El 'Lazer' Lissitzky, Had gadya, 1917-1919
We are just humans, we have the selective memory. When you see a Jew dressed in a Chassidic garb you might mistakenly think that this is the tradition, etc. In fact 99% of the time this Jew’s father or grandfather never dressed like that. But then it was the twentieth century, the century of the collective post traumatic amnesia. As far as the Jewish religion is concerned just a repressed memory. There was no industrialization, no communism, no Freud, no Marx, no Trotsky, no Einstein, no Holocaust and no Gulag, astonishingly not even members of own family, for many not even the state of Israel. The Jewish religion today is a collective rewind, pretending that we can safely ignore the preceding [and the current] centuries and instead reenact “remembrance” of the pyramids. Could you pass the salt please?
El 'Lazer' Lissitzky, Had gadya, 1917-1919
Of course the is the apocryphal version that didn’t even get through the soviet censors when El Lissitzky, the most innovative artist of the revolutionary wave, published the Had Gadya book in Kiev in 1919. In the final unpublished plate after Gott is done with the Malach Hamoves AKA the Angel of Death, in comes a hero and takes Gott to task for orchestrating the world as the perpetual game of slaughter, specifically the Darwinian murder of the weak, and the making of the unseemly, cruel song into the sweet dessert of the freedom holiday. After the improvised trial Gott is taken behind the shed once and for all… there must be a tune for that.
But even though the censor was the veteran of the Bolshevik revolution and a complete atheist, he couldn’t allow the publication on the last plate. Intuitively and from his chassidic youth the censor realized the practical implications of the metaphor. The last illustration would have deprived the fledgling Communist Russia of the blueprint for governing, the imitatio dei, the system that eats itself, the non believer understood that it was the prophetic blueprint for the entire century.
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