The Jew of New York: A Historical Romance

AUTHOR: Katchor, Ben

ARTIST: Ben Katchor (illustrator); Misha Beletsky (cover artist); Chip Kidd (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Pantheon Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1992, 1993

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1998

Publication History

Ben Katchor’s The Jew of New York first appeared in segments in The Forward in 1992 and 1993. The first edition of the complete work was published in 1998 by Pantheon Books. A paperback edition was released the following year. The graphic novel has been translated into French, Spanish, and Dutch.

Plot

The Jew of New York begins after the 1825 failure of Major Mordecai Noah to establish a Jewish homeland named Ararat on Grand Island, New York, an island near Buffalo and Niagara Falls. After much fanfare, Noah gave up suddenly and never set foot on Grand Island. Katchor uses this historical fact as the starting point of his graphic novel, the remainder of which is fictional.

Disgraced butcher Nathan Kishon has followed Noah to Buffalo. After Noah relinquishes his ambitious plan, Kishon ventures into the wilderness, where he meets successful fur trader Moishe Ketzelbourd, who has trapped thousands of beavers. Ketzelbourd collects beaver pelts and theatrical prints of his idol, the aged, one-legged actress Miss Patella. Kishon begins to work for Ketzelbourd, who pays him with beaver pelts rather than money.

Kishon, who narrates much of the first half of the book to Mr. Abel Marah, moves to New York City and checks into the Gibraltar Hotel, but he does not reside there. He has become so accustomed to the wilderness that he no longer feels comfortable wearing clothes or sleeping in a bed, so he replaces his clothes with a blanket and sleeps on the grass outside the hotel. Kishon tells Marah that he and Ketzelbourd visited Septum Dandy’s oxygen-worshipping commune, where the inhabitants adore scientist Joseph Priestley, but were exiled after Kishon slaughtered a wild turkey.

Ketzelbourd follows the scent of pickled herring to a rehearsal of the play The Jew of New York, written by the famous anti-Semite Professor Solidus, and sees the woman he adores, actress Miss Patella. She is performing in Solidus’s satire, which attacks Jews and refers to Major Noah as Major Ham. While trying to meet Miss Patella, Ketzelbourd is shot and killed.

Due to the changes that the wilderness effected on him, Ketzelbourd, who has seemingly adopted beaver traits, is believed to be a wild animal unlike any seen before. Thus, he is stuffed, glued to a “reconstructed” animal tail, and placed as an exhibit in Hiram’s Museum, becoming the only circumcised wild animal in the museum.

Marah attends Dr. V. Petersham’s Conserve Our Nation’s Manhood rally on August 10, 1830, where Petersham gives a public lecture against masturbation for his antimasturbation society, claiming that the act is bad for the economy and that masturbation should be considered an act of treason punishable by death. Meanwhile, Francis Oriole attempts to find financial backers so he can carbonate Lake Erie and pipe soda water to every home in New York. Marah agrees to invest but never follows through. Instead, he fakes his own death and moves to London, where he renames himself Ludwig Hullar.

Characters

•Nathan Kishon is a disgraced butcher who was found to have mixed kosher beef tongues with nonkosher ones. After his wife is hit by a falling tree and dies, he follows Noah to Buffalo and then works for Ketzelbourd. He is a born follower and has a propensity to slaughter animals. He wears no clothes, sleeps outside, and has amassed a fortune in beaver pelts.

•Mr. Abel Marah is an unscrupulous businessman who leaves his family and breaks off his business partnerships with Ketzelbourd and Oriole by faking his death. He loves get-rich-quick schemes but fails to follow through on them. He pretends to go to upstate New York to retrieve Kishon’s beaver pelts, but he instead checks into the American Hotel on Broadway and rests there before faking his death and moving to London.

•Miss Patella is an actress with one leg. She appears in the play The Jew of New York as part of her farewell tour. She is the object of Ketzelbourd’s and Marah’s desire, but the text never indicates why men find her attractive.

•Moishe Ketzelbourd is a fur trader who lives in the wilderness of upstate New York, where he kills beavers. He regrets the depletion of the beaver population, essentially caused by him, and starts to act a bit like a beaver, mirroring the animals’ behavior. He is killed in the theater while trying to approach Miss Patella and is stuffed and displayed in Hiram’s Museum.

•Professor Solidus is the anti-Semitic author of The Jew of New York, which satirizes Noah. He wears a veil and has numerous phobias. He laments Jewish assimilation because he fears that if Jews intermarry, the children will lose their particularly Jewish physical and cultural features, thus depriving him of valuable material for his anti-Semitic writings.

