The Jew of New York [Paperback]

Ben Katchor (Author)

Book Description

Series: Age of Unreason | Publication Date: December 26, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 108 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (December 26, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375700978
• ISBN-13: 978-0375700972
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 0.3 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #124,995 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ben Katchor's picture-stories and drawings have appeared in the Forward, Metropolis Magazine, and The New Yorker. His weekly strips include: Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, The Jew of New York, The Cardboard Valise, Hotel & Farm and most recently Shoehorn Technique. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, was a fellow at The American Academy in Berlin and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Katchor's libretto and drawings for The Carbon Copy Building, a collaboration with Bang on a Can, received an Obie Award for Best New American Work.
More recently, he has collaborated with musician Mark Mulcahy on "The Rosenbach Company," a sung-through musical biography of Abe Rosenbach, the preeminent rare-book dealer of the 20th century, "The Slugbearers of Kayrol Island," which won an Obie Award in 2008, "A Checkroom Romance," a love story about the culture and architecture of the coat-check room and most recently, "Up From the Stacks," the story of a page retrieving books from the stacks of The New York Public c. 1970.
He is an Associate Professor at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York City.
For more information visit www.katchor.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Everybody except me either loves or hates this book, March 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Jew of New York (Hardcover)

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 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting look at Young America's Values (not unlike Y2K+), January 27, 2004

By 

Scaliwag (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Jew of New York (Paperback)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Katchor strikes again! A masterpiece!, February 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Jew of New York (Hardcover)

Katchor seems to define his own idiom. While other reviews have focused on the "graphic novel", "The Jew of New York" goes far beyond this genre, and offers a unique dream-like perspective of Katchor's own strange world and masterful character portrayals.

Each Character is in fact developed brilliantly, and the whole complex story, from its Hebrew speaking Indian, to its gastrically obsessed Kabbalist, all form threads that seem to come together into a single and perfect ending.

This book is not only a pleasure to read and reread, but it's a pleasure to get lost in; to wander with the characters through an imaginary old New York, and see thier lives, schemes, and very human reactions, their triumphs and their pitfalls. I have bought two copies for friends already!

And, to anyone who doesn't know about castoruem, it's a must have book.