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 In 1825, Mordecai Noah, a New York politician and amateur playwright possessed of a utopian vision, summoned all the lost tribes of Israel to an island near Buffalo in the hope of establishing a Jewish state. His failed plan, a mere footnote in Jewish-American history, is the starting point for Ben Katchor's brilliantly imagined epic that unfolds on the streets of New York a few years later. A disgraced kosher slaughterer, an importer of religious articles and women's hosiery, a pilgrim peddling soil from the Holy Land, a latter-day Kabbalist, a man with plans to carbonate Lake Erie--these are just some of the characters who move through Katchor's universe, their lives interwoven in a common struggle to settle into the New World even as it erupts into a financial frenzy that could as easily leave them bankrupt as carry them into the future.
"Visually, Katchor pens this roster of con men and false messiahs with jittery lines that make them seem perpetually nervous, as if fearing that their schemes of grandeur will fall apart in the next panel--which, of course, they ultimately do; call it the art of the schlemiel. Possessing a devilishly dry wit, Katchor seamlessly blends footnotes from historical obscurity with his twisted imagination to create his own unique literary form--"megillah a clef"--that packs a sizable comedic punch. --Village Voice |
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