Escape Goat

Like the afikoman but less formally, the song “Chad Gadya” more or less concludes the Passover Seder. Its tongue-twisting Aramaicisms—about the little goat, purchased for a mere two zuzim, who is consumed by a cat, who is tormented by a dog, who is defeated by a stick, and so on, and so forth, until the Holy One, Blessed be He, finally shows up—are often interpreted as a series of nested allegories about the travails of Jewish history. One conquering nation comes and swallows us up, but then it, in turn, is swallowed by the next, and the Jews, repeatedly consumed, nonetheless abide. After all, that one little goat always pops back up again: “Chad Gadya, Chad Gadya . . .”

The song races forward, but its historical interpretation looks backward. As Yosef Yerushalmi famously noted in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, from the outset the Hebrew Bible almost obsessively commands the Israelites to remember and admonishes them not to forget. “Indeed,” he writes with magisterial understatement:

In trying to understand the survival of a people that has spent most of its life in global dispersion, I would submit that the history of its memory, largely neglected and yet to be written, may prove of some consequence.

Those are also the stakes of Dara Horn and Theo Ellsworth’s ambitious new graphic novel, which—fittingly for its young adult audiences—presents these questions wrapped in a fantastic premise and played out at the highest possible time and space-spanning pitch.

One Little Goat’s premise is reminiscent of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 surrealist black comedy The Exterminating Angel, about guests at a dinner party who can never leave. Here, of course, with a Jewish twist: They can’t leave because no one can find the afikoman, and as our teenage narrator explains in the four panels below, that’s a problem:

They’ve been stuck at the table for six months now. Mystically stuck, in fact. It turns out that the baby, “who doesn’t know how to ask,” has tossed the afikoman into a rip in the fabric of space-time somewhere near the family room—and no one can leave until it’s found. Our unnamed narrator, the twelve-year-old “wise child” of the family, is getting increasingly aggravated by all of his family during this never-ending Seder: loud siblings, ancient grandparents, cool cousins, a pregnant mom, and an overeager dad (“Who wants to be the angel of death?”).

Horn, who has a doctorate in Jewish studies from Harvard, has always been able to suffuse her gifts as a novelist with a robust understanding of Jewish history. Here our heroic wise son (who must come to realize that he is perhaps not so wise after all) has to proceed downward spatially and backward temporally through many different historical Seders to find that missing afikoman and let his and his family’s story continue. As he puts it in the prologue: “This is the story of how I discovered the thousands of Passover Seders that were happening right underneath the most boring Passover Seder of all time.”

Of course, the haggadah itself features an example of what sure seems to be a prior historical Seder—the discussion of Rabbi Akiva and friends of the Passover story that takes them all night in Bnei Brak. Unsurprisingly, it appears as the penultimate stop on our hero’s journey; other stops include Seders from the pre-glasnost Soviet Union and a subterranean one in the Warsaw Ghetto (in which, it turns out, our wise son’s grandmother participated). These stops are historical, of course, but they’re history that resolves into a kind of central myth, important milestones in the constitution of Jewish identity.

There’s even a funny stop at the home of Sigmund Freud’s mother. This is important for another dimension of the book: The archeology and excavation that are central to One Little Goat turn out to be historical not only in the national sense but also in the familial. Understanding your parents’ history helps you understand your current circumstances, a deep truth not only of psychoanalysis but of the young adult (YA) genre.

In other words, this night isn’t that different from all other (Passover) nights, even from those impossibly different (or at least embarrassing) ones that involve your parents, and Horn and Ellsworth are interested in stressing continuities and the past as a source of education and inspiration as well as artistic delight and narrative satisfaction.

One Little Goat is set squarely in comics land, which may lead some to question the seriousness of Horn’s purpose, but the haggadah is the only classic Jewish text whose illustrations have become central to the experience of reading it, from the mysterious medieval illustrations of the so-called Birds’ Head Haggadah (which appears in Ellsworth’s pages) to the kitschy modern commercial art of the Maxwell House Haggadah. One might almost say that the haggadah is the first Jewish graphic novel. Like comic books and graphic novels, the juxtaposition of text and image in the haggadah have combined to create something greater than either.

That defining juxtaposition between text and image can find its power both in congruence or incongruity. Horn’s partnership with Ellsworth derives its power from both. Ellsworth is a respected comics artist whose work is reminiscent of the countercultural underground comix style. His comic images are drawn with a strong, loose (even deliberately shaky) line; the art is fun but also disruptive, unsettling, vertiginous. Figures are often set against abstract backgrounds, floating, dizzied, contributing mightily to the sense of dislocation so necessary to the plot. When family members talk over one another at the Seder, faces and word bubbles blend together into an incomprehensible background. In bringing the chaos of the family tale to life, Ellsworth’s drawings barely respect the gutter (the white space between comic panels). Feet, arms, and leaping frogs jump madly out of them, and sometimes the action is so frenetic that the gutter disappears entirely behind squished-together panels that squish together centuries of history.

At the same time, Ellsworth’s caricatured, sometimes even grotesque figuration reminds us that we are not, or at least not easily, in the territory of the conventional YA novel, where everything, even in times of adventure and danger, looks cute and cuddly. That feels right, given the subject. Cute and cuddly isn’t an aesthetic recipe for describing Jewish history, or for describing the process of remembering it.

For Horn and Ellsworth, one of the prime dangers of the Seder as it is all too often practiced, with its focus on reading and recitation, is the danger of not listening to other people’s comments or stories and thus failing to answer, or even hear, their burning questions. Ultimately, the book is dedicated not to answers but to the asking of questions, and if this book is read by children, they’ll have plenty. Which, to be clear, is largely a good thing—even if at times the fleeting and impressionistic nature of the historical encounters and the challenging discordance of Ellsworth’s art may make it less accessible to children. But it’s not going to be read only by children. Or, at least, not in isolation. Comics have, in the past few decades, gone through their own repeated cycles of not being just for kids anymore, and although One Little Goat is being published by Norton Young Readers, it’s not really designed, in my opinion, just for kids.

Horn and Ellsworth are also dedicated to the notion, like the haggadah with its four sons and its conversing rabbis, its midrashic exegesis and its drinking songs, that it takes a wide variety of experience to nourish memory. “There’s room for everyone in this story,” one of the characters our hero encounters tells him—it may be the medieval rabbi and commentator Don Isaac Abarbanel—which meshes nicely with that of the most up-to-date exponents of YA literature: The Passover story is one that not only invites but even mandates you to find yourself in it, whoever you may now happen to be. Or, as the Hasidic rabbi Nachman of Bratslav tells our time-traveling hero and the goat who brought him to eighteenth-century Podolia: “The exodus from Egypt is still occurring in every human being, in every era, in every day.” To which the boy replies “Ohh-kay? But what does that even really mean?” But by the end, he gets it, the family gets to eat the afikoman, and they all sing about “the goat my father bought for two zuzim.”

One can imagine another night—or maybe the sleepy afternoon after the Seder—when a family might sit together and, instead of looking at the haggadah, sift through the pages of Horn and Ellsworth’s graphic novel. They might focus on individual details, attempting interpretation and explication, finding and exploring other texts in the chain of history and literature and art that they illuminate. One Little Goat affords the possibility of spending such time in a way that feels both utterly different and entirely familiar.