Had gadya: The Only Kid. Facsimile of El Lissitzky's Edition of 1919

by Arnold J. Band, Editor; with an Introduction by Nancy Perloff
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, 2004
42 pp., illus., 33 col. Paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-89236-744-X.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

El Lissitzky, best known as an avant-garde artist, created an enchanted illustrated version of the Jewish Passover song "Had Gadya" early in his career, while immersed in the Jewish cultural renaissance that flourished in Russia from roughly 1912 to the early 1920s. The Getty Research Institute has now published a facsimile of this beautiful book.

Had Gadya, or "the only kid," was originally a children's song. Introducing a new character in each verse that destroys the character from the previous verse beginning with the kid——a young goat in this case, though one is never sure of course——until, at the end, God slays the Angel of Death to end the cycle of violence. It was introduced in the Passover festival in the fifteenth century, probably because the story could easily be read as a parable for the hardships of the Jewish folk in its consecutive exiles in Babylon and Egypt.

El Lissitzky, who had been researching Jewish folk art in Belorussia and Ukraine, and took an active interest in the affirmation of a Jewish identity, illustrated the song and had 75 copies printed, three of which are still intact with the original dust wrapper.

The illustrations clearly show how Lissitzky made the transition from a Chagall-like two-dimensional and very imaginative figurative style to the geometrical abstraction of his later works. There are influences from futurism and Malevitch's suprematism in these colourful and bold lithographs but the most striking feature is the way Lissitzky uses type——the text is actually in a mixture of Aramaic and Yiddish but written in Hebrew characters——as a constructive and illustrative element.

In the short introduction, Nancy Perloff situates the book in Lissitzky's oeuvre and in the Russian context of the early twentieth century and discusses the iconography. For those who want to get the full idea, the music of the song is included as well.