An Odd Collection of Cartoons Sure to Test the Powers of Reason

Several years ago, I attended a two-hour lecture by the French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard. The next day, a friend asked me what the philosopher-magician had discussed. “I don’t know,” I said, slightly embarrassed. “Come on,” my friend insisted, suspecting I was being unnecessarily evasive. “You couldn’t have come away with nothing.” But I had: Baudrillard’s talk had left me stumped. “I have absolutely no idea,” I finally admitted, adding weakly, “I think there was something about Las Vegas hotel rooms and suicide. . . .”

Ben Katchor’s new comic-strip book, “The Jew of New York,” reminds me of that lecture. It is simply written and does not dabble in postmodern jargon, yet I cannot tell you what it is about. Katchor--whose strip “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer” is published in alternative newspapers nationwide--has been compared with “Maus” creator Art Spiegelman for his ability to endow the comic strip with complex layers of meaning. (Not surprisingly, Katchor was an early, longtime contributor to Spiegelman’s avant-garde comics magazine, “Raw.”) In all likelihood, those layers are present in “The Jew of New York.” It’s hard to tell precisely what they are, though, for they are buried in a narrative that is incomprehensibly digressive. This doesn’t mean that “The Jew of New York” isn’t sometimes funny and sometimes fascinating--just that it’s extraordinarily difficult to follow. Abandon linear thinking, all ye who enter here.

Katchor has described “The Jew of New York”--some of which originally appeared in weekly installments in the Jewish newspaper the Forward--as the “fevered imaginings” of “an amateur historian.” The book is set in a clearly fictional New York City of 1830, a time of rampant commercialism. (“The Jew” may be, among other things, a critique of free-market capitalism: Its funniest scene depicts an anti-masturbation rally at which the pressures on young men to make a living are blamed for their disinterest in marriage and consequent indulgence in the vile, dangerous, un-American practice of onanism.) The book’s title refers not to a character, but to an anti-Semitic play (“in Berlin, they had riots”), around which a multitude of characters loosely congregate.

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It is in the weirdness of these characters--who drift in and out of the book, bumping into each other in the oddest of places and the oddest of ways--that “The Jew of New York’s” real interest lies. There is Enoch Letushim, a Palestinian who peddles authentic Holy Land soil on Broadway, and Isaac Azarael, “a middleman in the Oriental button trade” (mother-of-pearl buttons are a recurring theme here), and Maynard Daizy, star of the play, who comes to a bad, bad end. There are Hebrew-speaking American Indians (who may or may not represent the lost tribes of Israel), and a one-legged sexpot named Miss Patella, an actress with whom the trapper Moishe Ketzelbourd (“but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar”) is obsessed.

There’s Nathan Kishon--the book’s nominal protagonist and sometime narrator--a ritual slaughterer who gets into some kind of trouble involving non-kosher beef tongues, spends five years in the wilderness with Ketzelbourd and becomes a purveyor of animal pelts (I think). There’s Abel Marah, a businessman who feigns his death and flees New York for London, where the streets “are filled with runaways, wife deserters and legally dead men.” There’s Yosl Feinbroyt, who unsuccessfully lobbies the publisher of a new American dictionary to include 600 words “derived from the processes of eating and digestion--a completely ignored realm of human discourse.”

There’s a mysterious man who wanders about in a waterproof India rubber suit--sort of strange, but isn’t everything here? And there are the two elaborate, preposterous schemes: one to carbonate Lake Erie (seltzer was apparently quite popular in 1830), and another to infuse the New World Theater--where “The Jew of New York” is scheduled to open--with the smell of pickled herrings. (The latter plan, literally, goes up in smoke.)

There’s a phantasmagoric feel to all this, and Katchor excels in creating a faintly recognizable, clearly absurdist, almost entirely self-referential world. An editor of the Forward recalled of “The Jew of New York”: “Each week, when a new installment arrived, we’d all gather around and try to figure out what it all meant.” Katchor supplies a plethora of bizarre characters, but the meaning . . . well, that’s up to you.