Chad Gadjo [Chad Gadya] by Birnbaum, Menachem (illus.); Uriel Birbaum (trans.) - 1920

Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1920. Limited First edition. Hardcover. g to vg. Quarto. Unpaginated. [30 pages]. Original illustrated tan stiff paper boards (portfolio). Missing the original string ties, which held the front cover to the rest of book block. Woodblock illustrated front endpapers and title page.

This remarkable work contains a total of 10 expressive and powerful color woodblock images illustrating the Chad Gadya song from the Passover Seder, by artist Menachem Birnbaum (1893-1944). Each images accompanies the corresponding verse of the song in with text in the original Aramaic/Hebrew and German translation. The German translation is credited to Birnbaum's bother the acclaimed artist Uriel Birnbaum (1894-1956).

The artist's take on this famous and beloved part of the Passover seder removes the work out of its usual playful context and tone, and brings it into a terrible word of brutal violence and death, reflecting "the unrelenting brutality of the First World War. Indeed, Birnbaum's 10 colorful woodblocks are "graphic, spare and unrelenting". "The work starts with a most beguiling image of a Chasidic father cradling a kid in his arms, his daughter reaching up to the helpless animal. Next the broad black form of the cat is seen from above mauling the helpless goat in a pool of blood. A vicious dog swings the tiny figure of the cat in a blood-splattered trajectory that amplifies the horror of violence. Then an enormous cudgel bloodily smashes the dog with a savage force that seems to echo contemporary political violence. While there is a respite in the cooling rain that extinguishes the fire the violence begins again as the ox is mercilessly slaughtered by a grim faced shochet (ritual slaughterer). In what might be the most shocking image of the series the Angel of Death claims his victim by simply covering his eyes from behind, his glistening wings and bony hands the only fatal instruments visible"...."Birnbaum's work sees darkly into the future, wrenching a terribly modern meaning from the ancient song of the Haggadah, allowing God to appear only as a shaft of light in the final darkness" - (Richard McBee, The Jewish Press)

Text in Aramaic/Hebrew and German.

Age toning to the portfolio. Remnants of the sting ties on the front and back boards. Boards bowed. Small pen markings at the very top corner of the front cover and the front endpaper. Smudges to the front free endpaper. Images and text throughout quite clean, save for some sporadic light smudges to the margins, and minor age toning along the edges. Binding in good to good+, interior in very good condition overall. About the author: Birnbaum was the second son of the Jewish philosopher Nathan Birnbaum and his wife Rosa Korngut. Birnbaum later married Ernestine (Tina) Esther Helfmann, with whom he had two children: Rafael Zwi and Hana. Birnbaum lived in Berlin from 1911 until 1914 and again from 1919 until 1933. He then emigrated to the Netherlands. In the spring of 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo and with his relatives sent to a German Nazi concentration camp where he was murdered by the Nazis. Birnbaum probably died in Auschwitz in 1944; Tina, Rafael Zwi, and Hana Birnbaum perhaps in Sobibór in 1943.