HAD
GADYA Table of Contents
The
Russian Jewish painter Eliezer Lissitzky was a devout follower of
the Communist movement, during a period when there was no contradiction
between revolutionary Communist activities and the growth and spread
of Jewish culture and art. In 1919, two years following the beginning
of the revolution, he painted a series of watercolors describing the
story of Had Gadya. Not part of a complete illuminated haggadah,
the sequence is intended to stand alone, carrying a message which
transcends the message of Passover. It is a show of support for the
Bolshevik victory, conceived of as the victory of the weak over the
strong, the good over the bad, as the victory of amended justice.
The series exposes the tension in Lissitzky's own ideological stance:
his acknowledged rootedness in Judaism and his attraction to the new
and better world promised by the Communists.
The
fascinating element in this sequence is the symbolic language which
the artist uses for expressing his ideas. This language is based on
the visual and verbal traditions of East European Jewry among which
he grew up, and this is the group to which he appeals in his work.
Lissitzky
tries to persuade the Jewish public of the justice of the Communist
cause by using a traditional language, Yiddish, characteristic Jewish
symbols and values through the Had Gadya story. He proposes to the
Jews of Russia a religious-political message, in which the Revolution
is the fulfillment of Judgment Day and the redemption of the Jews.
We
will observe and analyze three of the scenes in Lissitzky's series.
In Scene 5 in the Had Gadya story ("Then came the fire
and burnt the stick"), we see other objects apart from
the fire and the stick that are not mentioned in the song and
which are not found in traditional depictions of this scene.
These
are the red fire-breathing rooster that consumes the stick and the
structure that dominates the left side of the picture. The connection
between the red rooster and the fire can be found in a phrase that
was common at the time and in the area that Lissitzky worked: the
Yiddish phrase, a royter henn, which means literally a red
rooster, and refers to arson.
The
identity of the structure in the left of the picture is disclosed
when compared to Issachar Ryback's painting from 1917, The Old Synagogue.*
The decorative windows in the center of the structure,
reminiscent of the accepted representation of the Tablets of the Law,
emphasize the identity of this structure as a synagogue. Using the
rooster and synagogue structure, Lissitzky ties in the burning mentioned
in the Had Gadya with the burning of the synagogues which was
already taking place in Eastern Europe. Had Gadya takes on
allegorical meaning: the immediate suffering of the Jews at the hands
of the gentiles.
Scene
9 ("Then came Death and took the butcher") depicts the shohet
(butcher) and the Angel of Death according to the traditional description,
with a few exceptions. The shohet is lying on the ground (and
not on a bed, as in traditional depictions), and there is a candle
burning next to his head, following the ritual of East European Jewry
at that time.
Lissitzky
chooses to depict the Angel of Death as a king, as death was
commonly conceived in non-Jewish European art. On his head he
wears a crown, made of a dome-shaped skullcap surrounded by
three painted shapes, rounded at the top and resembling the
leaves around a budding flower. This shape recalls Russian folklore
depictions of the Czar's crown. With this simple crown shape,
Lissitzky creates an identity between the Angel of Death and
monarchism, the Russian monarchy in particular.
The political
implications are made clear in the last painting of the series.
In Scene 10 ("And the Holy One, Blessed be He, came and
smote the Angel of Death"), we see the Angel of Death with
a crown on his head lying dead at the bottom of the painting.
The symbolism is clear: the Czarist regime is dead.
To emphasize
the fact of death, Lissitzky writes in the palm of the angel's
hand the letters
(peh) and
(nun) for
(poh nitman) meaning "here lies", which appear
on most Jewish gravestones, and beneath that, "the Angel
of Death." The Angel of Death was smitten by God, represented
here by the eye, as well as another symbol of God the
hand.
On one side
of the painting we see an old bearded man turning his head and
hand to the sky, in an expression of amazement. On the opposite
side, we see a kid waving its front legs in the air. The hand
with the knife crosses between these two images, recalling traditional
artistic compositions of the "Binding of Isaac." Here, however,
there is a twist: instead of Isaac being under the knife, in
Lissitzky's painting it is the Angel of Death who is being killed
by the hand of God. One should not be mistaken in thinking that
there is an identification between Isaac and the Angel of Death;
on the contrary: Isaac, and the kid, are saved from the hand
of Death because Death itself is killed. Lissitzky is, in essence,
proposing the final elimination of Death, the arrival of the
Day of Judgment on which the taking of innocent lives as sacrificial
victims will cease.
Additional
elements suggest the arrival of that day. The rainbow that had
appeared in Scene 2 returns only now, in Scene 10, after the
gruesome chain of events that began with the cat killing the
kid. The wrong has been righted: the rainbow, symbolic of God's
covenant, returns to the sky. To the left of the rainbow, a
shofar reinforces the messianic message that the Day
of Judgment and Redemption has arrived.
The hand
which appears between the old man and the kid recalls the shape
of the hand on one of the first series of stamps printed in
Russia after the 1918 Revolution. It is the hand of the Soviet
people, of the Revolution, uprooting slavery and oppression.
Lissitzky is suggesting that the hand of the Communist Revolution
is propelled by the arm of divine justice and redemption.
One final interesting
point relates to the artist's signature. Lissitzky paints his name
in black, as he paints the word gadya (kid), on the opening
page. At the end of the series, he also signs his name, but this
time only with his initials,(aleph-ayin).
The shape of the letters reminds us of the Hebrew word for ram,(ayil).
The initials are found directly beneath the figure of the kid that
symbolizes the Jewish people in this series, and in Scene 10 it
also symbolizes the ram in the Binding of Isaac story. By writing
his name underneath the kid, Lissitzky identifies himself as a potential
sacrificial victim, whose life is saved thanks to Godly intervention
identified as the arm of the Communist Revolution.
Summary
Recognizing
the young Russian Jew raised traditionally
and living in a revolutionary age
as his target audience, Lissitzky brilliantly chooses Had
Gadya as the medium of his message. Through the story and
characters of the Had Gadya, he offers the choice that
he himself made: to leave the old ways paved with victimization
in favor of the new redemptive path of the Revolution and Communism,
a gift offered from heaven itself.
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*
The likeness between them is great; the wide-open
arches on ground level, pairs of elongated windows
on the second level, and a round dome-like shape on
the top underneath the steeple-like roof. The resemblance
is not accidental. Ryback painted his painting a short
time after he return from a journey with Lissitzky
in which they documented synagogues, and this is one
of the synagogues they visited.
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"Lissitzky's
Had Gadia" by Haia Friedberg, in Journal of Jewish
Art, Vol. 12-13 (1986-87), published by the Center
for Jewish Art of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. |
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Haia
Friedberg is an art historian specializing in Modern
Art. She teaches at the Art History Department of
the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and heads the
Modern Art Section of the Center for Jewish Art
in Jerusalem.
The Lissitzky images are own by the Tel Aviv Museum
of Modern Art, and are reproduced here with permission
of the museum. The images are not for distribution
and may not be downloaded or copied.
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GADYA Table of Contents
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