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Graphic Novels
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Fagin
the Jew
Will Eisner
PB £11.95
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Eisner, the inventor of the graphic novel format, has been writing and drawing stories about Jewish working-class life since 1978's A Contract with God. This time, though, he's turned to an unlikely variation on that theme, by rehabilitating Fagin, the trainer of young thieves from Dickens's Oliver Twist. In Eisner's version, Fagin grows up in London's Ashkenazi communities, forced into crime by cruel fate and crueler prejudice; most of the book is framed as his pre-gallows plea for sympathy to Dickens. Eisner's done this book in a sepia wash that makes his carefully researched depiction of 19th-century London look both grubby and glorious, and wholly convincing.
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The Rabbi's Cat
2
Joann Sfar
HB
£16.95
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Joann Sfar's beloved, humorous, and wise talking
cat is back for more beautifully illustrated adventures in
Algiers and across Africa in the 1930s. While the rabbi is away,
his cat tags along with Malka of the Lions (the rabbi's
enigmatic cousin), who roams the desert with his ferocious-on-demand lion.
Some believe Malka to be a pious Jew, others
think he's a shrewd womanizer, but the cat will
be the one to discover the surprising truth. Back in Algiers, the
rabbi's daughter, Zlabya, and her new husband fill
the house with their fighting, while the city around them
fills with a rising tide of anti-Semitism. On a whim, the
rabbi's cat, the rabbi, a sheikh (also a cousin of the rabbi),
and a very misplaced Russian painter set out on a fantastic journey
(even encountering a young reporter named Tintin in the
Congo) in search of an African Jerusalem. It turns out to be very fortuitous
that the rabbi's cat is not just a talking cat, but a
multilingual talking cat.
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The Rabbi's Cat
Joann Sfar
PB £12.95
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Sfar, the French
cartoonist behind the Little Vampire children's books, has come up
with a hilarious and wildly original graphic novel for adults. The
nameless, scraggly-looking alley cat who narrates the story belongs
to an Algerian rabbi in the '30s. When the cat eats a parrot, he
gains the power of speech and tries to convince his master to teach
him the Torah, raising the question of whether the appropriate age
for his bar mitzvah should be in human years or cat years. Of
course, being a cat, he has plenty of impertinent opinions about Judaism. That's a delicious setup on its own, but it gets better when the cat loses his speech again halfway through, and the story becomes a broader, more bittersweet comedy about the rabbi's family and the intersection of Jewish, Arab and French culture.
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The Master and
Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
HB
£16.99
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Adapted and illustrated by
Andzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal.
Banned for 27 years and initially published
in a heavily censored edition, The Master and Margarita
is probably the most important Russian novel
of the 20th century. Written as a satire
of Stalin's suffocating bureaucracy, the book has inspired Salman
Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, The Rolling Stones' song 'Sympathy
for the Devil' and the work of many
other international artists, writers and musicians. This classic
book interweavs three seemingly unrelated sories: the
Devil's visit to Moscow, in the guise of a professor
named Woland, wreaking havoc with his companions; the story of
Pontius Pilate and his encounter with the spiritual man, Yeshua;
and the story of the separated lovers,
the Master and Margarita. Moving from one to the other, Bulgakov
combines bizarre fantasy, great humour, and a brutal satire of
the Communist regime.
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The Complete Maus
Art Spiegelman
PB £16.95
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Some historical events simply
beggar any attempt at description--the Holocaust is one of these.
Therefore, as it recedes and the people able to bear witness die, it
becomes more and more essential that novel, vigorous methods are
used to describe the indescribable. Examined in these terms, Art
Spiegelman's Maus is a tremendous achievement, from a historical
perspective as well as an artistic one. Spiegelman, a stalwart of the underground comics scene of the 1960s and '70s, interviewed his father, Vladek, a Holocaust survivor living outside New York City, about his experiences. The artist then deftly translated that story into a graphic novel. By portraying a true story of the Holocaust in comic form--the Jews are mice, the Germans cats, the Poles pigs, the French frogs, and the Americans dogs--Spiegelman compels the reader to
imagine the action, to fill in the blanks that are so often shied away from. Reading Maus, you are forced to examine the Holocaust anew.
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Persepolis
vol. 1 & 2
Marjane Satrapi
PB £14.99
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Satrapi's autobiography is a timely and timeless story of a
young girl's life under the Islamic Revolution. Descended from the
last Emperor of Iran, Satrapi is nine when fundamentalist rebels
overthrow the Shah. While Satrapi's radical parents and their
community initially welcome the ouster, they soon learn a new brand
of totalitarianism is taking over. Satrapi's art is minimal and
stark yet often charming and humorous as it depicts the madness
around her. She idolizes those who were imprisoned by the Shah,
fascinated by their tales of torture, and bonds with her Uncle
Anoosh, only to see the new regime imprison and eventually kill him.
Thanks to the Iran-Iraq war, neighbors' homes are bombed, playmates
are killed and parties are forbidden. Satrapi's parents, who once
lived in luxury despite their politics, struggle to educate their
daughter. Despite the grimness, Satrapi never lapses into
sensationalism or sentimentality. Skillfully presenting a child's
view of war and her own shifting ideals, she also shows quotidian
life in Tehran and her family's pride and love for their country
despite the tumultuous times .
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Mendel's Daughter: a Memoir
Martin Lemelman
HB £14.99
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In what is clearly a labor of
love, artist Lemelman has created a "memoir" told in the voice of
his mother, Gusta, a survivor of the Holocaust. With the
characteristic phrasing of one who comes to English later in life,
Gusta's is a gritty eyewitness report
on the great upheaval of eastern Europe in the 1930s and '40s, based on Lemelman's recording of his mother in 1989; at the harshest moments, the reader can take a small bit of comfort that Gusta survived to live a long life in the U.S.A. Her tale begins with her childhood in the town of Germakivka, Poland (in the current-day Ukraine), and kicks into high gear when the Nazis bring war into her village, destroying an entire way of living. Her voice rolls on inexorably, a stark account of human weakness and fear, tragic missteps with fatal consequences, and unimaginable hardships as she survives for two years with two brothers in a hole in the ground. Lemelman's subdued art gives the story its heart; with a combination of charcoal drawings and photographs, he creates a sense both of an almost mythical time gone by and the very real lives that were snuffed out.
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