On the Riga seaside the air is fresh, or the secret of Ruff!

(c) Kid-book-museum

In further search for interesting and rare children’s books of the Soviet era, we set off from Tatarstan to the Riga seaside. There are very few children’s books published in Latvia from the 1950s and 1960s on the used book market. And there were very few of them published, mainly in Latgosizdat. Unless someone remembers the collection of “Latvian folk tales” in a dust jacket, repeatedly reprinted and distributed throughout the Union in a noticeable general circulation. Maybe that’s why unsatisfied reader demand, as best they could, tried to fill non-core publishers, for example … the Riga factory of children’s toys, which in 1958 released an unknown edition of a simply wonderful book-toy “The Adventures of a Cat”.

The format is slightly reduced. Cardboard cover and fabric spine. 16 pages. The publication is not in the funds of the RSL, RNL, just as it is not mentioned in the reference books of I.I. Startsev.

On the artistically designed flyleaf we read that the author of the text is L. Prozorovsky, and the artist is a certain G. Ersh. Is this the first time you see such an unusual surname? Me too.

From the third page, the main character suddenly appears on the stage – the cat Vaska. Well thought out and executed! Well done this same Ruff!

The idea, when paper figures of characters that go beyond the margins of the book block, are laid out in a toy book is not new. But in this book, the head, paws and tail of the cat are hinged and can move. Technologically, it is much more difficult. An ordinary book publisher would not have taken on such technology. A toy factory – please!

Here I seem to have lost my hand. The picture is blurry. Reproducing text:

Heard somewhere our Vaska,
What a beautiful seaside beach.
There’s a bay of that color
Just a blue pencil.

The cat complained there
Ah, a shame! Oh trouble!
It turned out that in the bay
Very wet water.

In other words, home, sweet home! This is the place for the right cat.
PS By the way, exactly the same meaning of the story “The Wind in the Willows”. There, neglecting the benefits of home comfort, the fidget and inventor Tod is a constant loser and troublemaker, and Maul and Rat Badger, who value peace by the fire and supplies behind the wall, always win. So, from a young age, parents through fairy tales inspired their children that running away from home to different Africa is fraught with major troubles. Someday I will write more about this.

And now we return to the authors of the book – L. Prozorovsky and the mysterious Ruff.
If with the first everything is more or less clear – a policeman, front-line photojournalist, writer, author of lyrics for the film “Arrows of Robin Hood” (on the Internet you can easily find front-line photographs, the author of which was Lev Vladimirovich Prozorovsky), then the artist is simply a disaster. For almost a month I could not find clues to the mysterious Ruff, until on one of the sites dedicated to the famous residents of Riga I came across information about the famous Latvian cartoonist Harry Solomonovich Yershe. Ersh-Iorsh. And everything fell into place!
Only now I don’t know in which volume of the encyclopedia

sergej_manit will include information about the artist – on “E” or on “I”).