Author Archives: Andrea Immel

Some New Thoughts on the Jacob’s Ladder, that Mysterious Toy

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The Jacob’s Ladder is an old-timey pastime that has made a surprising comeback recently. Twenty years ago wooden versions were available only from retailers making a stand against modern soulless plastic toys.  Jacob’s Ladders now can be obtained in different designs and materials quite inexpensively because they have been redefined as a “sensory” or  “fidget” toy that can help relax and focus autistic children. It is also  recommended as a good distraction for small, restless travelers or pupils having trouble sitting still. The kinetic illusion has been demystified by all the bloggers who have posted step-by-step illustrated instructions for crafting a Jacob’s ladder at home.

Cotsen has three or four old Jacob’s Ladder toys and I decided to try and confirm the date of manufacture for the earliest one, which is supposed to be late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.  Here is Cotsen 28398 viewed from the side:

Digging up material about the toy’s origins and history is a lot hard than finding instructions for making one!  Almost every scrap of information I  found was suspect, starting with the claims that the toy dates back to the Pharoahs.  The name, it is confidently asserted, was inspired by the account of Jacob’s dream in Genesis, but the earliest use in the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in 1820 and makes no reference to the Bible.  From the colonial period, the Jacob’s Ladder was supposed to have been a favorite Sabbath toy, so the wealth of  nineteenth-century American texts on-line would surely yield up a reference,  advertisement, or picture or two.   But searching on “Jacob’s Ladder toy” and all the alternative names–Aaron’s Bells, Chinese Blocks, Click-klack toy, Magic Tablets, Tumbling Blocks–failed to turn up anything useful. The pile of authoritative books on the history of toys in my study were no more helpful.

The most unlikely finds–two pieces by Charles Dickens, a short story “A Christmas Tree” from Household Words (1850) and an essay, “Toys, Past and Present” from All the Year Round, October 1 1876– turned out to contain pure gold.  The Jacob’s Ladder hanging on the tree in the short story describes it as “made of little squares of red wood, that went flapping and clattering over one another, each developing a different picture, and the whole enlivened by small bells, was a mighty marvel and a great delight.”  The passage in “Toys, Past and Present”  explains in greater detail how the marvelous effect was created and why gave so much pleasure: “It consisted of six oblong pieces of wood, adorned with pictures on both sides, and so connected with tapes that when the top piece, which was held in the hand, was turned down, all the others would turn down likewise by an apparently spontaneous movement, causing a new series of pictures to be presented to the eye, which was highly gratified by the change, as were also the ears by the clattering of the wooden tablets and the tinkling of some little bells which they were decorated.”

Dickens would have had no trouble recognizing this as a Jacob’s Ladder. There were differences, of course, between the ones with which he was familiar and the one in Cotsen. The six pieces of wood were covered with colored paper instead of painted and there was no sign that it had ever had bells.  It does click when the blocks tumble down.  The most important similarity is the presence of pictures on both sides of the pieces of wood. Dickens doesn’t say anything about the subjects or style of the pictures.  The prints on the Cotsen Jacob’s ladder were likely cut out of lottery sheets, a kind of ephemeral engraving, and glued to the paper covering of the boards.   Not much is known about lottery sheets beyond that they were being produced for children to “play with” as early as the late seventeenth century.  These sheets certainly would have lent themselves to craft projects of all kinds, but the presence of cut-outs from commercially available prints on a toy like this probably doesn’t prove it was homemade.  Cutting up lottery prints may have been the a cost-effectivel method of applying illustrations to a toy before technology existed to print directly on the wood.

There is another possible  source for the prints pasted on the boards…  There is a certain resemblance between the engravings in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book (G. Bickham, jr, 1744) and Nancy Cock’s Song-Book (T. Read, 1744) and perhaps a copy of such a small book was sacrificed to make the object…Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library has a German Jacob’s Ladder with two little rings piercing the long edges.  Bell fasteners, perhaps?  It has been dated to the same period as the English example in Cotsen.Another thing Dickens’ two descriptions establish is how much the appearance of a modern Jacob’s Ladder has changed in the twentieth century. The essential wooden (or plastic) pieces and the tapes are the same, but the use of bright contrasting primary colors is one of the hallmarks of the modernist toy aesthetic the Bauhaus developed. It is possible to find modern Jacob’s Ladders with patterns or pictures painted on the surfaces of the pieces, but pieces of unfinished wood or in solid colors with contrasting colored tapes are much more common. Bells must have been eliminated along the way as a swallowing hazard, as well as too expensive, too troublesome to attach securely. In 2019, Mr. John Armstrong, a toymaker in Omaha, Nebraska, wrote me a wonderful note about the history of this marvelous toy:

