The lamb is meek, the cat is big and black. It is not a stick which hits the dog, but a mammoth bludgeon. The slaughterer revels in his slaughter, and blood-red is the dominant color of that illustration. The angel of death is white-winged darkness with talon claws gouging out the eyes of its bloodied victim. But somehow the darkness of death and its white wings and talons dominate the scene, its dark presence hemming in the narrow ray of light.
Happy endings are only in children's songs.
Reality is what I have just seen in four long years of bloody war. Each devours another. In this world of ours, only violence persists. A portraitist and graphic artist, he worked as an art editor for Jewish journals, and after World War I became the art director of two Jewish publishing houses. His Had Gadyo illustrations warn of the enduring ominous presence of violence and evil on the European continent and in the heart of man, a first book prophetically foreshadowing the Holocaust two decades before it began.