Superman-An Immigrant Who Really Made It
DOOLEY, DENNIS
HERMAN IMMIGRANT WHO REALLY MADE IT!! "If one of the unarguable criteria for literary greatness is universal recognition, consider this: In all of the history of literature, there are only five...
...The court, however, denied their claim to ownership of Superman...
...Long years of bitterness and frustration followed, marked by further legal attempts, also unsuccessful, to regain ownership of Superman...
...American youth could not get enough of Superman...
...and Charlotte Plimmer was still Charlotte Fingerhut...
...America, though, is pretty much as religious as other industrialized countries...
...It was going to take some refinement, but Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster knew that at last they had their hands on the idea with which they were going to make it—big...
...In the depths of the Depression the Shusters had no heat in their apartment, and during the cold months Joe was sometimes forced to work with gloves on, often wearing two or three sweaters and a jacket or two...
...Siegel and Shuster's ultimate protector of "truth, justice and the American way" may share some features in common with the legendary Jewish guardian...
...There, banging away at one or another of those old black upright typewriters, you would have seen the youthful Willie Gilbert, who would subsequently write material for early television shows such as Howdy Doody and later wrote a play with the improbable title, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying...
...For years Siegel and Shuster had been irritated by all the ripoffs of their famous character...
...There the helpless babe was found— like Moses?—in a cornfield by a gentle couple, the Kents, who raised the lad as their own Is Superman an Incarnation of the Golem...
...The best known golem is the one said to have been created in the 16th century by Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, also known as the Maharal...
...the peon in Pernambuco may not know who Raskolnikov is...
...The Golem, written in 1921 by the Yiddish poet H. Leiv-ick, and recently revived by New York's Public Theatre, the golem becomes' a destroyer instead of protector...
...You would also have seen Jerome Lawrence, who would later coauthor Inherit the Wind, Auntie Mame and other plays...
...According to the Sefer Yezirah, God used the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to create the universe...
...Soon the young Clark Kent discovered his miraculous powers—tremendous strength, X-ray vision, the gift of (light—powers he vowed at his dying foster father's bedside to use only for the good of humankind and the deliverance of the oppressed...
...Superman-an immigrant ANb an orphan-uses His POYIERS ONt7 FOR THE (qOOb OF MANKlNb ANb 7HE MLNERANCE: OF THE OPPRESSEb i Last but not least is his doomed love, as the ineffectual Kent, for his female colleague on the Daily Ptand, the raven-haired Lois Lane...
...He came from afar and became the greatest American hero...
...In the end, the rabbi cannot control his creation, and the golem attacks the people he was created to protect Leivick, disillusioned at the suffering unleashed by the Russian revolution, wrote his play to explore the consequences of releasing powerful forces even for the noble aim of fighting injustice...
...But the little room on the first floor where Jerry and his friends put out the weekly student newspaper, The Gtenviite Torch, from 1931 to 1934, is still there...
...It was that agreement, confirming the relinquishment of all their rights to Superman, that the Court upheld...
...But there was no catching him...
...And Seymour Heller, who would wind up out on the West Coast managing a glitzy pianist named Liberace...
...Soon Action Comics was selling like hot-cakes—as many as half a million copies a month...
...A golem is an artificially created person who in some stories is endowed with extraordinary abilities that are used to protect victimized Jews...
...In the last analysis, Superman is an American boy's fantasy of a messiah...
...He lived for those precious hours in his room when he did his best to quench his voracious appetite for swashbuckling tales with an all-but-ceaseless intake of dime detective novels and adventure stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. G. Weils and the latest installment of Buck Rogers comics...
...He was born on the planet Krypton...
...And Albert Maslow, who was to win national prominence in the field of psychological testing...
...The work of "several prominent Glenvil-lites," writing under pseudonyms, we are informed confidentially, appears in its pages...
...Just as biblical names are compressed sentences—Samuel, for example, means "asked of God"—Kal-El can be read as "all that is God," or perhaps more in the spirit of the myth of Superman, "all that God is...
...By 1938, Siegel and Shuster had submitted Superman to practically every newspaper syndicate around...
