The First World War ended in 1918, but the Russian Civil War continued, and famine spread. The Chagalls found it necessary to move to a smaller, less expensive, town near Moscow, although Chagall now had to commute to Moscow daily, using crowded trains. In 1921, he worked as an art teacher along with his friend sculptor Isaac Itkind in a Jewish boys' shelter in suburban Malakhovka, which housed young refugees orphaned by Ukrainian pogroms. While there, he created a series of illustrations for the Yiddish poetry cycle "Grief" written by David Hofstein, who was another teacher at the Malakhovka shelter.