Fig. 14, 637K
| Unlike the big-nosed, calculating, money-mad Hockheimers (fig. 14), Diamondsheens and Burnupskis of turn-of-the-century cartoons and comics, Abie had a reasonably full range of human emotions--reasonably full, that is, for a comic strip character distributed by syndicates imposing limitations on the freedom of expression of cartoonists who, for the most part, were already trying to avoid themes thought to displease or offend their audiences. |
Abie loved his family and his country, and though sharp in business was capable of generosity. He could be gay, depressed, or angry, and when drafted he underwent the typical tribulations of army boot camp. On Saturday nights, he played a wicked game of pinochle or moonlighted as an extra salesman in a clothing store. He alternately admired and was just as often baffled by his fiancee, Reba, and her father.
Fig. 15, 300K
Fig. 16, 312K
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The strip kidded rather than satirized aspects of American Jewish middle class life: Abie's all-Jewish circle of friends, Cohen, Mandelbaum, Jake and Meyer; his eagerness to purchase at discount; his tortuous attempts to make a better living and be a responsible family man. Above all, his accent, syntax, and vocabulary placed him squarely into an American-Jewish first generation immigrant, bourgeois, urban, and commercial milieu (fig. 15) "Oi, Gewalt--I'm trepped!" he exclaims in a typical 1918 episode, "It shivers me all over when I think from the lecture mine Reba is going to hendle me", he observes in another. The dialect fades out and almost disappears entirely in the 1930's (fig. 16).
Other syndicated Jewish characters besides Abie occasionally appeared in the "funnies" of the 1920's and early 1930's; none, however, achieved Abe Kabibble's longevity or fame. Among his syndicated co-religionists were a Mr. Guggenheim in "The Nebbs"--a Yiddish expression for a non-entity--and those garment-center philosophers, "Potash and Perlmutter," who, having attained national prominence in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, migrated to the stage, the movies, and, as owners of a detective agency, to a daily strip feature in the Hearst papers of the 1920's. "Metropolitan Movies," Denys Wortman's single picture panels of urban types, included the trials of a clothing store owner ("In and Out of the Red With Sam") beset by bill collectors and discount-hungry friends. In "Gross Exaggerations," a New York World Sunday filler feature, Milt Gross (1895-1953) introduced the Feitelbaum family and their friends discoursing in Anglo-Yiddish (Yinglish) dialect. |
Fig. 17, 172K
| And then there were the Jewish comic strip types in the Yiddish language press. One of the most successful of these was Gimpl Beinish (fig. 17), the Schadchen (Matchmaker) who entertained readers of Die Wahrheit (Truth),edited from 1912 to 1919 by Louis G. Miller. Gimpl was drawn by Samuel Zagat (1890-1964), an illustrator and cartoonist who contributed to other Yiddish publications and the New Masses under the pseudonym G. Holan. For forty-two years, after leaving Die Wahrheit in 1919, Zagat was in charge of art work for the Jewish Daily Forward, perhaps the most widely read Yiddish newspaper in New York City. |
Runt-sized Gimpl was a bearded, top-hafted, beady-eyed, frock-coated busybody in striped pants. His frantic desire to make a living from uniting the most unpromising single men with unattached females took him to any place where Jews could be mated, however unlikely; from the streets of New York's lower East Side to the Catskills, from parks and beaches to suffragette marches. Though editor Miller supplied the ideas and the text for the strip, Zagat's drawings have a feel for Jewish settings and characters missing from the work of Hershfield and other creators of Jewish comic strip characters in the Anglo-American press.
"Abie the Agent," his chroniclers agree, appealed to middle class Jewish and Gentile readers who appreciated and shared his antics as breadwinner, citizen and husband. Hershfield's Jewish characters were the acculturated Jews of the melting pot, living up to the then widely-accepted German-Jewish ideal of acting like "Americans" in public, and confining expressions of Jewishness to the home. This stance precluded Jews' active, visible involvement in largely Jewish issues that would call attention to their ethnic or religious identity in a society (at least potentially) prone to anti-Semitic reactions.
Of course there are other reasons why Abie's environment reflected only a faint Jewish coloration: even a simple Yiddish or German-Jewish expression or pun, a reference to Matzo (unleavened bread) or other ritual matters taken for granted by a Jewish reader, would have required the kind of explanations a strip meant for general newspaper circulation simply could not take the time to make.
Fig. 18, 142K
| The comic strip characters created for the Yiddish press inhabited a more unself-consciously Jewish milieu than the syndicated Jewish types in the Anglo-American press, less circumscribed by the cartoonists' or the syndicates' taboos concerning immigrant speech and characteristics. The strip characters created for Yiddish-speaking, primarily working-class immigrants, therefore seem more robustly ethnic, more Jewish even when they do not transcend the broad slapstick farce that was the mainstay of the comics. Among the more interesting characters in cartoons and drawings created by artists for the Yiddish press serving first generation East European Jewish immigrants are Berl Schliemazel (from German: schlimm = bad; and Hebrew: mazel = luck, i.e., a born loser), whose greenhorn adventures in the United States appeared in Der Tagin 1914-1915 (fig. 18). Or Berl Bedroom, the Boarder; Moshe, the Real Estatenik; Mrs. Piskl, from Uptown; and Mrs. Yederman. All of the latter are characters experimented with by Miller and Zagat before Gimpl caught on in the Wahrheit. |
Surveys of comic strip figures in the Yiddish press yield partly realistic, partly fantasized versions of the humor, hopes, fears and aspirations of East European Jewish immigrants in metropolitan ethnic districts. This once familiar milieu is already receding into a sometimes sentimentalized, oversimplified historical distance. Such studies hardly change the accepted contours of ethnic social history, but the comic strip characters' encounters with other national, racial or religious groups, with Irish and Black Americans, with women and various fellow Jews, may produce unexpected, instructive and certainly entertaining results and conclusions.
John J. Appel is Professor of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. With his wife Selma Appel he lectures and writes about immigrant and ethnic stereotypes.