Kiev Collection – From Under the Fig Tree

Magid

joselitApril 17, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

This year, or so it seems to me, the American Jewish community is awash in new editions of the haggadah, the age-old ritual text that structures the Passover seder.

Haggadot. Source: Flickr/Sanford Kearns.

At one end of the spectrum, there’s the stunning Washington Haggadah, a facsimile edition of a 15th century text. Its brightly colored illustrations of daily life -- women stir the pot, an entire family crowds atop a horse, birds chirp, a jester beats a drum -- dazzle the eye and enlarge our sense of wonder at the ways in which earlier generations of Jews claimed the haggadah as their own.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a brand new version of the Maxwell House Haggadah, whose very ordinariness belies its extraordinary hold on the American Jewish imagination. Households across the country may lack a Kiddush cup and perhaps even a set of Shabbat candlesticks, but chances are they own a copy or two of the unadorned and down-to-earth Maxwell House Haggadah, which has been around in one form or another since the 1930s.

These most recent iterations of the text are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. If history is any guide, and I sure hope it is, American Jewry and its sister communities around the globe have, over time, generated any number of fascinating Passover texts, many of which can be found at GW’s very own Kiev Collection.
...continue reading "Magid"

At sea

joselitSeptember 6, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

There's something about the sea that captivates. Perhaps it's the play of light on the water's surface or the inexorability of its motions: back and forth, back and forth, it goes. Whatever the reasons, the sea beckons. Its hold on us is even more irresistible when joined to rituals such as tashlich, the symbolic casting of our sins into the water, an activity that is as much a part of the Rosh Hashana repertoire of extra-synagogal things to do as eating a new fruit or dousing it with honey.

Little wonder, then, that over the years tashlich has held its own.

Wherever Jews lived -- in England, France, the United States, Turkey or India -- they could be found on the first day of the Jewish New Year, standing by a body of water, be it ocean, river, lake, stream, pond or creek. Some clutched clumps of bread in their hands, which they then throw into the current: away, away with our wrongdoings!

Others, like the Bene-Israel, made use of a small pamphlet, The Remission of Vows and the Prayer Offered on the Sea Shore.

Published in Bombay in 1864 by the Bene-Israel Improvement Society, probably as a fundraising device, this humble, 20-page compendium -- another one of the Kiev Collection's treasures -- contains all manner of prayers. Most of them would be familiar to those of us who know our way around the mahzor, the liturgical text used on Rosh Hashana -- familiar, that is, if we could read Marathi.

With the exception of the title page and the frontispiece -- which, in a show of typographic derring-do, featured seven different kinds of English-language fonts, and the occasional appearance of Hebrew, whose hand-set aleph tilts mischievously to the right -- the entire text is written in this ancient Indian language.

Of a different order, but equally compelling, is Tashlich at Turtle Rock, a recently published children's book by Susan Schnur and Anna Schnur-Fishman.

Intended for youngsters between the ages of five and nine, it links the modern conventions of the adventure yarn to those of the ancient ritual, heartening its readers along the way.

From the shores of the Arabian Sea to a creek at Turtle Rock, from the mid-19th century on through the 21st century, Jewish life ebbs and flows.

Image credit: Kiev Collection.

Adventures of a fish

joselitAugust 23, 2010November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Just when you think you've seen it all, along comes a document or a song or a photograph or a book that greatly enlarges your frame of reference and ratchets up your appreciation for the cultural patrimony of the Jews.

This happened to me the other day when I came across Masa ha-dag, a children’s book of the 1920s that recounted in Hebrew the far-flung adventures of a fish (pictured).

One of the treasures of GW’s Kiev Collection, it had what my grandmother would call, in Yiddish, ale mayles -- all the right virtues or perquisites.

For one thing, the book was published in both Berlin and Jerusalem, underscoring the global reach of Jewish culture during the interwar years. For another, it boasted a sterling array of contributors: its Hebrew translator was Hayim Nachman Bialik, the preeminent Hebrew poet of his day, and its illustrator was Martha Seidmann-Freud, a leading Berlin book artist who preferred to go by the name ‘Tom,’ and whose uncle was none other than Sigmund Freud.

If that’s not enough to whet your appetite, there’s more: the book contains the most eye-catching, luscious illustrations I’ve seen in quite some time. Its palette of warm pinks and greens and yellows, much less its animated line drawings, puts you in mind of a time when all things seemed possible.