When Peter, Paul and Mary used to sing ‘I Know an Old Lady,’ about the old lady who swallowed a cat, then a dog, then a goat, then a cow, and finally a horse, they would leave the children in the audience giggling over the tongue-twister. And when Jewish children sing the traditional folk song ‘Had Gadya’ (The Only Kid) at the Passover seder, the capricious nature of that ditty keeps the young ones entertained during the long Passover meal. Just as with ‘I Know An Old Lady,’ ‘Had Gadya’ is an add-on song with a cast of characters, each one following the last: a cat devours the kid, a dog gobbles up the cat, a stick beats the dog and so on until God slays the angel of death. While ‘Had Gadya’ was first introduced in the Passover service in the 15th century, it was not part of the service proper, but appeared at the end of the Haggadah, the text used during the seder. One of the most stunning versions of ‘Had Gadya’ was the brightly illustrated edition by the Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, a typographer, book designer, architect and writer in the early 20th century. Lissitzky’s 1919 version was published by the Yiddish secular organization Kultur Lige in Kiev during a brief period in Russia (1917-1919) when the harsh laws against the Jews were relaxed (including the prohibition on printing of Hebrew or Yiddish words), sparking a whirlwind of activity by the Jewish presses. Seventy-five copies of Lissitzky’s beautifully rendered book were published, each bound by a three-paneled wraparound dust jacket. The Getty Research Institute, which owns an original copy, recently published a facsimile of Lissitzky’s book, with an introduction by Palisadian Nancy Perloff, who is collections curator of modern and new media. Perloff will be telling the tale of the ‘Had Gadya’ and promises to teach the song to Palisadians young and old at 3 p.m. on Saturday, March 20 at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore. Lissitzky took advantage of the linked structure of the story by designing each page of the book around a character. He arranged the words of the story to form a frame around the illustration, and connected the words to the story by color-coding the principal character with the word for that character in the Yiddish text. So, in Verse 1, for example, the ‘kid’ is yellow, as is the Yiddish word for ‘kid.’ ‘Lissitzky was interested in pictorial design,’ Perloff says. ‘He used symbols to convey meaning, so young people would be able to follow the story.’ While the artist’s illustrations have a folk-art, bold style reminiscent of Marc Chagall’s work, to convey the Jewish liberation based on the Exodus story, Lissitzky also intended his illustrations as an allegorical expression of freedom for the Russian people after the 1917 revolution. Perloff notes, for example, that the angel of death who kills the slaughterer in Verse 9, and who in turn is killed by the hand of God in the final verse, wears a crown, which resembles the czarist crowns. The implication is that the force of the revolution overthrew the czars. In 1999, Perloff curated an exhibition of El Lissitzky at the Getty entitled ‘Monuments of the Future,’ which displayed his Yiddish book designs including ‘Had Gadya.’ From that show, the Getty had the opportunity to buy the book, which it did, including the dust jacket, one of just three extant in the world. The facsimile, published by the Getty Research Institute, is a collaboration between Perloff, who provided background on the artist, and Arnold Band, a professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature, whose knowledge of Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic was invaluable in providing the English translation of the ‘Had Gadya’ as well as the explanation of the iconography. Perloff herself is fluent in both French and German, which she found most useful in studying Lissitsky’s letters, most of which were written in his wife’s native language, German. ”Raised in an academic family’her parents, Palisadians Marjorie and Joe Perloff, are both professors’Nancy’s education combines language, art history and music. At the Getty Research Institute, she is one of six curators and focuses on acquisitions in European and Russian modernism and in postwar music and the visual arts. While Perloff enjoys the strong intellectual community at the Getty, on top of the hill in Brentwood, she expresses just a slight wistfulness about being so removed from the ‘real world.’ ‘I used to work at 401 Wilshire in Santa Monica,’ she says. ‘You could meet friends for lunch or do an errand or two. Here it’s hard to get away, and it makes it a bit more difficult especially if you have children.’ Perloff and her husband Rob Lempert, a senior research associate at Rand, have an 11-year-old son Ben, who is in sixth grade at Crossroads. So far, Ben is more interested in science than art, Nancy admits. ‘But, maybe it’s because I talk about art so much at home.’
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
