprises, Hidden Images by Ernest Nister, originally published by Collins & Nister and reproduced in facsimile in 1985 by Philomel Books (New York). Even the title, Moving Pictures, echoes the series title on the cover of the Sully and Kleinteich edition, "The Moving Picture Books." These similarities led us to suspect that either Nister was the publisher of the chromolithographed mechanical plates in both Orenshtain and Sully and Kleinteich's editions of Little Red Riding Hood or that a talented imitator, probably also in Germany, produced them. When we at last were able to see a copy of the Sully and Kleinteich edition, acquired by the Library of Congress just as the present article went to press, we were gratified to find the words printed in the lower left corner of the cover illustration in a very small font, "Printed in Bavaria."

Following this reasoning, we return to the question of the dates of publication of both the Orenshtain and New York editions. If in fact the mechanical plates came from Germany, then it is unlikely that they were produced any time during World War I. As Montanaro says, "few movable books were produced once the First World War began. The manufacture of movable books was labor intensive. Presumably, after 1914 the labor force in the German printing works was required for less frivolous tasks. [Michael] Dawson surmises that 'the hostilities would have severed access to the lucrative English-speaking markets, making the publication of luxury books of this sort less viable.'"²⁸

As previously noted, it was not until the end of World War I that Orenshtain returned from Russian exile and established his new firm in Kyiv. Orenshtain would have been in a position at that time to obtain mechanical color plates once again in production in Germany. And so we suggest that Krasnaia shapochka was published no earlier than 1919 or 1920.

Of course, it is possible as well that Orenshtain's Krasnaia shapochka was published before the outbreak of World War I and before the Russian invasion of eastern Galicia. In this case, however, one would find less explanation for Orenshtain's publishing in the Russian language. As we have seen, before World War I Orenshtein's publishing business was in Kolomyia, and all of the publications of that period of which we have found any mention were in Ukrainian. By contrast, Kyiv, Leipzig, and Berlin, where Orenshtain operated his publishing concerns after the War and after his return from exile in Russia, all had large Russian communities.

There is one more category of evidence that should be taken into account. Orenshtain printed Krasnaia shapochka in "old" Russian orthography. This spelling and printing standard is often called pre-Revolutionary Russian orthography because it was the Bolshevik regime that in December 1917 mandated the change to a simpler, more uniform spelling and typography.²⁹ Very few examples of the new typography pre-date 1918, but the old Russian letter forms and spellings continued to be used by printers outside of Russia into the 1920s and beyond. A³⁰ nd so, Krasnaia shapochka certainly could have been printed in the 1920s.

Knowing more now about the circumstances surrounding the publication of Krasnaia shapochka, but uncertain about what some of it means, we leave further discoveries and conclusions to others. When in fact did Orenshtain publish the book, and why in fact did he publish it in Russian?

Did Orenshtain publish all the Ukrainian editions of Little Red Riding Hood cited on the pages that we saw in Ukrainian publishers' catalogs?³¹ And did these editions contain the same color plates as the Russian- and English-language editions? Who wrote the texts for these editions of Little Red Riding Hood and were they translations of a particular version of the story?³² We hope that our discussion and these questions help to inspire continued research into Yakiv Orenshtain's remarkable life and publishing legacy.