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Friday December 1, 2006

‘Klezmer’ cartoonist Sfar draws with a rhythm of his own

by joe eskenazi
staff writer

If it weren’t for coffee, Joann Sfar might not get any work done at all.

Everywhere he goes, the French Jewish cartoonist carries a small tin the size of a checkbook containing his watercolors and brushes and a little flask — “but there is no whiskey, only water.”

At cafes from Paris to Philadelphia he’ll order une tasse de café, and go to work. A raise of the eyebrow, a tilt of the cap, a wild laugh — everything he sees finds its way into his artwork.

“My teachers all told me I had to do drawings from nature, one or two hours a day, and I still do it today. I’m drawing sketches from the zoo or the café,” said Sfar, 35, a tall man with striking black eyebrows and closely cropped jet-black hair.

“I just did a story about Africa in the 1920s and crossing it in a very old car. And I found this car on Google and I found a little tin car, so I draw from nature. And when I feel warm, I start the graphic novel process. It’s like a sportsman warming up before playing. It’s something I need to do.”

Sfar’s little black notebook is packed with his impossibly neat handwriting and a number of sketches of Americana including a little man with striking black eyebrows and closely cropped jet-black hair waving a pair of American flags (he’s documenting the book tour that brought him to San Francisco and the East Bay in mid-November).

The artist’s water-filled whiskey flask and hours in cafes have not been idly spent; he currently has two major graphic novel serials in print — “The Rabbi’s Cat” and the just-released “Klezmer.”

The overtly Jewish “Le Chat du Rabbin” has already sold half a million volumes in Sfar’s native France and is now available in more than 20 other countries. Like “Klezmer,” it’s a deeply Jewish work that mines Sfar’s atypical Jewish background and strained but loving relationship with his religion.

Sfar was born and raised in Nice in the extreme southeast of France, the son of an Algerian-born father and mother whose family hailed from near Lvov, which is now part of Ukraine.

“I come from a very composite Jewish family. There were extremely religious guys, some of them are rabbis today and live in Mea She’arim or Bnei Brak in Israel. Others were communists. So there were all the debates in my family and I opened wide my ears to hear what they said,” recalled Sfar in his high-velocity French accent.

“I went to French public school but on Wednesday and Sunday I went to talmudic school — thank God I was never able to sleep in the morning when I was a kid. It was quite interesting — they told me that God punishes people when they do bad things and rewards them when they do good things. So, when my mother died when I was three I realized this is crap very early. So I guess I never believed in God. But I have a tenderness for people who do. It’s like when your friend believes in Santa Claus and you don’t want to offend him so you just say ‘that’s nice.’”

Sfar’s painful childhood made him into an agnostic at a young age, but he never rebelled against Judaism or went through the requisite angry teenager phase.

“I love the praying man. I have a deep respect for him. He is showing a lot of humility and a fragile face to the world. I guess I’m a follower but not a believer,” said Sfar, who lives in Paris with his wife and two young children.

“I never had any revolt toward religion. I never ate pork when I was a teenager and to see if God would punish me. I’m just happy for believers.”

Wisps of Sfar’s early Jewish memories infuse his work. “The Rabbi’s Cat,” set in Algeria, is the physical realization of his vivid remembrances of his paternal North African grandmother tossing water on him to ensure he’d return from a journey or always burning a piece of her bread just as the ancient Jews did or, less pleasantly, never leaving any water out in the house after a death because the “Angel of Death would dip his bloody sword in the water and you would be poisoned.”

“Klezmer” examines the Eastern Europe of his mother’s family; the blond-haired, blue-eyed protagonist is based on what he thinks his mother’s father may have looked like at age 15 (and the character’s struggles to learn klezmer music on the banjo mirror Sfar’s own).

Sfar’s Algerian series is wildly popular in France where “the wounds are still open” regarding the nation’s colonialist past. The artist also sees his work as a conversation-starter for the nation’s Jews and Muslims, whom he feels too often act as if they are Israelis and Palestinians while forgetting they both overwhelmingly trace their ancestry to Algeria, a nation where they coexisted for thousands of years.

In America, however, “Algeria is not famous here. People read [‘The Rabbi’s Cat’] as a fairy tale, a fantasy story about a country where Jews and Arabs live together. But ‘Klezmer’ is the contrary: American audiences are familiar with klezmer music and French people don’t know what it is. The Jews are all Sephardic and the Ashkenazis aren’t religious anymore.”

“Klezmer” by Joann Sfar, translated by Alexis Siegel (141 pages, First Second Books, $16.95).

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