Lissitzky, El, illus.

Had Gadya [title in Hebrew].  Kiev: (Kultur Lige), 1919



12 leaves (11  1/4  x 10 in.; 286 x 254 mm) comprising 11 fine full-page lithographs in color (including title) by Lissitzky with Hebrew lettering and calligraphic dedication leaf, bound at right margin with dark brown paper tape (as issued); some soiling and restoration to left margin of title leaf, some finger soiling to left margins of remaining leaves, paper tape chipped.  Original three-paneled dust wrapper, lithographed on recto and verso (as described below); separated into three panels, edges chipped and with some very skillful restoration work, chipping not affecting images or text. 



 

Arnold J. Band, ed. Had Gadya. The Only Kid.  Facsimile of El Lissitzky's Edition of 1919.  Introduction by Nancy Perloff.  Getty Research Institute, 2004

One of only 75 copies of El Lissitzky's early masterpiece, his illustrated book of the Passover song "Had Gadya", and one of only 3 known copies with the essential dust wrappers.

El Lissitzky's Had Gadaya represents "the culmination of his artistic and personal engagement with Judaica" (Perloff).  For the four years prior to the publication of this book, Lissitzky (1890–1941) travelled in the Ukraine and collected material for the St. Petersburg-based Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Society. During this period, he designed and illustrated several books in Yiddish.  In the summer of 1919, he joined the Popular Art Institute in Vitebsk, where he came under the influence of the supremicist master Kazmir Malevich.  As a result, the Had Gadya illustrations ars the product of a cross-fertilization of rich traditions of regional Jewish folk art and the best elements of the potent Russian avant garde.  It is one of the last works Lissitzky signed with his Hebrew given name, Eliezer.  The book was published by Kultur Lige, a secular Yiddish organization founded by Lissitzky and other Jewish artists.

The remarkable illustrations are based on a series of watercolors Lissitzky did around 1917 (now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).  By the time the lithographs were completed, they combined the playfulness of Chagall with cubist and futurist elements via Malevich.  Lissitzky saw in the traditional song and its illustration "a parable of the Russian Revolution, of the defeat of czarist rule, and the victory and liberation of the Russian masses" (Band). The text is Yiddish and Aramaic, both written in the Hebrew alphabet.  Each illustration is crowned with an architectural frame containing the Yiddish verse.  It is especially in the last plate that the Jewish and Russian proletarian elements come together: a single eye and a hand clutching a sword emerge from a circular cloud.  Here the all-knowing eye of God (as depicted in certain 18th-century Haggadot) merges with the image which appeared on the first Soviet postage stamp: an outstretched hand gripping a sword underneath a punishing sun.

The dust wrapper is of supreme importance to Lissitzky's plan for the work.  The exterior of the wrappers contains the title on the first panel, the central panel bears the printer's logo and the price (10 rubles).  The third panel, which serves as an inside flap bear a circular stamp depicting a man, a small boy, and a large animal; the man is holding a spice box, used in the ritual of havdalah. The interior of the jacket most clearly points to future developments in the artist's changing aesthetic concerns.  All ten verses of the song are printed on the left-hand panel.  It is here that Lissitzky's use of typography as design comes to the fore.  Arnold J. Band has explicated the remaining two panels as follows: "In thee off-white trinagles on the center interior panel are the Hebrew letters yud yud, a common shorthand for the tetragrammaton, yud, heh, vav, heh, a biblical name for God that is not supposed to be pronounced.  By stylizing the yuds and placing them adjacent to each other, Lissitzky treats the two letters as a single graphic symbol that merges with the surrounding abstract geometric shapes.  That Lissitzky's letters form both a word and an element in the overall design implies not only a respect for the sacredness of God's name—the letters suggest the name as much as they express it—but also as acknowledgement of God's omnipresence.

"Lissitzky incorporated the stylized Hebrew letters as well in the right-hand panel.  In the triangle at the top of the page are the lamed and the yud that refer to the first and last letters of his surname.  The pair of triangular diacritical marks between the letters tells the reader to read them not as a word but as individual letters.  In the circle below is the name of the publisher, Kultur Lige, and a surname, Kentzianavski, perhaps the name of the actual printer."

The three known copies with the dust jacket are those in the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the present copy.   In each case the wrapper has separated into three panels.

Very rare.  A landmark in the history of the avant garde book and of printed Judaica.  Although 75 copies were printed, it is surmised that a number of  these were destroyed during the Stalin era.