SIGNED LIMITED EDITION OF VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY’S BELLES LETTRES, ONE OF 200 COPIES PUBLISHED TO COMMEMORATE HIS 50TH BIRTHDAY, EACH VOLUME SIGNED

JABOTINSKY, Vladimir (Altalena). ???????? [Short Tales], ????? [Verses] and Causeries [Essays]. Paris: Voltaire, (1930). Three volumes. Slim octavo, original half brown morocco gilt, raised bands, marbled boards and endpapers, top edges gilt, uncut. Housed in a custom marbled slipcase. $6500.

Signed limited edition, number 117 of 200 copies, of this collection of the Zionist leader’s stories, poems and essays, published by his friends to commemorate Jabotinsky’s 50th birthday, each volume signed by Jabotinsky. Text in Russian.

“After Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky is perhaps the most renowned figure in Zionist history… Like Herzl, Jabotinsky was a journalist and a literary writer before he became a Zionist at the start of the new century,” his activism motivated by the brutality of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 (Nation). Then Russia’s “foremost Zionist lecturer and journalist… Jabotinsky played a leading role in the evolution of Zionist ideology in Russia… [crusading] against anti-Semitism, Jewish assimilation and the quasi-nationalism of the Bund.” Jabotinsky frequently wrote under the pen name ‘Altalena.’ “In 1910 [Jabotinsky] translated The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe into Hebrew… His translation of ten cantos of Dante’s Inferno is a masterpiece… but his main contributions to belles lettres were in Russian… In 1930, on his 50th birthday, his friends published a limited edition of three volumes of his poems, short stories, and essays in Russian” (Encyclopaedia Judaica). Frontispiece portraits in each volume. Text in Russian.

Scattered light foxing to interiors, with heavier foxing on preliminary and concluding leaves. Light foxing to edges of text blocks, bindings about-fine.