...IW7 Jerry Siegel was a paradox...
...Now outsiders, they watched as others made millions on various Superman deals, and their names no longer appeared on the Superman stories...
...The year after the court decision, the contract with Donenfeld ran out, and Shuster and Siegel were fired...
...They could no longer draw Superman...
...The idea of a patron saint is ludicrous in a nation whose Founding Fathers wrote into the founding documents the fundamental if not eternal separation of church and state...
...And so in 1939, he got his own comic book, which was soon selling an incredible one and a quarter million copies bimonthly—in addition to the Action Comics in which he still appeared...
...He would often arrive late for his first class and tiptoe clumsily to his seat while the annoyed history teacher looked on...
...By 1941, Superman was appearing regularly in 230 newspapers across the country with an estimated total circulation of 25 million, as well as in multiple overseas translations, the marketplace was glutted with Superman toys and other spinoff products...
...Clair and Superior Avenues...
...Young Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster may have been influenced by stories of the golem from Jewish folklore when they thought up Superman...
...In America, cultural icons that manage to tap the national religious spirit are of necessity secular on the surface and sufficiently generalized to incorporate the diversity of American religious traditions...
...And in 1942, a full-blown flU OU* R^HTS TO superman for $130...
...But every man, woman and child on the planet knows Mickey Mouse, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Robin Hood—and Superman...
...He would describe each scene, and the shot used— long shot, medium, close-up, overhead shot...
...Jerry would try to recreate the excitement of those Saturday-afternoon matinees as they worked together, Jerry leaning close in by Joe's shoulder, as he talked him through the story...
...THERE" TflEV WERE ON THE" 5AME H/Qri SCHOOL NEWSPAPER, fl FWKE WRITER OFllOY/W bOObY A CO'AOTHOR OF IMERIT THE Wltib t TA/E ?2>/T0R OF SEVENTEEN-AND THE creator of Superman 1 In connection with a book I edited (with Gary Engle), entitled Superman at Fifty*, 1 went back to old Glenville High School, on Parkwood between St...
...In some versions of the story, the word emef (truth) is inscribed on the golem's forehead like the S on Superman's costume...
...The industry hoopla already surrounding Superman: The Movie had been too much for Jerry Siegel to bear, and he asked the public to boycott the film...
...One imagines the two friends hunched over the first story boards of Superman, trading bursts of frosty breath excitedly, as they shaped the myth and set of characters that would be their ticket out of the poverty and anonymity of their Glenville boyhoods...
...He protects the weak and defends truth and justice and all the other moral virtues inherent in the Judeo-Christian tradition, remaining ever vigilant and ever chaste...
...By 1942 more than a dozen other superheroes, all more or less patent imitaiions, had arrived on the scene, [n time this doughty band would include such latter-day Olympians as the Flash, the Torch, Hour-Man, Star-Man, Hawkman, Plastic Man, the Ultra-Men, Wonder Woman, Wonder Man, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Dr, Fate, AirWave, the Red Knight, Green Mask and Green Lantern...
...As teenagers Jerry and Joe had haunted the local movie houses like addicts, and the swashbuckling Fairbanks' pictures were among their favorites...
...The notion that a person can create life can be traced back to the Talmud (Sanhed-rin 65b), which says that the fourth-century Babylonian rabbi Rava created a man...
...It was too far out, the boys were told...
...Haflan Ellison DENNIS DOOLEY Superman celebrates his 50th birthday this year...
...But he was actually created four or five years earlier by two Jewish high-school kids from Cleveland, Ohio—Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster...
...So great was the demand for more adventures of Superman that the McClure Syndicate commissioned Siegel and Shuster to do a daily newspaper strip...
...The precise events that came together to ignite a fantastic idea in a 19-year-old boy's brain are not known...
...The models for poor Clark Kent were Jerry and Joe themselves...
...Outwardly shy, thin, unathletic, bumping about behind glasses that slipped down his nose, he lived almost totally within a boyish imagination teeming with spectacular adventures and tales of outrageous daring...
...But Superman shows restraint while often the golem does not Indeed, the golem may even attack his creator...
