Michel Nedjar and his Purim Puppets

Michel Nedjar was born near Paris in 1947. Both his Jewish parents emigrated to France in the early 1920's, his father from Algeria and his mother from Poland.

Nearly all his grandmother's family were deported during the war and died in concentration camps: his mother and grandmother survived by hiding on a farm in Brittany.

His father developed a prosperous business as a master-tailor and Nedjar grew up amid garments and sewing machines, making his first dolls out of cast-off fabrics and tree roots, often playing with them in the cellar.

On weekends, he would help his grandmother, who ran an old clothing stall at the Paris flea market.

After leaving school in 1961, he worked as an apprentice tailor for several years. Following a brief period of military service and a bout of tuberculosis, he set forth in 1970 on a series of momentous journeys that took him to Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal.

By 1975 he had twice visited Mexico, as well as Belize and Guatemala, where the dolls sold in the marketplace fascinated him. "It was my first contact with High Magic, craftsmanship, the Baroque, death", he later remarked.

Back in Paris, he began fashioning his own fetish dolls out of rags, twigs, sacking and other flea market rubbish. At first colourful and comical, the dolls soon became sombre, unkempt and fearsome; some took the form of morbid totems saturated in mud and blood.

Animal and bird figures, and the human face reduced to an owl-like mask, are constant motifs. Whether in two or three dimensions, his expressions remain true to a fundamental vision of the fragility of human identity, and of the sufferings of the downtrodden and dislocated victims of modern history.

© Roger Cardinal 2004 for the catalogue of the International Exhibition of Self-Taught Art, The Slovak National Gallery, Bratisla, Slovakia

Since I have no doubt massacred this, have a look at the original and translate it for yourself: bfmtest's blog

Michel Nedjar's grandmother was a "rag and bone" seller at the Fleamarket of Saint-Ouen, his father was tailor. He, also, became a tailor before giving up his trade to travel the world.

He discovered the magic capacities of puppets, which exorcize fears and thwart fate. As an artist, he makes odd puppets from little bits of nothing; his "Purim puppets" are funny creatures of transgression and reversal, celebrating nothing less than sadness changed into joy and possible defiance of destiny.

Purim? It is the Jewish holiday celebrating the time when, about year 480 BCE, the Jewish people exiled in Persia were saved from extermination thanks to Esther, a Jewess who became queen of Persia. It is the festival of ... absurdity, thumbing your nose, one day when everything is allowed and the disguises expected, the day when laughter celebrates a near brush with death.

One day, Michel Nedjar was upset by a photo taken in a transit camp in 1946, at the time of Purim: survivors had disguised themselves as Hitler, others as deportees.

The scarred puppets are afraid of nothing. Their power comes from worn fabric ends, silver plated papers, buttons and scraps of paperboard. They are sentinels, warlike, knights, bride, goddesses or queens of the night. Some overlap animals with wheels, others carry inscriptions ("fragile," "detonator with wick, see directions for use on the back").

They make inspire fear and laughter, they are not puppets of wise little girls. They are, rather, grigris intended to conjure up adult fears.

Excerpted from Raw Vision:

Much has been written about Nedjar since Roger Cardinal's in-depth study published in Lausanne in 1990: of his childhood in a large Jewish family in an idyllic house with a garden in a northern suburb of Paris; of the brutal figure of his father, a Sephardi tailor reminiscent of Kafka's terrible genitor; of his Ashkenazi mother and his Polish, Yiddish-speaking grandmother, who introduced Nedjar to schmattes, the old rags which he later adopted as material for his handmade embryonic dolls.

One event ... is supposed to have been the original trauma that later triggered his creative output: the evening when, at the age of thirteen, he stumbled upon Alain Resnais' movie Nuit et Brouillard on television and discovered the terrifying reality of the Nazi concentration camps. 'I had two aunts who returned from Auschwitz and they told us,' recalls Nedjar. 'But words don't have the power of the image.'

And it is a fact that, many years later, Nedjar discovered with amazement that he handled his dolls in the same way that he had seen the soldiers in the film pile up the corpses in the pits when he was a teenager.

For more information, see

Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme
71 rue du Temple Hôtel de Saint-Aignan , 75003 PARIS
Telephone: 01 53 01 86 53

This lens is part of Chapel Hill Fiddler's Puppets & Masks CollectionPunch and Judy • How to Make your Own Punch & Judy Dolls • Casting a plaster mold to make a paper mache head • Punch & Judy show: the other characters • Bread and Puppet Circus • How to Make a Handmade Parade • Adult Puppet Theater • Make a La Llorona paper mache mask • Scary Masks from Afar • How to make a giant puppet and an El Tigre head • The giant head masks of Jane Filer • Make a space alien head from papier mache • Creep masks for Halloween inspiration • See all the puppet lenses at once • The scary recycled puppets of artist Michel Nedjar

This lens is part of Chapel Hill Fiddler's Jewish Lenses CollectionBest Jewish Books • Best Jewish Lenses • Mystery band from the Ukraine • Chai Lifeline helps sick Jewish kids • Hamsa: beautiful good-luck charm from Israel • TJC Hanukah Songbook • When does Chanukah begin in 2009? • How do you spell Hanukkah? • Jewish choral music songbook • I love Yiddish music! • The Jewish Storyteller • Jewish Wedding Music • Mani Leib, famous Yiddish poet-shoemaker • Purim Puppets of Michel Nedjar • A Sephardic song about eggplants • Uncle Shlomo's Pushcart • I love Yiddish!