On the Eve of the Sabbath

The prints of Russian artist Anatoli Kaplan bring to life the lost world of the Jewish shtetl (small village) in the Russian Empire before the Holocaust. Kaplan focused on the subject in his art despite religious repression in the Soviet Union, and following World War II, this became an even more central subject for the artist, as Jewish life and culture in Russia had been destroyed by the end of war. His celebrated series of lithographs Tevia the Milkman illustrates stories of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916), whose 1894 book became well known through many theater productions in Europe and New York before becoming the basis for the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof in 1964.