After the overthrow of the tsars in 1917, Eastern Europe witnessed a brief efflorescence of children’s literature in Yiddish, some of it composed by first-rate poets and illustrated by first-rate artists. Even after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they didn’t interfere with and sometimes even encouraged this new genre. But, by the 1930s, all that changed. Rokhl Kafrissen writes:

The high point of this revolution within a revolution was the appearance of a Yiddish-Aramaic setting of the Passover song Ḥad Gadya (“Only a Kid”) with illustrations by the great [artist] El Lissitzky. In this [version], Lissitzky marries cubo-futuristic graphics with traditional Jewish imagery, creating an “artist’s revolutionary manifesto that epitomized his vision of how the Jewish past and future could be linked,” as [the scholar and bibliographer] Lyudmila Sholokhova said. . . . The final image of God slaying the Angel of Death leaves nothing to the imagination: out of the eye of God emerges a hand wielding a sword; the eye is outlined in red, while the angel wears an imperial crown.

Lissitzky’s Ḥad Gadya was published in 1919 in Kiev. . . . As Sholokhova points out, children’s literature during this early period was not yet overdetermined by political dictates, as it would come to be in the 1930s. Traditional Jewish imagery was deployed in a positive light. Progress—scientific, technological, and political—was glorified, but not yet tied to the visual vocabulary of later Soviet propaganda (hammers and sickles, pioneers, Lenin, and so on).

Kafrissen contrasts this style to that in some of the work produced by Shloyme Davidman for American Yiddish Communist schools in the 1930s:

Davidman’s most popular book was a 1937 collection of stories . . . called Bongelo no. 25 (“Bungalow Number 25”). Young notes that—exemplifying the more didactic, ideological tone of Yiddish literature in the 1930s—one of the typical Bongelo stories is about a boy named Mori, who mocks his fellow students at the Talmud Torah he attends. Then the narrator of the story interjects, just in case we didn’t get the message: “There are Jews who believe that in the sky there sits a God who controls the world. But we already know there is no God in heaven. We must overthrow the bad people, the capitalists, who now rule us, as they did in the Soviet Union.” . . .

Davidman’s decades of [earlier] work as a pedagogue and cultural activist, [however, are], happily, far more interesting than the unbearable cringe of Bongelo no. 25.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.