 The poems in which he acclaimed the communist regime established him as one of the Kiev triumvirate of Yiddish poets, along with Leib Kvitko and Peretz Markish.Hofstein's elegies for Jewish communities devastated by the White movement pogroms appeared in 1922, with illustrations by Marc Chagall.Both had worked together as teachers at shelter for Jewish boys in suburban Malakhovka, which housed and employed boys orphaned by Ukrainian pogroms.