...El in Hebrew is, of course, a name of God, as in Etohim...
...His shin would be hanging out, his rumpled striped pajamas visible below the cuffs of his hastily donned pants—foreshadowing Clark Kent's eccentric habit of wearing his Superman costume underneath his clothes in order to save time in emergencies...
...They sought to regain the rights to their creation, cancel their contracts with the McClure Syndicate and Donenfeld, and recover S5 million in what they claimed was lost income...
...This golem has been the subject of numerous novels, short stories and plays, even a 1962 ballet According to some cultural historians, the prototype for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was the golem...
...and the soul that they had made in Haran...
...The idea for Superman came to Siege], he once told a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, on a warm summer night in a blinding Hash as he lay unable to sleep...
...It took them until 1938 to get Superman into print...
...For this, they were paid S130, or 310 a page, which they split equally...
...He then employs his knowledge of the mysteries, of kabbalah, to bring him to lifa The rabbi wants the golem to protect the Jews of Prague, to defeat anyone who rises up against them...
...The community assumes he is stupid...
...Though Jerry had never seen a screenplay, he talked instinctively in cinematic terms...
...According to Rashi, Rava did so with the help of the Sefer Yezirah (Book of Creation), a mystical text traditionally attributed to Abraham...
...Meanwhile," continues the story (which although unsigned bears all the marks of Siegel's prose), "a great deal of capital is being Written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Joe Shuster, this story has the Man of Steel losing his memory when he volunteers for a dangerous brain study experiment used for advertising which is expected to bring staggering results...
...For this purpose he hid his true identity behind the bland exterior of timid Kent, the newspaper reporter, emerging from a phone booth or a handy alleyway in his bright red and blue costume with flowing cape and jutting chin whenever evil showed hs ugly head or catastrophe endangered the innocent...
...In 1963, Siegel went to work as a mailroom clerk at $7,000 a year and Shuster was taken in by his brother Bern...
...Perhaps fearful of the negative publicity, Warner Communications agreed to pay Siegel and Shuster each $20,000 a year for life along with medical coverage for themselves and their families...
...And finally—a mysterious bespectacled boy named Jerry Siegel, maybe the zaniest of them all...
...Or at least the adult businessmen who controlled the comics industry were not...
...For it is the youthful editor's hope, through ads placed in Amazing Stories and "practically every other pulp paper magazine on the newsstands," to reach somewhere "in the vicinity of five million magazine readers...
...If Siegel and Shuster wanted to drawSuperman, they had little choice but to sign the agreement...
...Shuster and Siegel now live in Los Angeles and so far have given no interviews to celebrate Superman's 50th birthday...
...resembles the Hebrew word for "all...
...And one that could only have been born in the Depression and created by a generation with immigrant traditions seeking to become "real" Americans...
...The October 6, 1932 issue of the Torch announced with a flourish of nouns and adjectives the publication of a new magazine called Science Fktion: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization, J. Siegel—owner, editor, secretary, treasurer and office boy, which will feature "action-adventure stories upon this and other worlds...
...novel by George Lowther was published by Random House...
...And among its illustrators is a Torch staff cartoonist, one Joe Shuster, In a sudden outburst of boyish enthusiasm, the writer of the unsigned news piece confides Siegel's excited expectation that the magazine will soon be featuring the work of "well-known" authors as well, then adds, touchingly, that' 'until a large enough circulation has been reached to warrant printing, the magazine will remain mimeographed...
...Publisher Harry Donenfeld of Action Comics finally bought the story, but when he was shown the cover drawing for the first comic book—a scene depicting a caped man in tights lifting a car over his head while a stunned gang looks on—Donenfeld is said to have rolled his eyes and pronounced it "ridiculous...
...uperman also spawned a whole new genre of comic books as competitors—even Action Comics itself—scrambled to get a piece of the new market...
...Suddenly he saw before him the meek, slope-shouldered figure of Kent, the reporter, banging out at his typewriter the excruciatingly sweet and uninhibited adventures of his other self, who dashed about in a red cape and blue tights leaping buildings, snapping railroad trains like giant whips, knocking gangsters1 heads together and rescuing Lois Lane—a hero who could do everything Jerry had ever dreamed of, and do it wonderfully, basking in the admiration of women and the envy of his fellow men...
