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Title: We don’t live in the United States, we live... On an Island off the Coast
Source:
Greenwich Village Gazette
URL Source: http://www.gvny.com/columns/yaco/yaco10-1.html
Published: Oct 1, 1999
Author: Link Yaco
Post Date: 2006-02-28 12:43:44 by Tauzero
Keywords: States,, live..., United
Views: 36
Comments: 1
It's relatively common knowledge among comic book aficionados that the American comic industry was created and dominated by Jews. To this day, Jews have a disproportionate presence in the industry. Some people say that this seems to be typical of any intellectual or media-oriented business in America. Draw from it what conclusions you will (I would argue against any) but the concrete result for me as a child was that my favorite comics were filled with Yiddish-isms, or Yiddishkeit as the linguistic and cultural thinkers would call it. Yiddishkeit (which is the common spelling, but the correct standard Yiddish transliteration is "Yiddishkayt") is defined as Yiddish culture. The first syndicated Jewish comic character strip was "Abie the Agent." The cigar-smoking, large-eyed, chubby Abe Kabibble had a small bulb-nose and little mustache, and he spoke an English accented-by Yiddish spelling, expressions, and inflections. He was created by Harry Hershfield (1885-1974). Hershfield drew the strip as a daily black-and-white and a Sunday color feature from its inception in 1914 to its demise, with various interruptions, in 1940. But that was a comic STRIP, not a comic BOOK. Comic BOOKs really began around 1937, just a few years before the demise of Abe Kabibble. Jewish kids Joe Siegel and Jerry Shuster created the ultimate Jew, Superman. He was a glasses-wearing nerd on the day job, but secretly was an Israeli warrior god. He very much resembled the Golem of legend but with a Moses-like origin (instead of a basket of reeds, he was placed in a tiny rocket) and he came from an alien culture where people dressed in vaguely middle-eastern outfits and spoken a language always written in odd scribbles that resembled Arabic script (this convention was introduced in the '60s by Jewish editor Mort Wesinger). The bizarrely-shaped "S" on Superman's chest more resembles formal Yiddish script, which uses Hebrew characters modified to represent vowels as well as consonants. Hebrew has no vowels. The Superman-Batman comics line, National, merged with the Jewish M.C. Gaines' Flash-Green Lantern line, All-American, to form "DC Comics." DC was named after National's first, and hugely successful, superhero book, "Detective Comics" which featured Batman, who was created by Bob Kane. The Jewish Kane, whose real name is Kahn, played on the old testament themes of alienation, retribution, and morality. In the '50s, M.C. Gaines' son William took over the remainder of the family line and developed Entertaining Comics (EC) into a marketplace leader. The books he created (Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Mad Magazine) continue to have a presence in TV and movies. In the '40s, one of the Jewish owners of Timely comics hired his 17 year-old nephew, Stanley Lieber, who in turn ended up writing and editing artist Jacob Kurtzburg. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, as they became known, worked for Timely as it became Atlas and then Marvel, where, in the '60s, they created a pantheon of introspective sensitive heroes that includes The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and many many more. Stan Lee also retooled Joe Simon's unpublished '50s creation, the "Silver Spider" into the huge hit, Spiderman. The Jewish Joe Simon was Jack Kirby's partner from the early '40s to the late '50s. Together, they dominated the industry and, along with many other creations, they invented Captain American, in the '40s, and the entire genre of romance comics in the '50s. We should mention Will Eisner, who was the first major force in the comics industry. His shop trained many of the early talents (including Jack Kirby as well as the famed Jules Fieffer) and some of the characters he created survived into the late '60s (Blackhawks) and one is around today (The Spirit). As of this writing, Eisner is alive and has accomplished one of his dreams--to publish a comic in Yiddish! His critically-acclaimed "Contract with God" has been translated to Yiddish in a European edition. Superman's main competition was Fawcet Comics' sales phenomenon of the early '50s, Captain Marvel. The big red cheese, as he was affectionately called, was dominated by the scripting of Otto Binder. The secret