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.


Click to view enlarged

 

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.


Click to view enlarged

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.

 

footnotes

* 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. [back]

sources
"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.
author

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.


 

   
  SEARCH THE SITE:


Subscribe to the JHOM mailing list for updates.
Email: