A review of One Little Goat by Dara Horn and Theo Ellsworth – Compulsive Reader

One Little Goat
by Dara Horn and Theo Ellsworth
W.W. Norton & Company
April 2025, $18.00, 152 pages, ISBN: 978-1-324-08213-2

“If you’ve ever been to a Passover seder,” writer Dara Horn’s and illustrator Theo Ellsworth’s graphic novel begins, “you know that they feel like they last forever.” And how! Suggested for readers 8 – 12, One Little Goat is a deep dive into Jewish history and tradition that adults can appreciate as well. The author of the acclaimed essay collection, People Love Dead Jews, which explores the commercialization of the Holocaust and the global veneration of Anne Frank among other examples of the exploitation of historical Jewish tragedy, Horn writes with depth and insight and a provocative perspective on Judaism. One Little Goat is subtitled A Passover Catastrophe, which says it all.

Narrated by “the wise child” – one of four in the Haggadah, along with the wicked child, the simple child, and the child who doesn’t know how to ask – the premise of the story is that the seder (which means “order”) can only conclude after the afikoman is eaten. The afikoman is a piece of matzoh that’s hidden near the start of the evening, and at the appropriate time, the children search for it and hold it for ransom, usually a dollar so or a treat. Then the afikoman is eaten with dessert, and the seder can be concluded.

In One Little Goat, the afikoman cannot be found, and this seder has been going on for six months. As if this isn’t stressful enough, the mom is now nine months pregnant and about to deliver her fifth child. If all of this doesn’t stretch credulity, a talking goat showing up at the front door shouldn’t be too far-fetched, either. Thinking it may be Elijah coming for his cup of wine, the wise child, whose hair has grown down to his shoulders by now, answers the door.

The goat identifies himself as the biblical scapegoat, who first appears in the Book of Leviticus. He is blamed for everything that goes wrong; that’s what a scapegoat is, after all. The goat offers to help the wise child recover the afikoman, which, through a series of odd circumstances, the wise child’s baby sister (“the child who doesn’t know how to ask”) has accidentally lost in “a gap in the fabric of interdimensional space-time.”

Thus, we follow the wise child and the goat back through history on their quest to find the afikoman. First, they go to a seder in the USSR, in 1981, where his father was born and Jewish holidays were illegal. Then they go to a seder in Warsaw, Poland, 1943, where his great-grandmother’s family hid out from the Nazis. Much to the wise child’s embarrassment, he hadn’t known much about any of this; he hadn’t thought to ask.

They go back and back and back through history, first to an 1896 seder in Vienna at the home of Sigmund Freud (Siggy’s mother is very disappointed with him), back to the 1300s, to the first Medieval Haggadahs, in which all the people are depicted with the heads of birds, to a seder with Rabbi Don Isaac Abarbanel, past the Spanish Inquisition; to the famous seder in the Haggadah with Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaria, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon. The goat and the wise child go back to ancient Egypt, to the slaying of the firstborns – the angel of death passing over the homes marked with lamb’s blood on the door. The wise child also happens to be the firstborn of his own family, so this is a particular moment of suspense for him.

Of course, they do ultimately recover the afikoman and conclude the seder with Chad Gadya, the song about the goat “my father bought for two zuzim.” As Horn reminds us, “The goat is always at the very end.”

All along as they make their way back through time in search of the afikoman, the wise child is encouraged to ask questions. Asking questions is kind of the point of the Passover seder. Asking questions is all about curiosity (as Walt Whitman famously said, be curious, not judgmental); it’s how knowledge is gained. It’s the way to understanding, as the wise child discovers when he asks questions about his younger siblings – the wicked, the simple, the one who doesn’t know how to ask – whom he had previously simply taken for granted, viewed as one-dimensional.

This collaboration with Theo Ellsworth is unique. Ellsworth’s style is reminiscent of R. Crumb, the underground comics pioneer whose iconic black-and-white cross-hatching and the exaggerated features of his character are instantly recognizable. Combined with Dara Horn’s erudition, the comic book style makes the ancient story seem somehow more relevant and more subversive. Families looking to revise their Pesach observance rituals might consider Horn/Ellsworth’s One Little Goat as an option to spur those questions that make the holiday unique and meaningful.

About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.