© Jankel Adler estate

Following earlier visits, Adler arrived in Paris in 1933, where he worked alongside the printmaker Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17. He can be seen as part of a ‘second wave’ of artists from Russia who were drawn west to Germany, then France. His etching, Ein Jude, brings a modernist technique to a traditional subject. Ein Jude which refers specifically to his Jewish identity combines modernist aspects - flattened and geometric forms and enlarged hands - with the archetypal image of the bearded eastern European shtetl Jew, reminiscent of the main protagonist of Fiddler on the Roof.