- An Interview by the Jewish Week
03/12/13 Steve
Lipman/Boston Staff Writer
Hans Guggenheim, a refugee from Nazi Berlin who found haven
during World War II in England and Guatemala, and eventually in the United
States, conducts his own seders every year in his Boston apartment that doubles
as a personal art museum and extensive library.
Each year his guests read from among his collection of a few dozen
Haggadot.
This year they’ll all use a single one — a Haggadah that Guggenheim, an
artist, recently finished drawing and writing.
This year, his Haggadah is available only online, in PDFformat (projectguggenheim.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_26.html),
to reach the greatest number of possible readers.
“The Unfinished Haggadah: Autobiography of an Israelite” is four dozen
pages of color, black-and-white and sepia images, his own artwork and a few
photographs, which incorporate some standard Haggadah text, supplemented by his
personal recollections. Inside are references to the Holocaust and other key
points in Jewish history, some, but not all, of the standard Haggadah text.
Languages featured include English, Hebrew, German, Yiddish and Ladino.
“Traditional Haggadahs ignore all these other things,” like the Holocaust,
the Bar Kochba revolt and the persecution of Jews in Arab countries, Guggenheim
says, calling these additions consistent with the Passover message of
deliverance from danger. He says he focused on content that will help people
make “a seder in the 21st century.”
While many Holocaust survivors and refugees have in recent decades written
wartime memoirs, Guggenheim’s Haggadah is one of the first attempts to do it in
Haggadah form, says Danny Levine, owner of J.Levine Books & Judaica in
Manhattan. While “it’s admirable that this guy went and did this,” most Jews
who attend a seder still follow the traditional steps outlined in a standard
Haggadah, Levine says. “That’s why it’s called a ‘seder,’” Hebrew for order.
But authors offering their Passover writings — more typically Haggadah
commentaries and supplements — online are becoming more common as
computer-based technology becomes easier to use, Levine says. “I’ve seen a lot
of people do it.”
Guggenheim says he may seek to have his Haggadah published in book form in
a future year; this year, his seder guests will get a printout of his creation.
He calls his work “The Unfinished Haggadah,” he says, “Because our
[Jewish] history is never finished.”
Growing up in prewar Berlin, Guggenheim would attend his Orthodox
grandfather’s seder every year. It was long. “I would fall asleep at some
point.”
Part of the extended Guggenheim family (“All the Guggenheims call
themselves related,”), Guggenheim worked in the United States as an artist,
historian, collector, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor,
illustrator for LIFE magazine and anthropologist.
In his Haggadah, which opens with an image of him sitting at his
grandfather’s seder table, are pages from a German-language Haggadah, a drawing
of a Kindertransport scene, photographs of relatives, a Heine poem, and pictures
of death camps in Europe, which he visits each year.
Guggenheim’s artistic style is sometimes realistic, sometimes
impressionistic; his Haggadah is intensely personal, a reflection of his own
life and of many Jews’ 20th-century experience. “Most of the [standard]
Haggadah is in it some way,” symbolically, through his artwork, if not
actually.
What would his grandfather think of his Haggadah?
“I don’t think he would accept it at all,” Guggenheim says. But, he adds,
“It’s not for him.”
web link to the article: http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/short-takes/guggenheim-haggadah
