The tabs are broken, but it works for me

HOW MANY British families this year will have at least one copy of Routledge’s The Children’s Haggadah A familiar part of many seders

is dislodged so that it will only turn if you put a finger in the middle to hold it in place. I have found just one person whose childhood copy is still intact, a situation that one might describe as a miracle like the parting of the Red Sea.

Yet, strangely, it doesn’t seem to matter. The Children’s Haggadah is a rare example of an object where the very fact of it not working properly adds to its charm. People describe their damaged copies in gleeful tones. This may be because the precise way in which each copy doesn’t work individualises it, so people feel extra affectionate when they’re reunited with it each year.

These days, many families create interactive, child-centred Seders but, until quite recently, children were expected to sit at the table for many hours, while the four questions that the youngest of them had asked at the beginning were answered, at great length and in Hebrew — a language that they could probably read but not understand. Little wonder that the illustrations in this Haggadah were stared at, the wheel turned, the tabs pulled, again and again, until every page of the book became unforgettably familiar.

A 1952 advertisement for the Haggadah in the JC reads, “The pictures, many of which are ingeniously constructed to move, with fascinating results, are not the least delightful features of the whole praiseworthy production.” The advertising copywriter in question could have done with some lessons in being punchy and to the point— but the general sentiment is definitely correct.

Pesach is a festival of memory, and this Haggadah is self-fulfilling in that respect; our battered copies, with their matzah crumbs and wine stains and dedications on the flyleaf, link us to many decades of bygone Seders and to the people who sat round the table with us.