In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

“seven,” and that’s how many days it lasts); in these moments, it is hard to tell whether Nahai is being playful or just plain sloppy. Readers don’t seem to have minded these blips or Nahai’s occasionally inelegant prose; the book spent 12 weeks on the L.A. Times bestseller list and has been translated into Dutch, Polish, French, Farsi, Hebrew, German, Greek, Norwegian, and Italian, among other languages. Further reading: Nahai was born in Iran and educated at a Swiss boarding school and then at southern California universities; she holds an M.F.A. from the University of southern California, where she now teaches. Nahai’s other novels so far about the Jews of Iran are Cry of the Peacock (1991) and Caspian Rain (2007). For those who want less magic and more facts, Daniel Tsadik’s Between Foreigners and Shi’is (2007) is a concise scholarly history of Jews in 19th-century Iran; if you can find it, there is also a documentary film, Jews of Iran (2005), directed by Ramin Farahani that focuses on the 25,000 Jews who still live in the country. As Nahai has pointed out, interest in the Middle East since September 11, 2001, and more recently in Iran particularly, has spurred a wave of novels and memoirs by Iranians and Iranian Jews, including Marjane Satrapi’s comic book memoir Persepolis (2003), Azar Nafisi’s crowd-pleasing Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) and, on the Jewish side, Dalia Sofer’s The Septembers of Shiraz (2007). Meanwhile, the immigration narratives and tales of exotic Jews from farflung locales just keep on coming: Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (2007) details a modern exodus from Egypt, while Sophie Judah’s Dropped from Heaven (2007) and Carmit Delman’s Burnt Bread and Chutney (2003) focus on the Jews of India. It is probably just a matter of time until we see memoirs and novels about American Jews who hail from Ethiopia, Turkey, and anyplace else Jews have ever set foot. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111pThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay By Michael Chabon RANDOM HOUSE, 2000. 639 PAGES. Jews invented the American comic book, and the superhero in particular. So, are Superman, Batman, and Spiderman all somehow Jewish, then? Well, not exactly. Fans, critics, and scholars might postulate about some essential Jewishness in each of these characters, but the truth is that their creators were unwilling to identify the heroes religiously, and, at the same time, were busy whitewashing their own Jewish origins. Thus finding what in Yiddish is called the pintele Yid—the nub of Jewish essence—in the history of comics, though hardly impossible, can pose quite a challenge. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon achieves something different, and more astounding: he re-creates the history of comics 151 Titles American Jewish Fiction around that pintele Yid. In his gorgeous prose and with an intricate, page-turning narrative, Chabon tells the story of Jews in comics more engagingly than anyone before or since, and the fact that this tale is fiction—that the two comics creators, Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier, and their signature creation, The Escapist, are all figments of Chabon’s miraculous imagination—takes away nothing from its fundamental accuracy and makes it only that much more impressive. The winner of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Chabon’s novel is full of delights, including the ways it links both the ancient legend of the golem and the horrors of World War II with the rise of the modern superhero; its sympathetic portraits of friendship and love, both gay and straight; its fresh and engrossing descriptions of New York in the 1930s; and its tour de force re-creations in prose of comic book issues. It is amazing that, in the years after the novel’s enormous success, Chabon’s invented comic book characters became real, as The Escapist was adapted into a comic book. Tremendous in its scope, exuberant in every way, and excitingly engaged with the history of Jews in America, Chabon’s novel is as mythic and unforgettable as the best comics—and if you aren’t a fan of comic books, it just might turn you into one. Further reading: Chabon’s earlier novels—The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) and Wonder Boys (1995)—and his collections of short fiction, are all superb and deal with Jewish life; but Kavalier & Clay is his masterpiece so far. Of course, readers enamored of Chabon’s story should immediately proceed...

Share