Rising from the Gutter: Rudolph Block, the Comic Strip, and the Ghetto Stories of Bruno Lessing

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Rudolph Block published, under the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, nearly one hundred stories that were set in the New York Jewish “ghetto.” Featuring characters including sweatshop workers, schadchens, schlemiels, Jewish widows on the make, and gypsy musicians, these stories conveyed the syncopated linguistic rhythms of the streets, cafés, and tenements of the Lower East Side. Lessing’s works were not published in obscure immigrant newspapers or in tiny editions produced by fly-by-night avant-garde publishers. Rather, they appeared in some of the most widely read magazines of the day, including Cosmopolitan and McClure’s.

Beginning in 1897, Block, under his own name, also edited the Sunday comics section of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, a post he would occupy for nearly thirty years. As editor, he reviewed the thousands of submissions of jokes, poems, and cartoons that appeared in the supplement in its early years, cultivated the newspaper’s young stable of artists, and supervised the standardization of the format we now know as the “funny pages”: the eight-page color section made up of half-page and full-page comic strips divided into multiple panels, drawn in a cartoonish style, and featuring regular characters and repeating storylines. It was certainly not Hearst but Block who had day-to-day responsibility over the comics section and who marshaled the chaotic energies of the early comic strip into the unified, cohesive format that made Hearst’s comics supplement distinctive and would ultimately define the comic strip itself.

Despite his prolific output as a writer and his prominence as an editor, Block has been mostly forgotten. He hardly even appears in the footnotes of biographical and historical treatments of Hearst and his publishing empire. Comics historians sometimes give him credit for “discovering” Rudolph Dirks, the artist who created the Katzenjammer Kids, established in 1897 and still published today. But no one has examined his role as an editor, except to note that many artists at the Journal chafed under his authority—unsurprising, given the process of standardization he imposed on the Journal’s comics section.¹ Bruno Lessing, meanwhile, is omitted from nearly all of the major (and minor, for that matter) anthologies and histories of Jewish American literature. The few that include him focus almost exclusively on Children of Men (1903), his first collection of stories, ignoring the dozens of stories he published in subsequent decades.²

Why have Bruno Lessing and Rudolph Block been forgotten? Block certainly made some bad choices if a literary legacy was on his mind. Magazine fiction and comic strips were not until recently (if even now) considered literary. Certainly, the work of editors, too, has remained largely invisible in literary studies; if comic strips have been dismissed as a serious subject of scholarship, an editor of comic strips would receive even less notice. That said, the reasons that Block was forgotten show us as much about literary historiography as they do about Block’s work itself. For one thing, it is not clear that Block in fact was Jewish.³ Even if he was, he was of German rather than Eastern European extraction. And in response to anti-German sentiment following World Wars I and II, Jewish American literary historians have deemphasized the contributions of German American Jews in the formation of Jewish American literary history.⁴ Block was reticent about his religious background, and his adoption of a pseudonym—not a particularly Jewish-sounding one—could just as well have been a move to hide his identity as Hearst’s comics editor as an attempt to signal “Jewishness.” The fact remains, however, that regardless of whether or not Block personally identified as a Jew, Bruno Lessing certainly wrote about them. And to borrow language from Benjamin Schreier, the goal for a reader of Jewish American literature should not be “to read a Jewish author for his … texts’ ‘Jewishness’” but rather to develop a “literary critical concept of Jewish identity,” which includes the range of different identities perceived, imagined...