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The Jew of New York, by Ben Katchor
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In 1825, Mordecai Noah, a New York politician and amateur playwright possessed of a utopian vision, summoned all the lost tribes of Israel to an island near Buffalo in the hope of establishing a Jewish state. His failed plan, a mere footnote in Jewish-American history, is the starting point for Ben Katchor's brilliantly imagined epic that unfolds on the streets of New York a few years later.
A disgraced kosher slaughterer, an importer of religious articles and women's hosiery, a pilgrim peddling soil from the Holy Land, a latter-day Kabbalist, a man with plans to carbonate Lake Erie--these are just some of the characters who move through Katchor's universe, their lives interwoven in a common struggle to settle into the New World even as it erupts into a financial frenzy that could as easily leave them bankrupt as carry them into the future.
- Sales Rank: #712124 in Books
- Color: Brown
- Published on: 2000-12-26
- Released on: 2000-12-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.40" h x .30" w x 8.10" l, .53 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 108 pages
Amazon.com Review
Whether chronicling the metropolitan peregrinations of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, or weaving together history and fantasy in 19th- century New York, Ben Katchor's comics, filled with scratchy figures moving through gray-washed streets, feel like the relics of a half- forgotten dream. The Jew of New York takes an obscure historical footnote--an attempt in 1825 to establish a Jewish homeland in upstate New York--and spins it into an intricate tale of a rapidly developing city and its diverse inhabitants, from one-legged actresses, to wandering Jews, to masked anti-Semites. The plot wanders from place to place, never predictable, but always fascinating. The result is a like a story by Paul Auster, rewritten by Charles Dickens, as Katchor gradually draws the reader into his bizarre but precisely imagined world. Weird conspiracies, religious fanaticism, and a plan to carbonate Lake Erie are just three of the threads which Katchor weaves together, creating a version of 1830's New York that captures the spirit of the times in a way that history cannot. The reader is never quite sure what is true, yet this powerfully imagined work is irresistibly compelling. Katchor's disturbing, deeply layered historical palimpsest transforms his collection of misfit characters and the city that they inhabit into something rich and strange.
From Publishers Weekly
Much as he does in his acclaimed comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, Katchor uses the intricacies of urban social life to create a dense, whimsically inventive portrait-in-comics of New York City, this time at the dawn of the capitalist age. The work opens in 1830 as the New World Theater prepares its production of an anti-Semitic comedy titled The Jew of New York, a "burlesque" of the life of the putative founder of the first Jewish state (very likely, a shady land deal) on an uninhabited island in upstate New York. Katchor's ingeniously meandering tale uses multiple, overlapping story lines to illustrate aspects of urban and frontier life. Characters overlap, pass each other and return in a rich stew of hucksterism, scientific idealism and trashy popular culture that fancifully recreates the advent of a new mercantile age. Katchor's freewheeling imagination conjures a 19th-century utopian community of air worshippers called Free Oxygenators; a Native American named Elim-min-nopee, who orates in perfect Hebrew for 25 cents admission; and a businessman, Francis Oriole, who is obsessed with the medicinal properties of soda water and has a bizarre scheme to carbonate Lake Erie. History, fantasy and Jewish mysticism ferment in this comic social atmosphere, related with Katchor's wry humor, deadpan equilibrium and poetic verisimilitude. His b&w drawings are brisk and expressive but also quite precise, and they work in combination with the text to produce a singularly captivating fictional portrait of 19th-century Americana. Rights: The Wylie Agency.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA-American social history, 19th-century economics, religion and racial beliefs, theater life, and science all get the Katchor treatment in this graphic novel with well-developed characters, plot and subplots, and literary devices. An 1830 stage production of an anti-Semitic comedy, "The Jew of New York," is interwoven with the stories of a onetime kosher butcher who has come to New York City from the wilds of Albany; an urban denizen earning his way in the New World by selling dirt from the Holy Land (for burial of the observant dead); a merchant in Asian buttons who conspires to steal beaver pelts; a has-been actress; and others who are either Jewish, gentile anti-Semites, or soulless folk who want to make a buck. In true Katchor style, the artwork is engaging and the characters are individualized by strange and wondrously unique habiliments (including a theater director who wears a face mask) as well as by their vocabularies, intentions (reported through actions as well as words), and interactions. Nothing puerile here, this is an adult novel because of the complexity of its literary presentation. Sophisticated teens-especially those with an interest in urban lore or drama-will enjoy it immensely.