...Donenfeld pointedly reminded them in the negotiations that it was he, Donenfeld, who held all the rights to Superman...
...Superman made his first appearance in Action Comics in June 1938, but Donenfeld told his editors to choose more sensible cover subjects in the future...
...Warner also promised, in the event of their deaths, to take care of Siegel's wife and Shuster's brother—in exchange for Siegel and Shuster's agreeing to suspend hostilities...
...now his creation's powerful X-ray eyes bored through foot-thick walls to expose to the reader the clandestine deeds of dour men...
...rtoutb SOON g? RCACMNQ SflULUoti million, Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization did appear for several issues— and brought Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster closer together...
...They had sold Superman...
...If one of the unarguable criteria for literary greatness is universal recognition, consider this: In all of the history of literature, there are only five fictional creations known to every man, woman and child on the planet The urchin in Irkutsk may never have heard of Hamlet...
...Jerome Lawrence was still Jerry Schwartz...
...Then National Periodicals itself, the parent company of Action Comics, joined the pack and began publishing the adventures of a new character named Superboy, who purported to be the earlier Superman, In 1947, tired or watching others making millions on their character while their own income was declining, Siegel and Shuster went to court...
...It was marvelous," Joe recalled years later in an interview with comic book historian Tom Andrae, For his part, Joe Shuster squinted through thick glasses at the blurry figures of Clark Kent and Lois Lane taking shape beneath his fingers, his nose only a few inches from the drawing board...
...Here was the soul of a D'Artagnan imprisoned in the body of an undernourished delivery boy...
...Like Superman, the golem of Rabbi Judah Loew possesses great natural powers and invincibility, as well as hidden powers to see, corresponding to Superman's X-ray vision...
...Like Jerry, Joe was shy with girls and was an insatiable consumer of science fiction and comic strips, especially of the exotic variety, such as Flask Gordon and the surrealistic classic Little .Ytmo...
...Oral™ /Vij...
...His enormous size frightens the Jews of Prague, who see him as a scary-looking stranger...
...Lane's ignorance of poor Kent's true identity leaves her continually mooning for yet another glimpse oilier manly rescuer, Superman, while Kent increasingly eats his heart out at the third desk from the window...
...After crossing millions of miles of interstellar space, he landed on Earth...
...Soon after Superman had become an overnight sensation, they had complained about the SI 30 deal...
...he first appeared in 1938...
...Superman doesn't have to be seen as an angel to be appreciated, says Engle, but in the absence of a tradition of national religious iconography, he can serve as a safe, nonscctarian focus for essentially religious sentiments, particularly among the young...
...it is now named Franklin Delano Roosevelt Junior High...
...Siegel and Shuster are estimated to have earned only about $400,000 from Superman between 1938 and 1947...
...Back in 1938, beaten down by years of rejections, the two boys had turned over the first 13 pages of Superman, along with a customary release form relinquishing all rights to their character...
...Superman was an authentic American dream...
...In the Jewish neighborhood on Cleveland's This comic book from January/February 1945 was drawn by the original creators of Superman—Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—and was the 32nd Superman comic to be published...
...Superman is in a way the ultimate immigrant's success story...
...It is impossible to imagine Superman being as popular as he is and speaking as deeply as he does to the American character were he not an immigrant and an orphan...
...There was Charlotte Plimmer, who would one day edit Seventeen magazine...
...When publisher Harry Donenfeld agreed to let them do a regular newspaper strip for the McClure Syndicate, he stipulated as a condition that they would have to work exclusively for Donenfeld for the next ten years at S35 a page...
...He's not just some immigrant from across the waters like all our ancestors, but a real alien, an extraterrestrial, a visitor from heaven if you will...
...In those days, Willie Gilbert was still Willie Gomberg...
...What they didn't know on that mild morning in 1934 was that it was going to take them four exasperating years to get a publisher to give the strip a trial run...
...In 1975, the news that a $20-million Superman movie was in the works drew an anguished cry from Siegel in the form of a nine-page, single-spaced press release mailed to a thousand newsrooms around the country...
