Great Songs for Great Kids

parents tool

Memory's
Middleman

FAMILY CONCERT

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2 1 PM
ADAT SHALOM SYNAGO&ITS

ROBBO is Robb Zelonky, whose original songs are
always fun & entertaining - with a dash of learning.

GRAND FINALE featuring 2nd graders from
Beth Achim Religious School and Mel Day School

Optional lunch available for purchase at 12:15 PM
Call 351-5100 to make a lunch reservation.

This concert is made possible in part by the
Sol & Diane Colton 1,'t i Music Endowznent

Chairpersons: Alicia Schwartz, Sheila Tyner

Ilear a sample of ROBBO at www.blanIwtIdd.com

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Fm.relAberEvt...

AUTHENTIC SZECHUAN COOKING

Introduces

Katchor's evocative
cartoons bring back
a world that never was.

JOEL TOPCIK
Special to the Jewish News

B

en Katchor likes to think of
his comic strips as a low-
level commodity.
Buried in the back pages of news-
papers and ignored by consumers of
"high art," his works could share a
display case with last year's appli-
ances and cheap novelties. As for
Katchor himself, he says he's only
the middleman.
For nearly 20 years, Ben Katchor
has memorialized lives of quiet des-
peration on the city streets of the
commercial district.
In his syndicated comic strips and
in four comic-book-style works of
fiction, known as "graphic" novels,
Katchor probes the intricacies of
hidden economies and celebrates
what he calls the "pleasures of urban
decay," creating an absurdly comic
world where remnants of the past
struggle to survive the forces of
manufactured obsolescence.
Now, New York's Jewish Museum
presents the first major museum
exhibition of his work, Ben Katchor:
Picture-Stories, on view through
Feb. 10.
Born in Brooklyn in 1951,
Katchor started publishing his ink-
and-watercolor strips for under-
ground magazines in the early

1980s before becoming a regular
contributor to the Forward and the
Village Voice. In 2000, the
MacArthur Foundation awarded
him one of its prestigious "genius"
grants.
Picture-Stories offers a survey of
Katchor's work, from early under-
ground drawings and unpublished
sketchbooks to the slide-projected
stage sets he designed for his 1999
opera The Carbon Copy Building
and recent strips for Metropolis
magazine.
Katchor's fascination with what
he calls "the economic scene of the
city" shows up in much of the work
exhibited in Picture-Stories. His
early strips for Art Spiegelman's
RAW magazine explore worlds
beyond the door marked
"Employees Only," as in the strip
titled "The Atlantic Ocean
Laundry," in which clothes washed
in water siphoned from the Atlantic
mysteriously come back smelling
pleasantly minty.
His heroes are the "smaller, more
desperate businessmen" — the
owner of the electronics store, the
maker of "toy cigarettes," and, per-
haps most famously, the real estate
photographer — stooped figures
who trudge through Katchor's
bleak, often colorless cityscapes, as
if bearing the weight of their hopes
and schemes.

Idealized, Jewish Past

Often characterized as nostalgia for
what never was, Katchor's drawings
express an obvious affection for an
idealized past.
Although his jaggedly sketched
streets and storefronts occupy an
ostensibly nameless city from an
. unknown time, the prewar build-

***1/2 stars

Oakland Press

of Milford

DINEA
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Lei Ting •

11/23
2001

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(248) 960-7666

tells his own death a year later at the age
of 23. This complex painting exempli-
fies the conflict between religious ties
and contemporary culture.
For Eastern European artists, the
assimilation and acculturation into the
larger world was much more difficult
and Jews continued to endure poverty,
pogroms and despair.
Two Polish artists, Samuel
Hirszenberg and Maurycy Minkowski
chose as their subject matter the mar-
ginality and vulnerability of their fellow
Jews. In Hirszenberg's overtly political
painting, The Black Banner, dated 1905,
masses of chasidic men carry the coffin

of a pogrom victim. The coffin is cov-
ered in a black banner as a means of
denouncing the Czarist-endorsed anti-
Semitic Black Hundreds who were so
destructive during the pogroms that
year.
After personally experiencing a
pogrom, Minkowski, who was deaf and
mute, painted After the Pogrom, . a sear-
ing rendition of an exhausted Jewish
family uprooted from their home who
have stopped to rest.
The works of Abraham, Simeon and
Rebecca Solomon, three remarkable
British artists who were also siblings,
appear tog e ther, providing a running