THE BOY AND THE TREE

Children's verse first written in Yiddish, then published in the Soviet Union in a Russian adaptation, and now adapted in ""American"" from both earlier versions: as it stands here it's hard to know whom to credit for the occasional cute conceit or whom to blame for the consistently lame form. An example of both is ""Writing"": the shoemaker's straight lines are ""written"" with nails in hide, a bricklayer builds up straight lines of brick--but where is the ""writing"" (in any sense) in ""The dressmaker sews/ On her sewing machine./ A polka dot dress/ Can now be seen""? But it hardly matters, because most of the ideas seem every bit as flat as the lines. And Pivovarov's fanciful but unimaginative pictures from the Russian edition represent another kind of inept adaptation, with motifs and mannerisms borrowed from various early Soviet modernists tossed into a bland, childlike jumble.