Creator Bio
Menachem Birnbaum
1893–1944?
Born in Vienna, the book illustrator and portrait painter Menachem Birnbaum was the son of the ideologically peripatetic activist Nathan Birnbaum. He lived in Berlin from 1911 to 1914 and then from 1919 to 1933, when he moved to the Netherlands. He was arrested by the Germans in 1943. The violence and horror of his expressionist illustrations of the song “Had Gadya” (from the Passover seder) are a commentary on the tumult of World War I and its aftermath.
Entries in the Posen Library by This Creator
Primary Source
The Shohet (from “Had Gadya”)
The violence of the Passover song “Had Gadya” (“Who Knows One”) clearly spoke to this illustrator’s sense of horror following World War I.