precocity? His chronology was all wrong, whatever the physiology. Youcouldn’t locate him satisfactorily in time; he was old too soon, and younger than he should have been.
Whether it was his anachronistic moustache I was unknowingly alluding to every time I drew Hitler’s, is a question I have gone back and pondered – fruitlessly, I must say – many times since. But maybe I am just looking, in retrospect, for signs. He made my flesh creep, let’s leave it at that. He made me embarrassed for Jews, and therefore for myself. Which is probably the way it worked for my father too. ‘Where do they get the idea from,’ I remember him expostulating, with a gesture designed to take in not just Manny, and not just Manny’s family, but every household which allowed the noxious weed of Orthodoxy to take root, ‘that to be frum you have to look as though you’ve been lying in your own coffin all day? If the God they believe in had wanted us to look like death, why did He blow life into our nostrils in the first place?’
But my mother thought it was a good idea for me to have a friend.
‘Swap comics with him,’ was her suggestion.
I hung back. ‘He doesn’t look like a boy who reads comics,’ I said.
But then I didn’t look like a boy who read comics either, and read them at first only to conform to my parents’ idea of what a normal boy ought to have been doing. There was something about the Dandy and the Beano , the mishaps of Dennis the Menace or Roger the Dodger, that depressed me. It was the look of them, partly: the skanky paper, the low-mirth smudginess of their production; but also the dismalness of the schoolyard world they portrayed: discipline versus cheekiness, small victories, practical jokes, jeering, every teacher undernourished, every kid drawn as though he had rickets. And then one day, Dodgy Ike, who was always dropping in on us with gifts of doubtful propriety and provenance – genaivisheh was my father’s word for them: knocked off, but somehow innocently, knavishly, ge knavishly knocked off – turned up with a cigar in his mouth and a stash of contraband American comics under his arm. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy: a brave new Technicolor world of momentous, universe-changing action and teeming metropolises, even the ejaculations, SHAZAM! and BLAMM! and ZOKK! a thousand times more heroic than the small-time COO!s and CROAK!s of the meagrely illustrated, miserly minded Beano . I fell in love with them at first sight, not just because they were from somewhere else, and shouldn’t have been in my possession at all, but also because of the architecture of their design – the sculpted bodies, the masses of colour, the dynamic sense of movement, boldly futuristic and yet as classical in their density as any of the Renaissance paintings of annunciations and miraculous births whose reproductions hung in our art room at school. How did their artists achieve that? How were they able to appropriate everything, apparently so effortlessly? What was the secret of their pictorial plunder? Although I wouldn’t have put it to myself in quite this way, I recognised (correctly, as it turned out) something Jewish in them – Dodgy Ike Jewish, a bit genaivisheh in the knavish sense, full of spirited immigrant johnny-come-lately razzamatazz, and thus the antithesis to what the English expected of an illustrator of comics.
Did that explain the anti-American sentiment of the careful Gentile world in which I grew up? Was that why our teachers were always warning us off American movies and music and bubblegum, and would have confiscated my Superman comics had I brought them to school – because what they really didn’t like about America was its Jewishness?
Without doubt, some of this anti-Americanism rubbed off on me. Even though I was so smitten by Lois Lane I would draw her in the arms of someone bearing a striking resemblance to me just before I went to sleep, and so envied Superman his X-ray
Whether it was his anachronistic moustache I was unknowingly alluding to every time I drew Hitler’s, is a question I have gone back and pondered – fruitlessly, I must say – many times since. But maybe I am just looking, in retrospect, for signs. He made my flesh creep, let’s leave it at that. He made me embarrassed for Jews, and therefore for myself. Which is probably the way it worked for my father too. ‘Where do they get the idea from,’ I remember him expostulating, with a gesture designed to take in not just Manny, and not just Manny’s family, but every household which allowed the noxious weed of Orthodoxy to take root, ‘that to be frum you have to look as though you’ve been lying in your own coffin all day? If the God they believe in had wanted us to look like death, why did He blow life into our nostrils in the first place?’
But my mother thought it was a good idea for me to have a friend.
‘Swap comics with him,’ was her suggestion.
I hung back. ‘He doesn’t look like a boy who reads comics,’ I said.
But then I didn’t look like a boy who read comics either, and read them at first only to conform to my parents’ idea of what a normal boy ought to have been doing. There was something about the Dandy and the Beano , the mishaps of Dennis the Menace or Roger the Dodger, that depressed me. It was the look of them, partly: the skanky paper, the low-mirth smudginess of their production; but also the dismalness of the schoolyard world they portrayed: discipline versus cheekiness, small victories, practical jokes, jeering, every teacher undernourished, every kid drawn as though he had rickets. And then one day, Dodgy Ike, who was always dropping in on us with gifts of doubtful propriety and provenance – genaivisheh was my father’s word for them: knocked off, but somehow innocently, knavishly, ge knavishly knocked off – turned up with a cigar in his mouth and a stash of contraband American comics under his arm. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy: a brave new Technicolor world of momentous, universe-changing action and teeming metropolises, even the ejaculations, SHAZAM! and BLAMM! and ZOKK! a thousand times more heroic than the small-time COO!s and CROAK!s of the meagrely illustrated, miserly minded Beano . I fell in love with them at first sight, not just because they were from somewhere else, and shouldn’t have been in my possession at all, but also because of the architecture of their design – the sculpted bodies, the masses of colour, the dynamic sense of movement, boldly futuristic and yet as classical in their density as any of the Renaissance paintings of annunciations and miraculous births whose reproductions hung in our art room at school. How did their artists achieve that? How were they able to appropriate everything, apparently so effortlessly? What was the secret of their pictorial plunder? Although I wouldn’t have put it to myself in quite this way, I recognised (correctly, as it turned out) something Jewish in them – Dodgy Ike Jewish, a bit genaivisheh in the knavish sense, full of spirited immigrant johnny-come-lately razzamatazz, and thus the antithesis to what the English expected of an illustrator of comics.
Did that explain the anti-American sentiment of the careful Gentile world in which I grew up? Was that why our teachers were always warning us off American movies and music and bubblegum, and would have confiscated my Superman comics had I brought them to school – because what they really didn’t like about America was its Jewishness?
Without doubt, some of this anti-Americanism rubbed off on me. Even though I was so smitten by Lois Lane I would draw her in the arms of someone bearing a striking resemblance to me just before I went to sleep, and so envied Superman his X-ray
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