[[[Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & The New Land]]]
edited by Harvey Pekar & Paul Buhle with Hershl Hartman
Abrams Comicarts, 240 pages

It always seemed to me like mine was the last secular “Jewish generation” in America. Born in the mid-1950s, in the depths of Brooklyn in a neighborhood adjacent to the heavily Orthodox neighborhood of Crown Heights, surrounded on all sides by three generations of family, including grandparents and great-grandparents born in the old country, the entire world seemed Jewish. Even when my family moved (briefly) to West Virginia (population 5,000, only seven of which were Jews), then back to Brooklyn, to Canarsie and East Flatbush, the feeling of Jewishness never went away. The neighborhoods were now a mix of Irish, Italian, and Jewish, even a sprinkling of Afro-Americans, but when the family gathered, Yiddish was still spoken among the adults when the topic wasn’t fit for kinder, children. As a result, der kinder learned to understand, if not speak, just enough of the mamaloshen (the mother tongue) to get the gist of what we weren’t supposed to hear.

Popular entertainment was Jewish, too. The producers and writers behind many of the sitcoms were Jews and even if the characters weren’t Jewish (with the exception of The Goldbergs), the comedic sensibilities sure were. Ditto for the variety shows, where in addition to everything else, many of the hosts were Jewish as well. Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis (although not Dean Martin), Sid Caesar. Allan Sherman sold millions of comedy albums in the early-1960s with song parodies that were flavored by schmaltz (chicken fat). Today, when he’s remembered, he’s remembered for his (mostly) WASPy “Hello Mudder, Hello Faddah.” Song-writing in the mid-20^th century was so Jewish that according to ASCAP’s list of the top twenty-five most popular Christmas songs, twelve were written by Jews.

Even the Italians were Jewish in Hollywood. In The Detective, a 1968 mystery starring Frank Sinatra, Jack Klugman co-stars as one of Frank’s police colleagues who has a brief exchange with his wife in the sing-song cadence of Yiddish about whether or not he wants her to make him a “nice glass tea.” My great-grandmother drank hot tea out of a glass (never a mug), sweetening it with a cube of sugar between her teeth as she sipped.

Jewishness, if not Judaism, was everywhere. Hollywood is still a Jewish town, but the entertainment it now produces is far less so. Even the language of the Jews, Yiddish, has become somewhat catholic in appeal; every schmuck on the street thinks he’s a big macher because he knows a bissel Yiddish. And as the Jews have long known, there’s really nothing like Yiddish to make a point. As Neal Gabler (author of the excellent An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood) says in his introduction to Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & The New Land, “Yiddish is the most onomatopoeic language ever created. Everything sounds exactly the way it should: macher for a self-appointed big shot, shlmiel for the fellow who spills the soup and shlmazel for the hapless one (as in “poor shmuck”), shnorrer for a freeloader, nudnick for a pest. The expressiveness is bound into the language, and so is a kind of ruthless honesty….Yiddish has dozens of words for imbecile, a tribute to Jewish lucklessness…. There is no decorousness in Yiddish, nor much romance. It is raw, egalitarian, vernacular.”

Yiddish is an “amalgamated language, borrowing freely from German and Polish and Hebrew with its own unique constructions and confabulations,” and the people who speak it are the Yiddishkeit, or the Yiddish culture…although as Gabler points out, what the word encompasses is “so large, expansive, and woolly a concept that culture may be too narrow to do it full justice. ‘Jewish sensibility’ comes closer,” but, in the end, “You can’t define Yiddishkeit neatly in words and pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.” (more…)

(Editor’s note: Obviously, this column was written before Hurricane Irene hit the Atlantic Northeast. This was very smart on the author’s part, as nobody knew if he’d have power to write and send it until it could have been too late. Thanks for the foresight, Denny!)

If superheroes existed, they’d be near Cape Hatteras, where Hurricane Irene is expected tomorrow, or maybe here, where big wind is expected Saturday or Sunday. Or they’d be monsters.

I lived through a hurricane in 1963, aboard the USS Lake Champlain – petite as aircraft carriers go, about the size of a small village, but huge among ordinary watercraft. We were in the Caribbean, reasonably safe because something as massive as a carrier probably won’t capsize, but making our way along decks that were constantly swaying. Once, I stuck my head outside a port and looked at the huge waves breaking over the flat bow of the ship and thought, well if I wasn’t a believer before…

Our pilots spent the next few days flying rescue missions to and from Haiti and I got a story or two to tell.

And last May, in Missouri, we were close to a tornado that passed within a mile of our hotel. The next morning we drove through the area, where Marifran grew up, past the spot on the curb where we sat in my father’s station wagon after a movie and pizza, good Catholic kids doing nothing more than lingering. Mari’s childhood home was intact, but the garage in the back yard was flattened. That’s how it was in Ferguson, Missouri that May morning: normal plots of suburbia punctuated with devastation.

And what will happen to Nyack, New York tomorrow or the day after?

Superheroes, I think, come from the same place as deities and good luck charms, They represent something greater than our frail and frightened selves, something bigger and stronger and vastly benevolent that will shield us from the cruelties we thrust upon us by ill fate, cruelties that may be edging toward Nyack from the south and may soon ravage us. They don’t exist, these superheroes, but evolution has gifted and cursed us with imagination, and maybe we can be comforted by pretending that they do.

