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John Strausbaugh
Looking back on it now, Katchor’s response is characteristic—an
exquisitely nuanced Julius Knipl shrug that expresses, all at once, a
little bemusement, a very slight regret, and a fatalistic despair that
in the grand scope of the universe a man should be picking nits with him
over such a trifle.
"It’s just a cartoon," he shrugs. "It’s a comic strip. It’s not a big
thing." Then he adds, most tellingly, "It’s not history, it’s a dream of
history. What can I say? I saw it in my dreams."
Dreamlike, yes. And obsessed with history. That crossroads where time
and the Dream Time intersect locates pretty much all of Katchor’s work.
It’s not an historian’s history, more a historical novelist’s, much
about the feel of history, the actual, ontological weight of the past on
his characters’ often stooped shoulders.
The Jew of New York, because it’s set in New York in the 1820s and 30s,
is also much about the future—about America, and New York specifically,
as a dreamscape of potentiality and possibility, a place escapees from
the Old World ran to to find themselves, to act out their visions, to
try to re-create themselves.
Then again, this being a Katchor story, most of them fail.
The Jew of New York, just out from Pantheon (98 pages, and on sale at Amazon for $14), is
Katchor’s third book, after Cheap Novelties and Julius Knipl, Real
Estate Photographer, and it’s brilliant. About half appeared in The
Forward as a weekly strip, the rest is new.
The 19th-Century New York
Katchor creates here, as he has for Knipl and now for The Cardboard
Valise, is an alternative to the bricks-and-mortar one you and I
inhabit, recognizable but not the same, sustained by its own logic,
pervaded by a gentle, melancholic surrealism. In short, as Katchor says,
a dreamworld.
Mordecai Noah is such a perfect Ben Katchor character the reader not
forewarned might not know he’s the one real person among all the
comic-strip characters. Interestingly, he never really appears in person
in the book, but acts more as a muse or a genius loci, an animating
spirit who operates on a grander metaphorical scale than the others and
whose vision indirectly seems to set them all in motion.
Major Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785-1851) was perhaps the most
distinguished Jew in New York in his day. The "Major" was an honorific;
—an officer in the city’s
Veterans Corps of Artillery. Curiously, he was a staunch advocate of
slavery, claiming that to emancipate America’s slaves "would be to
jeopardize the safety of the whole country." He was also a politician
(first sheriff of New York County), an amateur playwright and, most
importantly for Katchor, a dreamer of grand-scale dreams.
To whit: In
1824 he bought at public auction some 2555 acres of Grand Island in Lake
Erie, whereon he intended to establish a Jewish homeland. He had a large
stone brought to the island, meant to be the cornerstone for this New
Jerusalem, on which was inscribed: "Ararat, A City of Refuge for Jews,
Founded by Mordecai Noah in the month Tizri 5586, September 1825 and in
the 50th Year of American Independence."
Major Noah was able to attract some interested Jews, but not nearly
enough to make a go of this dream. In fact, his own interest in the
project seems oddly evanescent; you get the impression he was one of
those visionaries who like the dreaming too much to be bothered with the
reality. Steamboats operating out of Buffalo used to make regular stops
at the lonely cornerstone of Ararat as a tourism curio; it’s now in a
Buffalo Museum. For his part, Major Noah’s mortal remains, Katchor tells
me, reside in a Sephardic cemetery on W. 21st St.
Of course, Maj. Noah was far from the only religious visionary in
western New York State’s "Burnt-Over Region" in the early 1800s. It was
in fact literally crawling with millenarian sects, utopian communities
and cults. Katchor gets at this,
slyly and marvelously, in one little scene where the melting snows in
the western woods reveal, as they recede, the ground littered with the
previous season’s tossed-off religious tracts and pamphlets, numerous as
fallen leaves.
All the other "Jews of New York" in the book besides Noah are also
dreamers, most just as fruitlessly. Katchor has ingeniously
re-envisioned New York history from the perspective of its largely
invisible Jewish inhabitants—not the rich and lordly Jews who would
become kings of the city, nor the poor emigrants of the later Diaspora
who fled to the Lower East Side, but an earlier wave of Jewish pioneers.
Much is made in the book of a Smith-like theory of the day that American
Indians were descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. "They are all
very like Jews," Katchor has a lecturer saying, "in appearance and
voice, for they have large noses and speak through the throat..." Later,
a con artist and impresario will train an Indian, wonderfully named
Elim-Min-Opee, to spout Hebrew as though it were his natural language.
This identification of the Indians with the Jews as barely-apprehended
insider-outsider groups threatened with extinction—real or at least
cultural—within the onrushing, frontier-busting society of youthful
(Christian, white) America, is a powerfully resonant leitmotif of the
story Katchor is telling here, what I think he wants to get at, in his
typically oblique and sadly funny way, about how American became America
(and New York New York). That he’s trying to get at it in a comic strip
suggests that he’s probably the most "serious" comic-strip artist since
Spiegelman introduced Maus. (I also think his historical scope is
broader, his feel for the human condition more subtle and textured. But
that’s me.)
Another theme of the book—the tension between the expanding city and
the recoiling wilderness—is excruciatingly represented by a Jewish
character who spends long years out in the western New York wastelands
trapping beaver. Torn between urbanity and a more "natural" state, he
becomes tragically obsessed with the career of the world-famous actress
"Miss Patella" (a plump and one-legged echo of TK Sarah Bernhardt) at
the same time that he is growing so comfortable with living in a "wild"
state that he is mistaken—again, tragically—for a beast.
Still another character, seeing how popular the new invention of
bottled soda water has become among New York’s sophisticated gourmands,
dreams of turning all of Lake Erie into a vast reservoir of soda water,
which will then be piped (through an elaborate arterial system Katchor
reproduces as end-papers) into every restaurant, hotel and even private
dwelling in the metropolis.
There’s Professor Solidus, the anti-Semite playwright who’s never
actually met a Jew; a man who takes his exercise wading into rivers in
an all-over suit of India rubber, and who’s embarked on a study of
Jewish culture as though they were a separate species from his; an
itinerant salesman pushing authentic soil from Palestine so that Jews
can be buried in a little piece of the homeland; a man who imports
mother of pearl for fancy buttons
Katchor interweaves their stories,
their dreams and their hopes, most of which go up in smoke, literally,
at the climax. You get the sense in the end that New York—the New
World—is rushing ahead without them, out of their grasp, barreling
westward, into the future, leaving each of them, like Major Noah, at
best a footnote to American history, a stone in a museum, a headstone in
a private cemetery wedged between buildings on a nondescript block of
the city.
For a book based on a comic strip to be this smart, this sad
and this funny all at once is, if you don’t mind my saying this about a
guy I work with—funny how he’s come back to NYPress just in time for me
to be saying this, isn’t it?—a remarkable
A Dream of History:
Jewish Visionaries in
an Almost-Historical New York
AS SOON AS BEN KATCHOR started a new weekly strip, The Jew of New York,
in The Forward, he was hearing from a Jewish historian complaining that
he was off by one year on the birthdate of Mordecai Noah, the one
character in the strip who happened to be a real historical figure.
New JWR contributor John Strausbaughs is editor of NYPress.
