Holiday Cheer - Yiddish Book Center

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Jewish New Year Cards9 PAKN TREGER
Photographs by Jim Gipe.Eager consumers could also purchase the cards directly from the Hebrew Publishing Companyand its competitors, Bloch Publishing Company and the Williamsburg Art Company. All threecompanies functioned as both manufacturers and distributors.Much like their recipients, Jewish greeting cards came in various kinds of shapes, sizes, and sensibilities,from the modest, self-contained square of a penny postcard to an oversized, eight-by-eleven-inchrectangle, accented with all manner of furbelows and frills. Some cards were the very picture of restraint:quick and to the point, they eschewed ornamentation in favor of a simple message in Hebrew andEnglish: “L’shana tova tikasavu. A happy New Year.” Others trafficked in the sweet and sappy. (“If we maynot be sentimental on Rosh Hashanah when, indeed, shall we?” wondered one well-wisher on the eve ofWorld War I.) Featuring amber-hued scenes of a multi-generational family sitting down to a yontefdikedinner or performing the ritual of tashlikh, they offered a vision of Jewish life untainted by time.Still other shana tovas, “multi-colored pasteboard creations, frosted and be-ribboned,” reveled indetail, in riotous combinations of motifs, colors, and materials such as accordion pleats and paperhinges which allowed the images to pop up and open out in all their three-dimensional glory. Visuallyarresting and compelling, these cards were meant to be displayed proudly on a mantelpiece, where theycould be seen by one and all, instead of pasted onto the leaves of an album or casually discarded.With the exception of the actual greeting stamped on the cover or within its folds, little distinguishedJewish greeting cards from their non-Jewish counterparts, most of which were published inGermany, the premier source for color printing. Vivid examples of chromolithography, the “democraticart” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they not only shared a penchant for10 SUMMER 2003
Page 1: y JENNA WEISSMAN JOSELITHoliday Che
Page 5 and 6: Folding Out HistoryThe Kramers are

Holiday Cheer - Yiddish Book Center

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?