Walker in the Imagined City (Page 3)

But wait, there's something funny here, and (if it's not redundant to say so) altogether Yiddish. As in Cheap Novelties, the crank theories of older men about sexual hygiene offer insiders direct analogies to the fervently Marxist theories of the autodidact Jews of Katchor's father's generation: They've got it all worked out, a near-cryptic science of something-or-other, and now, if only the world would listen....

This is not so much a satire of these generations and their ideas as it is an oblique, poetic comment on their world in dialogue and drawing, a sort of displacement that nevertheless sums (or summons) up the original. Today's eldest left-wing Yiddish pedagogue, Itche Goldberg, who at 96 is still editing the bimonthly Yiddish Kultur from a little Manhattan office, once analyzed the paradoxical Jewish nostalgia for roots in the era of a rebellious break from older generations, resulting in what Katchor calls "remembering remembering." The recurrent impulse triggered by a semiconscious questioning of self-identity or self-location outside the bounds of either religion or nationalism thus finds its latest Dante in Julius Knipl. If Cynthia Ozick was not altogether wrong in a CUNY forum last year to describe the revived interest in Yiddish as a "betrayal" of Jewish causes (her Jewish causes, that is), it's because something vernacular taps feelings of Jewishness a lot more accessible in Seinfeld than in the synagogue. And you don't even have to be Jewish for the yearning, although it surely helps.

Dwellers in today's nineteenth-century cities, Katchor avows, can still drink in the ambience of the vanished automats, where the coffee called for an iron stomach but the conversation lasted forever; or revive visits to small shops whose very merchandise was a mystery. If this is a dream world, then more and more apparently want to join it. Reminding us that George Herriman's Krazy Kat was made into a ballet during the twenties, Katchor's strip "The Carbon Copy Building," is now an opera with his own libretto, which premiered in Italy and recently played, fittingly, in the former factory town of North Adams, Massachusetts. If this is an emerging public art, then perhaps in some alternative universe, everything is Katchoresque. It's a nice thought, hopeful in the way that André Breton used to promise his followers that someday Surrealism would abolish the barriers between sleeping and being awake. That imaginative leap demanded something beyond socialism, but Katchor's world surely bears a rather stronger resemblance to the old romantic phrase rarely heard these days, "When you're in love, the whole world is Jewish."

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