I just read and enjoyed your article on Jacob’s ladders from earlier this year.  I can push the origins back a few more hundred years for you (not to ancient Egypt).  Click on the link below and you will see a painting by Bernardino Luini from the early 1500s.  The puzzle the child is holding should look familiar.  Although only two boards long, the basic concept is there, all the way down to inserting a bit of string behind the two ribbons so it will appear and disappear. On Wikipedia it is said that Luini worked with and was influenced by Leonardo.  Could that have been the origin of such a clever toy?

We will probably never know, but what an intriguing idea!

 

“Death from Starvation Threatens every working Man”: A 1932 Soviet Book about Famine in the Ukraine

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Today is the third anniversary of the Ukraine War.  To mark the occasion, here is Polina Popova’s sobering 2022 post about  how the Stalin’s government tried to justify in a children’s book the terrible food shortages in the Ukraine, known as Holodomor.

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In the year 1929, massive collectivization campaigns began all over the USSR. It was also the second year of the first Five Year Plan, when forced grain procurements were introduced. Despite the brutal enforcement of the regime, many peasants still resisted grain requisitions and refused to join collective farms. Acts of active and passive resistance from the peasants led to more repression from the government; the collectivization campaign went slowly and inefficiently. Despite the “voluntarily character” of the collective-farm movement affirmed by Stalin in his “Dizzy with Success” article on March 2, 1930, during the spring of that year, around 180,000 militant young activists were sent to the villages to enforce the campaign was followed through.[1]

Since Ukraine was the USSR’s primary grain supplying region, it suffered the most from mass collectivization. Serious food shortages in this region started as early as 1929.[2] By March of 1930 more than 60% of the Ukrainian peasants were collectivized.[3] 1931 became a turning point for many Ukrainians, because crop requisitions remained constant while the harvest was 20 per cent lower than in 1930.[4] Hunger had always been present in the Soviet countryside and small cities since the beginning of the 1920s, but 1932 would mark the beginning of the first man-made famine in Ukraine called, later, the Holodomor.[5] Famine brought not only disease, death, and despair to Ukrainian peasants, but also new abuses of power: people were punished for not meeting grain quotas and were arrested. Worse, on the basis of a law instituted on August 7, 1932, criminalizing “theft of socialist property,” many were sent to labor camps for stealing even a small amount of grain. [6] Yet, the government (or Stalin himself?) refused to make any concessions to grain quotas that would have prevented mass starvation. Thus, at the beginning of 1933, famine spread all over Ukraine, and death on a mass scale occurred in every small city or village in the region.[7] Famine also spread to other regions such as Kazakhstan, the Don and Kuban, the North Caucuses, and the Volga region.[8] The peak of the famine lasted through the whole of 1933 through the winter of 1934.[9] During 1933 at least 3.5 million people died of famine in Ukraine alone.[10]

With this sobering context in mind, we can examine one of the treasures of the Cotsen collection – Za Vladu, Rabotu, Khlib (Kyiv: Dvoy Molodai Bol’shevik, 1932), which can be translated “For power, for work, for bread”. The book is short but attractive and full of illustrations; with concise, clearly written paragraphs, it was probably intended for young schoolchildren (illustrated by E. Rachova, and written by I. Broĭde). Two pages slightly resemble modern-day graphic novels, with small illustrations one after another, creating a plot that follows the short story. Laconic, straightforward, and avant-garde in illustration style, the book was, perhaps surprisingly, expensively produced.

Front wrapper, Za Vladu Robotu Khlīb. [Kiev: Dvoy Molodai Bol’shevik, 1932].(Cotsen 38417)

Was it accidental that a children’s book about bread – and a rather expensive edition of such – was published in Ukrainian and not in Russia, the language that most Soviet children’s books were published in? Not at all. Obviously, its target audience was the children of Ukraine in 1932 and after. To put it bluntly, this beautiful book is a perfect example of Stalinist propaganda, which had two goals (and as is often the case for totalitarian regimes – the goals contradict each other). [11] On the one hand, the book normalized hunger for Ukrainian children. It argues that everyone, even people in capitalist states such as Germany, face extreme hunger. Though true to a certain extent, this claim is highly exaggerated in the book. On the other hand, the book demonstrates that the communist Soviet Union does not face this problem (a complete and utter hypocritical lie).

