Between the Covers

A large collection of nearly 300 letters, consisting of about 250 love letters and 50 letters of related personal correspondence, written to the artist Yulla Lipchitz, wife of the renowned sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. Included in the collection are 12 holograph letters by Jacques Lipchitz, eight black and white photographs of Yulla with two of her lovers taken before her marriage to Lipchitz, several telegrams and post cards, a few of Yulla’s draft replies, and several pieces of manuscript and printed ephemera. Nearly all of the letters are in English, including about 20 in German. Overall very good or better.

Yulla, her first husband Frederick Mott, and most of her correspondents were German-Jews who fled Germany in the late 1930s. Nearly all of their letters are written in English, with occasional flourishes in German: “Darling Pussilein, my love!,” “Darlichingen! Ich Küsse dich,” &c. Over 150 letters are from Walter J. Fischel, an important German-Jewish scholar known internationally for his pioneering studies of Oriental Jewry, and two other men (about 25 letters each) with whom Yulla was having illicit affairs during the War years. The letters of all three men are remarkable for their impassioned, often wild declarations of love, and their frequent pleas to arrange meetings and to get married, if Yulla’s husband would grant her a divorce. In the end, after an attempt to reconcile with her husband in 1945-1946, all four men were no match for Jacques Lipchitz, who first met Yulla in 1944, and married her in 1948. A detailed list is available upon request.

Item #384579