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting look at Young America's Values (not unlike Y2K+)
By Amazon Customer
Well, first of all, I have to say I'm really surprised by the people who don't like this book. Certainly I don't expect it to be universally loved, but I really disagree with the reasons I've read below. For example, one reviewer criticized it by calling it a "book of ideas." Yes, exactly! And not your run-of-the-mill ideas either. I found it very inventive, original, thought-provoking, and culturally/historically accurate. That's a lot to pull off in less than 100 pages--pages that are largely taken up by drawings. Pictures do say 1,000 words. Second, I completely disagree with the reviewer who noted that you have to know something about Jewish stereotypes. I'm a black African female living in 21st century America, and I had no difficulty understanding the stereotypes or warped values behind them. Maybe it would be safer to say that you need to understand or have been exposed to some type of stereotype in your lifetime. But I have to think that most people who would even pick up this sort of book, would be literate enough to know that the stereotypes depicted, are exactly that. I even disagree that the page layouts were difficult to read. I think if you have ever read sequential art, it's pretty straight-forward. And if you haven't, the process of figuring it out--and it really does become intuitive very quickly--adds to the telling. You *do* find the significance of certain details by kind of puzzling over the images and layout. So I guess if you need hand-holding narratives, then this probably isn't the book for you. But this is the first work by Katchor that I've read, and I am very impressed by his ability to say so much in so few words about capitalism, nature conservancy, race relations, religiosity, sexuality, theatre, etc. and how these things comprise /conflict with "progress" and the belief every age has that it is the epitomy of advanced human development.
I first heard of Katchtor when reading The Narrative Corpse, a story told by 69 artists and edited by Art Spiegelman. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who had a negative reaction to it, had similar comments as can be found here. That the "story," as such, wasn't linear, etc. But again, I feel like those readers really missed the point. Anyway, I'll save that review for that book, but if you're not so hung up on context, The Narrative Corpse is another that you might enjoy, though the two books couldn't be more dissimilar.
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Everybody except me either loves or hates this book
By A Customer
I'm a big fan of Julius Knipl, so I looked forward very much to _The Jew of New York_. When I saw that all the Amazon.com reviews of it were either adoring or vituperative, I knew I had to buy it right away. Why had that happened?
Well, now I know. This is a book with prerequisites, and if you don't have 'em, you're going to find the book very difficult. You need to know something about Jewish life in America, particularly the panoply of stereotypes to which they've been subjected (one that gets a lot of play in the book, the idea that Jews somehow smell bad, is not quite so current as it once was). And it helps to know something about the 19th century American brand of crackpot people and crackpot groups.
Finally, you need to know how to read Ben Katchor. If you expect a linear read you'll be frustrated. Each panel needs to be scrutinized carefully, and pages will pass before you catch the significance of certain details. You'll need to learn to like that centered panel that one reviewer hated so much...it's used for reasons, sometimes esthetic, sometimes dramatic.
In the end, I was disappointed in _The Jew of New York_ because I'd hoped for a book first about people and feelings rather than about ideas. The author's aim (my informed guess here) is to show how the majority can simultaneously fetishize minorities and hold them in contempt, certainly a notion with relevance to 1999. But I wish he could have told me about that with more emotion; instead, we get a range of exceedingly eccentric characters, whose hearts we don't really get into.
Anyway, I don't regret my purchase, but if I weren't a Katchor fan, I might.
8 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Waiter! A bowl of turtle soup...
By A Customer
This book is terrible. First the story. It weaves several different story lines together. A production of a play 'The Jew of New York' by a questionable director (guess what happens to him in the end), a plan to carbonate Lake Erie, and a guy reading 'Lost Tribe' pamphlets in a rubber suit. There's a button importer and an Indian who speaks Yiddish. Sounds inventive. Sounds squirrelly enough for a graphic novel. But the author, caught up in his own casting brillance, forgets to make the characters say and do inventive and brilliant things. Instead they plod. In the beginning you do find yourself wondering if the plots are historical, but by the end you're just screaming to have the book done with. The art? Every character looks like they were morphed out of one base character. It's impossible to tell them apart. Also you should have a good magnifying glass because the panels are too small. It would have been nice if the publisher would have included one. There is also this repetitive center panel that appears every six or seven pages. It distracts and is annoying. The author should have known this. I think the actor Maynard Daizy (a character in the novel) sums it up the best as he discusses the up and coming play with the scenic director Samson Gergel..."The dialogue itself is devoid of humor. Waiter! A bowl of turtle soup..." I couldn't have said it better myself.
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