We’ve done some preparing, and may do more. But I remember those waves crashing onto the carrier deck and I doubt that our paltry efforts will be able to affect the results of the storm.

What I want is a superman to protect me, or at least a father’s hand to hold. But supermen aren’t real and my father has been dead for years.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

Continuing a great and long-standing tradition, about 90 of our top newspaper comic strips will be commemorating the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on and in Boston MA, New York City NY, Newark NJ, Shanksville PA and Washington DC by producing special strips, with each cartoonist making his or her individual comment on the event.

Strips that will be participating include Agnes, Apt. 3-G, Archie, Arctic Circle, Ask Shagg, B.C., Baby Blues, Barney & Clyde, Beakman And Jax, Beetle Bailey, Between Friends, Big Nate, Bleeker The Rechargeable Dog, Blondie, Brewster Rockit: Spaceguy!, Buckets, Buckles, Candorville, Chuckle Bros, Crankshaft, Curtis, Daddy’s Home, Deflocked, Dennis The Menace, Dick Tracy, Dog Eat Doug, Dogs Of C-Kennel, Doonesbury, Dustin, Edge City, Elderberries, Fastrack, Fort Knox, Freshly Squeezed, Funky Winkerbean, Gasoline Alley, Grand Avenue, Hagar The Horrible, Heart Of The City, Heathcliff, Heaven’s Love Thrift Shop, Herb And Jamaal, Hi And Lois, Home And Away, Ink Pen, Lacucaracha, Lio, Little Dog Lost, and Luann.

Continuing our alphabetical list: Mallard Fillmore, Mark Trail, Marvin, Mary Worth, Momma, Mother Goose & Grimm, Mutts, Nancy, Ollie & Quentin, On A Claire Day, One Big Happy, Over The Hedge, Pardon My Planet, Pluggers, Pooch Caf’e, Prickly City, Pros & Cons, Real Life Adventures, Red Rover, Reply All, Retail, Rhymes With Orange, Rubes, Safe Havens, Sally Forth, Sherman’s Lagoon, Shoe, Six Chix, Snuffy Smith, Speed Bump, Stone Soup, Strange Brew, Tank Mcnamara, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Brilliant Mind Of Edison Lee, The Duplex, The Family Circus, The Meaning Of Lila, The Other Coast, The Pajama Diaries, Tina’s Groove, Todd The Dinosaur, Wizard Of Id, Zack Hill, Zippy, and Zits.

Further, special exhibits and presentations will be made at The Newseum in Washington, D.C., The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, The Toonseum in Pittsburgh, and The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) andThe Society of Illustrators, both in New York City. Contact the individual museums or go to http://cartoonistsremember911.com/ for more information.

If my calculations are correct – and that might be a first – the comic book advertised in the house ad above was released 53 years ago this week. DC fussed with the cover dates since this book was published, but I think I’m on this one. The house ad itself was designed so that the production department could easily swap out the covers, and here’s three of the others to appear in that slot:

(Don’t be concerned about Superman having a different cover date; DC had different schemes for monthlies, 8x yearlies, and bimonthlies.)

In 1958 those were four extremely compelling covers. Superman having a new power was a big deal, and rainbow covers always sold better than the norm. “Jimmy from Jupiter” was a very strong concept back at that time, and it was one of the first of the famous Jimmy Olsen transubstantiation stories.

The same thing is true for the Superboy story. It introduced Bizarro, the first super-villain to become an adjective. Editor Mort Weisinger knew he had a good story after its Superman-oriented dry run in the newspaper strip: he hyped it in the previous issue of the title, which was a rare event.

But that Adventure Comics cover was the killer: crossovers were few and very far between, and time travel crossovers were all the more rare. This issue must have sold well, as Mort endlessly repeated the stunt with other characters. Today we’d think that a no-brainer, but back in 1958 it was a very big deal.

So it was a good week or two for the Superman Family. And it was a very good week for me, as I had just turned eight years old and was at the optimum age for these stories.

Even then, my father was concerned about my obsession with comics. He didn’t have a problem with comics per se, just the fact that it became my religion. It was sort of a Jazz Singer thing. But we were visiting a relative and my father wanted to keep me occupied, so we stopped at a drug store next to the relative’s apartment building and he told me I could pick out three. I already had the Superman, so I had to pick from Action, Jimmy Olsen, Adventure, and Superboy. Of course I begged for all four – I would have anyway, but this time I was as insistent as I was ineffective.

Problem, problem. I had been waiting for the Bizarro story for at least a month, and the Superboy – Robin crossover was more important than life itself. So the choice came down to “The Jimmy From Jupiter” and “The Shrinking Superman.”

I chose Jimmy.

The problem is, even though that issue of Action Comics was redistributed two weeks later I never found it on the newsstands. In fact, I didn’t find it until nearly 15 years later, and it cost me over ten bucks.

I told that to my father, thinking I could guilt-trip him by exploiting his deep appreciation for the buffalo. But, as usual, he outwitted me. Dad said that I was eight and I would have not kept the book in good condition and, therefore, would have bought it on the collector’s market anyway.

He nailed me.

One thing more. This house ad? It spawned a deep love for rebuses. A teevee game show called Concentration where the gimmick was getting the contestants to solve a rebus took to the air the very same week as these various Superman titles were released. To add insult to injury, the original run of the show ended 14 years later, roughly the same time as I bought “The Shrinking Superman” at a comic book convention.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil