CLOSE-UP
COVER STORY
RON OSTROFF
Special to The Jewish News
-
Boris
Yeltsin
9
the Russian president, is "a
person of very strong principles,
backing them with personal
physical courage, but with the
very dangerous tendencies of a
real dictator."
26
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1991
Drawing A Bead
On Ranan Lurie
R
Force, he soon began to draw
for the Israeli Air Force
magazine as well
"Since I was doing so
many Air Force cartoons
with airplanes and para-
troopers, the natural back-
ground was a sun," he
recalled.
Mr. Lurie's audience is in-
ternational. He said his
work, syndicated by his own
company, is published on a
regular basis by close to 600 newspapers in
63 nations.
Because of that wide scope, he can't use
American metaphors that won't travel
abroad. And his cartoons are more concern-
ed with matters across the globe than
around town.
"I have a rule," he said, carefully pausing
between words. "We never do cartoons about
the hemorrhoids of the local sheriff."
Mr. Lurie's approach to his work differs
in other respects from his American col-
leagues.
"Some cartoonists pride themselves on be-
ing the funniest," he said between sips of
espresso in a room crowded with photos of
Mr. Lurie interviewing world leaders. "Be-
ing funny I leave to Bob Hope. I would like
my cartoons to describe a political or
economic situation accurately and make
clear to readers a complex political happen-
ing in five to seven seconds:'
He said "cartoonists are supposed to bribe
you with humor" to get across the
A knack for
political
cartooning has
made this
Israeli world
famous —
and rich.
anan Lurie's life reads
like a novel.
A sixth-generation
Israeli, the award-winning
cartoonist was a para-
troop officer in the Is-
raeli wars of 1948,
1956 and 1967. He
has been a writer and
editor for Israeli news-
papers, and a staff poli-
tical analyst and cartoonist
for Life magazine, Ger-
many's Die Wel4 The Times of London
and Asahi Shimbun, Japan's largest
newspaper.
He has interviewed Presidents Johnson,
Carter, Ford, Reagan and Bush, plus such
other heads of state as Egypt's Anwar
Sadat and Uganda's Idi Amin — not
to mention most of Israel's leaders.
Posing as an Australian journalist in
1954, Mr. Lurie infiltrated the Egyptian
Navy's flagship and interviewed its of-
ficers. He won Israel's top journalism
prize for the subsequent story he wrote,
and five Egyptian naval officers ended up
in jail for talking with him.
Not content with his listing in the Guin-
ness Book of World Records as the world's
most widely syndicated political cartoonist,
the 59-year-old Mr. Lurie has developed a
process to quickly animate his art. Since
mid-August, a walking, talking Lurie car-
toon has appeared on ABC-TV's "Nightline"
five nights a week.
"Don't call it work because I love it," Mr.
Lurie insisted during a recent interview
in his palatial home in
(--;//
Greenwich, Conn. "If I don't do
it seven days a week, I'm very
frustrated."
Mr. Lurie said he draws inspira-
tion from the political cartoonists
". of the 19th Century. Each of his car-
icatures sports an oversized head with in-
tersecting sets of parallel lines used for
shading. And somewhere in the drawing is
a smiling, shining sun.
Mr. Lurie adopted that trademark when
he began his professional cartooning career.
At age 16, just days after Israeli in-
dependence in May of 1948, Mr. Lurie pub-
lished his first cartoon — in the daily
newspaper Yediot Achronot. Since he was in
fighter pilot school for the Israeli Air
Lurie's cartoons are
syndicated in some 57
countries and 400
newspapers.