[Item #15042] Tears. ITALIAN-AMERICANS, RADICAL, PROLETARIAN LITERATURE.

Tears

Chicago: Jay Bass, [1939?]. First Edition Thus. Octavo (22cm). Stiff decorative card wrappers; silver foil dustjacket; 8pp. Presentation copy, with mounted photographic portrait of Balabanoff (5" x 3") inside front wrapper, inscribed in ink: "For my dear friends F&T Lewis, with many, many heartiest wishes!," dated 1939. Jacket worn and partially detached; text block loose in wrappers; complete, just Good.

The text consists of Balabanoff's anti-Fascist poem "Human Tears," printed in English, French, Russian (cyrillic), Italian and German versions. A much-expanded collection of Balabanoff's poems, with the same title, was published in New York in 1943; the current volume, privately printed and extremely fragile, is seldom encountered.

Angelica Balabanoff (1878-1965), an Italian Jew, was among the founders of the Italian Communist Party in 1900; she joined the Russian Bolsheviks in 1917 and served as secretary of the Comintern from 1919-20, during which time she became closely affiliated with Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and many others. She broke with the Bolsheviks and left Russia in 1922, after which she once again became active in the Italian Socialist party. During Mussolini's regime she went into exile, first in Switzerland, then Paris and, finally, New York City, during which time she published a number of multilingual editions of her poetry.

Price: $175.00

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