...While it never reached a circulation of five SCtMe-Fiction MA$Aitti...
...One final gesture was thrown into the bargain: Their names were to be restored to their creation...
...But in 1934 the world was not yet ready for Superman...
...this finds an echo in Superman's identity as "protector of truth...
...east side where Jerry and Joe lived, they did not exactly cover themselves with academic glory, nor were they worth much as athletes...
...They were told to put their energies into "your work with zest and ambition to improve...
...He is the heroic male match for the Statue of Liberty, come like an immigrant from heaven to deliver humankind by sacrificing himself in the service of others...
...He had always suffered from poor eyesight...
...Even before the sun was all the way up, Siegel dashed, shirt hanging out, several blocks to the house of his friend and sometime collaborator, Joe Shuster...
...the widow in Jakarta may stare blankly at the mention of Don Quixote or Mkawber or Jay Gatsby...
...Jerry daydreamed his way through school and went through the motions of his after-school job making deliveries for a printing plant...
...It also appears as an element in a host of names in the Hebrew Bible: Ishma-el, Dani-el, Ezeki-el, Samu-el, ha...
...But in optimistic mid-century United States, it is not surprising that Superman does not share The Golenis tragic ending Siegel and Shuster could envision a future with limitless possibilities and their character reflects that hopefulness son...
...In the most famous play about a golem...
...It's just that our tradition of religious diversity precludes the nation's religious character from being embodied in objects or persons recognizably religious...
...Perhaps hardest of all to bear, they entertained no ambitions their families could tell friends about...
...Here is a peculiarly American myth...
...Its theme is cultural assimilation, according to Gary Engle, professor of popular culture at Cleveland State University...
...Superman raises the American immigrant experience to the level of religious myth...
...What purer or stronger vision could there possibly be for a a great American folk tale...
...A starchild, he became the only survivor of a wonderful race...
...The myth of Superman asserts with total confidence and a childlike innocence the value of the immigrant in American culture...
...If you had opened the door of that first-floor room almost any day of the week, back in 1932, you would have come upon one of the most remarkable collections of people ever brought together on the staff of a high school paper anywhere...
...Tragedy marks Leivicks play from the start The Maharal fashions a huge, powerful figure of a man out of clay...
...America has no national religious icons...
...When George I^owther novelized the comic strip in 1942, he revealed that Superman's real, Kryptonic name was Kal-El...
...On the eve of the planet's destruction his parents put him in a tiny rocket ship that hurled him into space...
...The golem obeys his creator as if he is the Maharal's slava But from the start the golem is conflicted...
...The Man of Tomorrow rose unfailingly to the occasion, wrapping girders around bank robbers...
...The model for Superman was Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., at least as far as his physical appearance was concerned...
...In 1940, a 15-minute serial that aired three days a week debuted on the Mutual Radio Network, under the sponsorship of—what else?—Kellogg's Pep, forever emblazoning on the American psyche the immortal words, "Up in the sky, look . . .!" Between 1941 and 1943, 17 lavishly colored animated shorts were turned out for Paramount by Max Fleischer's studios...
...he simply outclassed all rivals and seemed to thrive on having enemies...
...According to Siegel, they were dismissed as "inexperienced" young men with swelled heads who were "grossly exaggerating the importance of Superman...
...But the two never surrendered their belief that Superman rightfully belonged to them...
...The four dollars he earned each week helped his family make it through the hard times that afflicted the country...
...Jerry quickly told Joe about his newest idea and asked Joe to work up the drawings...
...The Nazis took such a whale of a beating at the hands of Siegel and Shusler's hero, both on land and in the air, that Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels himself is said to have bounded to his feet in the middle of a Reichstag meeting waving an American comic book and furiously denouncing Superman as a Jew...
...the book's final paragraph suggests that Abraham, using similar methods, also created a human being, as implied in Genesis 125: "And Abram took Sarai his wife...
...The high school library where Jerry and Joe once shared furtive whispers behind history books is now populated by black students from lower middle-class and poor families...
Vol. 13 • June 1988 • No. 4
