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.
Review
The Jew of New York will confirm Ben Katchor's reputation as "the most poetic, deeply layered artist ever to draw a comic strip" (New York Times).
From the Inside Flap
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.
About the Author
Ben Katchor is the author of The Jew of New York. His weekly comic strips, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer and The Cardboard Valise, appear in The Forward and other newspapers. He also produces a monthly strip for Metropolis magazine. Katchor received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2000. He lives in New York City.