•Hershel Goulbat is the man responsible for teaching Hebrew to an American Indian, Elim-Min-Nopee, and arranging for him to speak Hebrew before spectators at Hiram’s Museum. People are amazed that Elim-Min-Nopee can speak Hebrew, fueling speculation that American Indians are descendants of the lost tribes of Israel.

•Isaac Azarael is a middleman in the button business who awaits a shipment of buttons from a ship called the Palambrom, not knowing that it has sunk. He beats Hershel Goulbat with a stick to save Kishon from a beating.

•Francis Oriole is the president of the Lake Eric Soda Water Company. He intends to carbonate Lake Erie and make a fortune piping soda water into people’s homes. He tells potential investors and customers that carbonated soda water aids in proper digestion.

•Major Mordecai Noah is a man of the theater who decided to found Ararat, a new Jewish homeland on Grand Island, but abruptly gave up. He attends a rehearsal of Solidus’s play, The Jew of New York.

•Vervel Kunzo, a.k.a. theMan in an India Rubber Suit, is a German academic who travels to New York to write a cultural report on what makes Jews in New York so unique. He interviews Kishon as part of his research. He exercises by swimming in his India rubber suit.

•Yosl Feinbroyt is a latter-day kabbalist who believes that all languages are corruptions of the original Hebrew. He collects spontaneous utterances and sounds of people eating and drinking and attempts to add these words to the dictionary. He believes that his transcription of these sounds will bring him close to God’s original language.

•Enoch Letushim is a Palestinian seller of soil. He has recently arrived in New York and wishes to sell his soil to people who want to be buried with soil from the Holy Land.

Artistic Style

Katchor combines comic panels with advertising flyers used by his characters to sell their products or advertise upcoming events. As with Katchor’s comic strip Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer (1988- ), The Jew of New York effectively employs light and shadow. The characters in the graphic novel are designed to appear stereotypically Jewish, in keeping with the novel’s subject matter and themes. Marah, for instance, is drawn with a stereotypically large, sharp, and pointy nose. Distinguishing between the characters is sometimes difficult, as they look similar to one another, but their distinctive hats aid in recognition.

Themes

A major theme in The Jew of New York is the influence of capitalism in a growing New York City. Characters attempt to market beaver pelts, soda water, soil from the Holy Land, lozenges made from secretions from the anal glands of male beavers, a Hebrew-speaking Indian theatrical show, buttons, and Jewish cultural items such as phylacteries and tzitzit. Hiram’s Museum, desperate for an exhibit, displays Ketzelbourd’s body, claiming it is a wild animal. The book is also about New York itself, providing a semihistorical interpretation of what the city may have been like in 1830.

Katchor indicates that human beings are inextricably tied to their obsessions and idols, whether those are money, religious artifacts, cultural ideals, or even one-legged actresses. When the desires of humans become compulsive, as do Ketzelbourd’s desires to amass thousands of beaver pelts and to meet Miss Patella, they end in tragedy or heartbreak.

Katchor’s book also deals with self-interest. Human beings are egocentric and always look out for themselves. When Kishon wears nothing but a blanket and sleeps outdoors, the Shearith Batsal Mutual Aid Society wishes to help him not because its members care about his welfare, but because the idea of a Jew living like an animal reflects poorly on the organization. Therefore, the society attempts to marry him to a widow in order to make itself look good and demonstrate to New York that Kishon does not represent all Jews. The society never considers whether a widow would want to marry a man who wears nothing but a blanket, sleeps outdoors, and has a desire to kill animals.

Impact

Katchor has influenced other comic book writers who share his interest in Jewish studies, satire and iconoclasm, historical graphic fiction, and the history of New York and other cities with rich historical pasts. His speeches on comic book writing at venues such as the Albany Institute of History and Art have sparked interest in the comics medium, and he has influenced budding comics writers and artists through his work as an associate professor at The New School for Design in New York. Katchor has influenced Steve Sheinkin, David Gantz, Michael Chabon, James Sturm, Neil Kleid, and Jake Allen, among other notable figures.

Further Reading

Eisner, Will. The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (2006).

Gantz, David. Jews in America: A Cartoon History (2001).

Sturm, James. The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2001).

Bibliography

Hoberman, J. “Gaslight: Ben Katchor’s New Graphic Novel Is Set in a Shadowy New York of the 1830’s.” The New York Times, January 10, 1999. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/10/reviews/990110.10hobermt.html.

Jones, Malcolm. “New York’s Comic-Book Hero.” Newsweek, February 27, 2011. http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/27/new-york-s-comic-book-hero.html.

Katchor, Ben. “Ben Katchor.” Interview by Alexander Theroux. BOMB 88 (Summer, 2004). http://bombsite.com/issues/88/articles/2668.