Illustrations on page 1 of the book are very telling: we see a family of four with no food at the table and hungry small children clutching their mom, seeking support. The father of the family is helpless in the ugly face of starvation. But the following image shows two “rich people” sitting at a restaurant ordering food (presumably, judging by the sizes of the two capitalists’ bodies, they are ordering in abundance). The text says that workers in Germany and other capitalist countries do not have work and bread, while capitalists use working peoples’ money “to build tanks and cannons.” Here, the book has another propogandist message, typical for 1930s Soviet children’s books – that enemy capitalist countries are inherently militaristic and war hungry; unlike the peaceful Soviet Union. On that same page, there is a vivid description of how workers are forced to stand in long lines to get “a [single] piece of bread” and even end up sleeping “in gardens and under fences.” Reading this, another graphic image comes to mind – an image common in the memoirs of people living in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipro, and Uman’ during the 1932-1933 famine. Ukrainians in big cities of the time really witnessed starving people (most of them – fleeing from the countryside) standing in long lines at bread stores, begging for food in the streets, or lying in the streets (quite literally “under fences”), often with bloated stomachs, many of them dead.[12]

Page [1] vignettes, (Cotsen 38417)

The book describes how capitalists deliberately dump flour and grain in the sea to drive up food prices. Ironically, one can think of parallels with Bolshevik policies and inefficiencies. For example, grain was often lost due to poor storage capacities which lead peasants to starve. At the end of the first page, in bold, we see the statement “ГОЛОДНА СМЕРТЬ ЗАГРОЖУЄ КОЖНIЙ РОБIТНИЧIЙ (Sic!) РОДИНI” (“Death from starvation threatens every working [man] of [his] homeland”). How ironic that these words were applied to foreigners and not Ukrainians or other Soviet citizens. Although the famine was most severe in Ukraine, peasants were starving all around the USSR. One wonders how many Ukrainians understood this false rhetoric of the time presented by this book and by the Soviet authorities.

Page [1] bottom, (Cotsen 38417)

Other descriptions of the supposed brutalities of the Germany state against its starving and jobless workers, on page 3, depict policemen on the streets of Berlin looking for signs of discontent and riots. In response, children had to save the day, or better to say – “save the night,” as they secretly glued leaflets calling for a strike.

Page [3] vignette, (Cotsen 38417)

The book has an open ending in which workers are still striking in the factories. The goal of this kind of story was not to have a happy ending, but rather to present an impressionistic bricolage of hunger, children begging for food, helpless parents who are unable to provide it to the little ones, long lines for bread, homelessness, and the politicization of children. Soviet Ukrainian children were already too familiar with these realities, yet were supposedly spared from them by the Communist government.

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[1] Joseph Stalin, “Dizzy with Success” (Pravda, No. 60, March 2, 1930), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/03/02.htm (accessed March 24, 2022).

[2]Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933. Report to Congress. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1988), 191.

[3]Ivnitskiĭ, Sud’ba raskulachennikh v SSSR (Moskva: Sobranie, 2004), 19.

[4]Bohdan Krawchenko, “The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933” from Famine in Ukraine, 1932-1933, ed. by Bohdan Krawchenko and Roman Serbyn (Alberta: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), 20.

[5]Nikolai Ivnitskii, Golod 1932-1933 godov v SSSR: Ukraina, Kazakhstan, SeverniyKavkaz, Povolzh’e, Tsentral’no-Chernozemnaia oblast’ (Moskva: Sobranie, 2009), 192.

[6]Krawchenko, “The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933,” 21. Sergei Maksudov, “Victory Over the Peasantry,” in Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context, ed. Halyna Hryn (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008), 54.

[7] Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 243.

[8]Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933, 135.

[9]Krawchenko, “The Man-Made Famine of 1932-1933,” 21.

[10]Ivnitskiĭ, Golod 1932-1933 Godov v SSSR, 209.

[11] Something that was noticed by Umberto Eco in his famous list of fourteen features of “Eternal” Fascist regimes was the controversial, often illogical dichotomies that the oppressive totalitarian regimes operate within. One of the examples is an imaginary enemy who is strong and weak at the same time. Umberto Eco. “Ur Fascism,” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/ (accessed April 13th, 2022).

[12] Robert Kusznierz, “The Impact of the Great Famine on Ukrainian Cities: Evidence from the Polish Archives,” in After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine in Ukraine, ed. Andrea Graziosi (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013), 16.