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LOT 171:
Michail (Michails) Jo (MIKHAIL YO) (Meier Ioffe) (Latvian - Russian - Belarusian, 1895-1960)
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Start price:
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1,200
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Day of Atonement in the Jewish village, Watercolor on paper (attached to cardboard), 49 x 35 cm, Signed
The pseudonym of Meyer Yafe, a Jewish painter and caricaturist, born 1893 in Vitebsk, Byelorussia.
Worked for the newspaper "Segodnya" (Russian: Сегодня, Hebrew: "Today") from the early 1930s until the closure of the newspaper at the time of the Soviet invasion in 1940.
He graduated from high school and a school for painting in Riga. He was later a watchmaker, a house painter, and an assistant to Cantor Rozovski who introduced him to the Yiddish theater.
During WWI, he served in the Russian army, was wounded on the front, and later returned to Riga, where he became a painter and a decorator at the local Yiddish theater.
He also exhibited his paintings at shows in Latvia and other countries. He lived in Lodz (1938-1939), and when the Germans attacked Poland, he escaped from there into Russia where he was arrested and was for many years confined in Soviet prisons and labor camps.
He was freed in 1956 and returned to settle in Riga. He began writing in his youth in Russian, publishing articles on painting and theater in Pribaltiiskii krai (Baltic rim) in Riga and later in Pravda (Truth) in Moscow.
In 1918 he switched to Yiddish and contributed to: Dos folk(The people), Letste nayes (Latest news), Idishe bilder (Jewish images), and Frimorgn(Morning) in Riga; Der ashmodai (The Ashmodai) in Berlin; Vilner tog (Vilna day) in Vilna; Forverts (Forward) in New York; Nayer folksblat (New people’s newspaper) in Lodz; and Literarishe bleter (Literary leaves) and Dos vort (The word) in Warsaw; among others. In book form: Di ribele, kinderlid (The rape [vegetable], a children’s song), translated from Russian, with his own illustrations (Riga, 1921), 16 pp.; the monograph Yitskhok levitan(Isaac Levitan) (Riga, 1927), 48 pp.; Teater-pesimizmen (Theater pessimisms), a pamphlet on the Yiddish theater (Riga, 1938), 47 pp. Together with M. Kitay, he edited the satirical collections: Purim (Purim), “Haman’s bastard”; and Peysekh (Passover), “the eleventh plague” (both: Riga, 1922).
He died in Riga, 1960.
