LEILOT (Nights) by Glass, Ari (Erich Glas) (text and illustrations)

One page of text in Hebrew preceding 28 linocuts presented without captions, depicting the artist's imagined visions of the horrors of the Holocaust including torture, prison camps, fires, and graphic images of death. Some very minor toning. Large 4to. Original printed wrpps., some minor paper loss to front cover, small areas of repair, some browning, binding slightly loose. (Tel Aviv) (Hotza'at Hakibbutz Hameuchad) 1945. Ari Glass (born Erich Glas) was a German and Israeli painter, graphic designer, illustrator, and photographer. His first exposure to the horrors of war was during World War I, when he served as a soldier, pilot, and aerial photographer. After the war, Glass studied at the Bauhaus under Lyonel Feininger and Johannes Itten, and later joined the Das Junge Rheinland group. He worked as an independent graphic designer and a press photographer before leaving Germany in 1934 due to the rise of the Nazis. He moved to Kibbutz Yagur and changed his name to Ari. This series of linocuts was created in 1942, the images allegedly coming to Glass during a high, hallucinatory fever. As they were published while the war was still going on, the reality of what was actually occurring in the prison camps was mostly rumors. Glass sought publication of the images but the Palestinian publishing house initially refused, not wanting to spread fear and panic. He was able to get the portfolio published in a limited edition in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1943, and the Palestinian edition appeared later, in 1945. Extremely rare; as of April 2019, WorldCat does not locate a single holding of this volume.