HoopDance

There’s more to Jewish comics artists than superheroes. Readers of Art Speigelman’s classic Maus: a Survivor’s Tale I and II and Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay will catch a luminous glimpse, not only of heroes that vanquish villains, but also storytelling sprouting like weeds from penny chalk drawings on city sidewalks, and the indelible desire not just to tell, but to make you see good and evil. Temple Isaiah Library has acquired some graphic novel examples (long form comics with more complex story lines aimed at older audiences).

In superb semi-autobiographical pencil sketches bleak as the ghetto itself, Joe Kubert’s Yossel, April 19, 1943, a fiction within a fiction, tells of 15-year-old comics artist Yossel and a ragged band of sewer-dwelling Jewish rebels in the Warsaw Ghetto: “We huddle around the burning candle, for warmth, for consolation, for courage…I take out my pencil stub and paper and by the candle’s pale glow, I start to draw.” Page after page, the eyes haunt you, as the drawings’ drama pulls you into their despair, degradation, and raw determination.

The great Will Eisner (1917-2005) draws a bead on the 19th century anti-Semitic forgery by Russian secret police, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, used by Nazi propagandists and the Russians to justify “the Solution” and the pogroms against Jews. The Plot: the Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was finished shortly before Eisner’s death. Orgainized like a comics “Law and Order” episode, parallels to current headlines are inescapable. Visual “chapters” track the “Protocols” effect from France to the United States in 2003. …Recommended for adults and older teens.

Review originally published Ruach, Jan. 2006, p.4.

 

© Val Morehouse, version: Jan 2006.

 

All Rights reserved.

“Librarians much prefer reading to the “infantry” rather than becoming the infantry in a cultural war…”, by Val Morehouse. Click here stand71.pdf

Originally published in Hot Flashes, a bi-partisan newsletter for women acitive in North Dakota politics, 1994.

 

© Val Morehouse, version: Dec 2005.

 

All Rights reserved.

For Kevin Locke, Hoop Dancer
July, 1989

 

The sun is a painted pony on the
runaway hoop of the sky.

Grounded at last. Golden
As old grass headed out in the heat,

The pale skull of Yellow Hair is balding
on the bosom of the earth.

Hear that squaw sound keening
along the telegraph wires?

“Custer died. STOP. All divisions massacred. STOP.”
Blue seeps into the dawn like cavalry coats.

Drum sound. Pierced with stars
Bright arrows in the coulees.

Under a moon cut like a
Bloody saber sliding over the thin glitter of water

Soldiers hoped to ford. Greasy Grass. Cemetery of poles
Like buffalo bones.

Three thousand tepees, ringing the night,
Cones on a jingle dancer’s dress.

A thousand feathers rampant and bending under
The hooves of the wind.

Bell song. Dirge. Hoops red and white.
All will dance.

© Val Morehouse,  1989, version: Dec 2005.

All Rights reserved.