Jan Rice's Reviews > The Rabbi's Cat

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The Rabbi's Cat, by French artist and writer Joann Sfar is a graphic novel set in Algeria in the 1930s.

Despite how his name sounds in English, the author isn't a woman. It's Joann as in Johann: John! Here he is with the model for his fictional cat:


Approaching this review, all I could think of at first was cat puns: The Cat-cher in the Rye. The cat without which there is nothing. A feline of valor--although this is a male cat, an un-neutered male cat. Cat thee behind me! And, of course, the cat's pajamas.

First thing, the cat gets his tongue: he becomes able to speak. Next thing you know, he's demanding a bar mitzvah, then to study Kabbalah, and the ensuing theological consternation leads to the first adventure--or maybe it's the second already. The cat is rebellious. He's a handful. But so are the people. All are very very human, meaning contradictory, struggling, caring, and loving beings, unpredictably tangled up with each others' fates.

The cat can't understand why anyone would be a rabbi:

It's as if a cat took it into his head to look after the other cats.

The cat doesn't accept fundamentalist theology:

I answer that even a kitten would not buy this nonsense.

The cat has a wolfish look about him. This is because he's some sort of skinny Oriental breed with a long nose. On Facebook the author says his cat is from Siam.

The rabbi's cat and its model (from the Facebook page):


When the cat once again loses his voice, his owner, in the midst of a crisis of faith, thinks God won't speak to him and now his cat doesn't want to speak to him either. He of course assumes the cat is not speaking on purpose.

This is a serious yet very funny book. The author maintains a light touch throughout. It's not that, when he needles, his needles aren't sharp. They are very sharp indeed, but so artfully applied that the effect is less like piercing than like acupuncture. It is all in the family, all done with absolute honesty but with a substrata of understanding and compassion. The truth will out, and better out than in, should be his motto.

I was excited to find this article before reading the book. It's helpful as to the author's background and oeuvre, but didn't quite get to the spirit I felt behind the words and narrative, barbed though it may be.

The rabbi's nephew explains why his singing act on the streets of Paris is in the guise of an Arab:

Because to play a Jew you have to have a Polish accent, and I don't know how to do it. Playing a North African Jew just doesn't work; people aren't interested; it's too complicated for them.... The public, Uncle, doesn't like things that are complicated.

As they approach the nephew's apartment, the rabbi asks if there's any more bad news. The nephew replies that, no, he's not a pimp, and his girlfriend isn't a whore.

She is Catholic though.

You...you...and is it serious, you and this young woman?

Oh, listen, Uncle, with all due respect, shut up.... No, I'm sorry. Let me put it this way, man to man: I'm madly in love with her, but since she's a singer, she's banging half of Paris in addition to me. So when she doesn't come home at night, I get drunk, and if it goes on much longer I'll end up blowing my brains out.

(My master lets out a sigh of relief.) So there hasn't really been any talk of marriage yet, right?

You are missing the demonic sarcastic smirk on the nephew's face when he made his little speech in this graphic novel.

The rabbi is a teddy bear; his daughter slant-eyed and enticing, the cat is alternately feline and wolfish. Words may be the sine qua non, but here the pictures frame them.

This is my first graphic novel, the first one I've ever finished, anyway. I read part of Will Eisner's The Plot; it was very instructive but I bogged down. I have the graphic novel for Stephen King's Dark Tower series; I read the books but not the graphic round-up. And I haven't finished Chast's Can't we talk of something more pleasant? The Rabbi's Cat may be better, but a key point is I committed to reading it for a book club. It's not only wanting to talk about it; it's that I said I would.

I used to read comic books. I left a stack of Archie and Betty and Veronica comics in my childhood closet, and my mother threw them out. They would probably have been worth thousands. :) There were some others, too, I think. In my young adulthood I had a couple of what I think were early R. Crumbs. One in particular was instructive. Later I hid them from my children and (I at least) never saw them again. I read cartoons and comic strips now, but I expect them to be short. I have cartoon collections but really haven't read them straight through.

It was hard reading words and pictures together. I kept going back to look at the pictures. Then I got going and realized I was just reading. But I kept feeling as though I were forgetting. I probably forget most of what I read, too, but there's less to remind me of the process.

At any rate, mission accomplished.

The translation is sharp.

The book is a movie, too.

I used to say Roz Chast is my favorite cartoonist, but now I'll have to say she's my favorite New Yorker cartoonist. She does get mean-spirited on occasion!

Given that the author is such a success in France, across-the-board depictions of France as an antisemitic society can't be the whole picture.

What I think is so special about Sfar is that he speaks. This book, after all, is about human beings who are Jews. I have heard about the period before WWI and the time between the wars that Jews post-emancipation achieved the ability to contribute to the societies in which they lived, but in spite of being Jews, not as Jews. In modern times such things are no longer supposed to be an issue, but I dare say they still are.

So, good for Sfar.

Sfar, so good.