of Big Red's powers was the magic word "shalom!" -er- that is, "Shazam," which was also the name of the robed, bearded rabbi, I mean wise man, who gave him his super- er-, marvel-ous abilities. DC ultimately sued Fawcett, which quit publishing comics, as sales were in a post-war slump anyway. Ironically, DC ended up reviving Big Red in the '70s. The first, and longest running horror/fantasy comic was ACG's "Adventures into the Unknown" (1948). It was largely created, edited, and written by "Richard Hughes" who was born Leo Rosenbaum. For over 20 years he edited and wrote this and a number of other comics for the American Comics Group (ACG). He used a variety of pseudonyms as he wrote and they were every ethnicity, including Asian, except Jewish. But with the use of about two dozen pseudonyms, he wrote almost everything for ACG for over two decades. One of the last great Jewish comics creators was the publisher of Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella. In the mid '60s, these magazine-sized black & white comics created an entire sub-industry with many imitators. The publisher was James Warren, who dropped his Jewish last name of Taubman. Warren re-created the '50s EC horror comics at an even higher level of literacy and draftsmanship. Warren was perhaps the last of monolithic Jewish figures on the comics landscape. So is it any wonder that comics were filled with Yiddish-related terms and phrases, from the creation of the industry until the mid-to-late '60s? At Marvel Comics, Benjamin Grimm, the Fantastic Four's Thing, was fond of cursing people and objects with: FURSHLUGINNER FURSHLUGINNER, also spelled FERSLUGINNER or FORSHLAIGENER, has two meanings in Yiddish: the more civil "beat up" and the rude pejorative which can be translated most politely as "damned." It should be noted that this term made its appearance in the MAD and PANIC comic books first. There was also a running gag of a character named IRVING FORBUSH. FORBUSH is a distinctly Yiddish-sounding name. And as for IRVING, see MELVIN, below. Irving Forbush ultimately became the star of their parody book, NOT BRAND ECH ECH, is an exclamation which means "oh!" or "eh!" in Yiddish. Although many thought this was directly ripped off from MAD magazine, it was in common usage. ECH is more commonly used to express disgust than the similar FEH (see below) which tends to connote more in the way of disinterest. Even at DC, which was the blandest and most culturally-maintreamed company around, odd phrases would pop up, such as Supergirl saying (in Action Comics #336, 1966, page 4, panel one, "Little does Lois know what gives under my mask!"): WHAT GIVES? This is somewhat speculative, but my perception is that WHAT GIVES is non-standard English, unique to the immigrant's English of New York City, especially the Bronx and Brooklyn. I have been able to find that WHAT GIVES is a grammatical construction that appears commonly in German. Yiddish, of which 90 percent is derived from German (albeit a medieval dialect called "Plat-Deutch"), about 5 percent from Hebrew, and a mish-mosh of Slavic and other loan words for the rest, retains many German grammatical constructions, including that of WHAT GIVES. However, WHAT GIVES is regarded as a peculiarly and somewhat quaintly German construction. There is a body of opinion as to how commonly this construction is actually used within the Yiddish language, but Yiddish speakers, especially from areas where modern German was spoken, are commonly aware of the construction. Linguistically, Eastern Europe changed drastically after WW2. German is no longer a popular language, and few Yiddish speakers remain in the area. The large area of Galicia, once part of Austria-Hungary, then Poland, and presently about half is in Poland and half in the Ukraine, once held one of the largest populations of Yiddish speakers, and German was a common auxiliary language. Neither is now the case. New York has one of the largest populations of Yiddish speakers. Israel also holds a good deal of surviving Yiddish speakers, but Yiddish is seldom used (except in certain traditional communities similar to the American Amish) as Hebrew is the national language. At EC, any time an alien spoke, it was in a Yiddish-flavored gibberish salted with these two phrases (which became an in-joke at EC): SPA FON SQUA TRONT Mine is minority opinion, but these sound like Latin-ized Yiddish to me. SQUA is very similar to the Latin preposition "qua" (as in "sine qua non") and SPA is obvious Roman Latin. FON and TRONT is similar to a number of Yiddish words with the ending "on" or "ont" syllable. Most of these are Latinate. They are loan words from the Latin-derived language of French, and the common French suffix "-ent," is pronounced "ont." To a Yiddish speaker in New York, perhaps nothing sounded as elegant and foreign as Latin or French. EC's Mad Magazine was a gold mine of Yiddish, thanks to writer Harvey Kurtzman and later Al Feldstein, Dr. Frank N. Stein's assistant read a Yiddish newspaper and more yidderish showed up: VEEBLEFETZER Again, this is a bit speculative. In my view, this nonsense word has the distinctive Yiddish diphthong TZ, (as in "plotz" and "putz"). SCHMEK or SMEK or SMEKITTY-SMEK (a sound effect) Schmek contains the familiar German/Yiddish tripthong "SCH" and sounds an awful lot like "schmuck" which is a bastardization of "schmok" which, of course, means penis. MELVIN OF THE APES, LITTLE ORPHAN MELVIN, SMILIN MELVIN... And if they ever needed to give a Melvin a last name, it was often COWSNOFSKI. Much like Irving, Melvin was an old English name that was adopted by Jewish immigrants exactly because it did not sound Jewish. So many Jews did this that we have come to associate these old Anglo-Saxon and Celtic names with Jews. COWSNOFSKI, and variant spellings, are Eastern European names with a Jewish flavor. POTREZEBIE There is no speculation here. Editor Gaines himself said, during a cab ride sometime in the '70s, that this word was Polish for "necessity." Actually, it means "necessitous." Necessity is almost the same: "POTRZEBA." Polish, of course, isn't Yiddish, but the majority of Pre-W.W.II Yiddish speakers were from Poland, and spoke some Polish, and Polish loan words showed up in Yiddish. More purely Yiddish words showed up as well: A dog named SCHLEP SCHLEP, of course, means to carry, or drag a considerable weight. A gangster spoof called GONIFS. GONIF is the Yiddish word for "thief." EH! and FEH! were common expressions in MAD. So much so that when American Comics Group published an imitation of MAD (it has been listed as copyrighted 1950 but it is more likely to have been printed in 1954), it was titled "EH!" FEH, much like ECH, is a variant of EH which is a Yiddish exclamation meaning "oh!" or "eh!" HOO HA! A Yiddish exclamation meaning "wow." HALVAH was sometimes used amusingly. In satirical movie credits choreographer Agnes de Haviland became "Agnes de Halvah". Halvah is a Middle Eastern and Jewish dessert made of sesame seeds and honey. A parody of the Eisenhower slogan, I LIKE IKE--I LIKE LOX. Another Jewish food. At Fawcet comics, Superman's rival spoke a mystic word of yidderish. SHAZAM The Jewish-ness of Captain Marvel was never seriously in question to the Jewish New Yorkers who grew up reading him. Some of the kids who grew up to become major comic artists have said that they always assumed Captain Marvel's magic word was "shalom," the Hebrew word for "hello," "good-bye," and "peace." It was only after following the character for some time that they realized their mistake. But it was an easy mistake to make. Cap dressed in a somewhat Middle Eastern manner, compared to the European circus tights of his competition. Cap had a sash instead of a belt, and his cloak was a gold-trimmed affair, slung over one shoulder, and held in place by gold braid. His metal armbands completed the appearance of a desert warrior. The mystical word "shazam" was an acronym that stood for Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury. The significance of the Jewish king in the starting position is telling. Shazam was also the name of the ancient "Egyptian" wizard who gave Cap his powers, so there can be no argument about the intention of a Middle-Eastern (alright, if you want to split hairs, Egypt is North African, not Middle-Eastern, but it's the same region) flavor to the word. At ACG, Leo Rosenbaum, AKA Richard Hughes, wrote fantasy stories ripe with motifs extremely reminiscent of the folktales of the schtetl, especially as classically written by Scholem Aleichem in his Wisemen of Chelm stories. "Adventures into the Unknown" #168 (1966) featured a story with a serpent-headed flower, the undead on strike, a weeping "Lord of the Underworld," and the "Spooky Soda Shoppe." An alligator wearing underpants, a dull fat boy who knows the secrets of the universe-but isn't telling, thinking trees, and ghosts with attitudes, these where the stuff of ACG. In #158, the boss of the afterlife says to the ghostly superhero, Nemesis, "Real schlemiel of a spirit." The schlemiel says, "I was an infant when the 2nd World War broke out and for safety I was sent to live with my uncle in America." Sounds like a Jewish refugee to me, eh? This article focuses on only the first three decades of comics because, arguably, the form declined after that initial period. The popular art form of comics, like all pop forms (e.g. jazz, rock, film) developed in a few decades, had a brief avante garde period, and then crystallized into a static form. Comics came into being in the late '30s (1937 is a date commonly accepted but frequently argued as some try to push the date back further by pointing out one-shot oddities in curious formats) and reached their developmental peak in the late '60s. After the avante garde work of Steranko and Adams (initially with the offbeat Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD and Deadman, respectively, and then more conventionally with Captain America and Batman) in the commercial comics and Robert Crumb and his colleagues in the undergrounds (Zap Comics), the form froze. Note that none of these creators, not even Crumb, are Jewish. That is why this article concentrates on the pre-avante period. Unlike film, where Jewish artists remained important during the medium's avante period (the '60s were a wildly creative time for all the arts), comics became a gentile phenomenon. This coincided with the commercialization and homogenization of the form that, as usual, co-opted the avante impulse. Comic books without Yiddish became bland hokum. Jewish creators, such as Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), tried to take back the avante garde in the late '70s and '80s but it was after the fact. Comic "events" such as Art Speigleman's Maus, created over a period that stretched from the late '70s to the late '80s, were elegant exercises in what was, by then, a static form. It is also relevant to point out that Spiegelman is an artist who not only developed his craft in the '60s but straddled the avante garde ranges of both commercial comics (at Topps, where he worked with Marvel's Roy Thomas, and the legendary Wallace Wood) and undergrounds (Spiegleman did some underground work in the '60s and remains a friend of Crumb to this day). New York Jewish comics creators such as Jacob Kurtzburg (Jack Kirby) and Eli Katz (Gil Kane) have spoken about the grinding poverty of their upbringing and the fearful violence of their gang-ridden neighborhoods. Joe Shuster, illustrator and co-creator of Superman, was so poor he learned to draw on wrapping paper because his family couldn't afford plain white paper. They have also spoken of their parents either speaking English with heavy "Jewish" (meaning Yiddish) accents or even speaking no English at all. These impoverished offspring of immigrants had intense ambition that fueled their imaginations. As so often happens, their more fortunate children, acculturated and satisfied, lack the drive to innovate that their parents had. Perhaps the children of the current wave of immigrants from Asia or South America will have the talent to create a new art form...or retool an old one and one day make comics exciting again! (Among the many who offered advice for this article were Mike Mosher, John Heebink, Ryder Windham, and Mark Evanier. Any linguistic errors are the responsibility of the author and not of any of his generous advisors.)
Poster Comment: Superman The original movie short says he is of a race of super men. His home is destroyed. He arrives on Earth, Moses-like, in a tiny craft. He takes to his adopted home and resolves to fight for truth, justice, and the American way, a paragon of Talmudic loyalty to his host nation. And SHAZAM? You couldn't possibly get any more explicitly Straussian than that! "Little does Lois know what gives under my mask!" -- Supergirl
hen I grew up in the Midwest, like most baby boomers, I read Superman comics and Mad magazine. Later, I graduated to Marvel Comics and Spiderman. What I didn't know was that I was learning a language that I would one day need to converse with the natives of the Village-YIDDISH.
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Further thoughts: One Superman was of immense benefit to his adopted home. Suppose his parents and cousins had also come along, and he eventually had children of his own? Well, then things might've gotten complicated. And while in the movies he loved Lois, and tried to be with her, ultimately he decided he could not: In giving up his powers, he became too personally vulnerable, and lost his power to do good. You might say he heeded Albert Schweitzer's admonition. Or the whisperings of the Emperor, or of the Ring.
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