Superman, Wonder Woman . . . And Sholem the Golem
Lens, Sidney
SUPERMAN, WONDER WOMAN, BATMAN,SPIDERMAN, CAPTAIN MARVEL, PLASTIC MAN, THE GREEN HORNET, CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST ...AND THE SHOLEM THE GOLEM LAWRENCE BUSH Was Mad magazine, the Bible of...
...Sholem has a little less personality than Dorothy's Toto...
...declares one of the educational features in issue six...
...Similarly, the Klein children and their friends have no inner conflicts, no secret yearnings, no social problems^—and no resentment towards their parents...
...Ironic though it may seem for ,i religious comic book, that missing something has to do with spirituality: (he mythopoelic elemeni lhat is al the heart of comic book magic...
...There are no stunningly evil geniuses like the Fantastic Four's Dr...
...I -inn exploits none of the more lurid or kabbalistic elements of the Golem legend, the master-slave, creator-destroyer, human-inhuman dichotomies that have sustained it through a thousand incarnations...
...They want something kosher for their kids...
...Enter Leibel Estrin, a "popular culture" major at Ohio's Bowling Green University (where Stan Lee is adjunct professor) and a post-graduate baal tshuva...
...New York...
...The Torah is so complete...
...That mitzvah usually forms the theme of the issue and is explained in an introductory "page for parents" and reinforced by various other stories, games and puzzles...
...An orphan of time, unspeaking, fantastically powerful, pictured only as a set of huge grey hands or a massive torso, this clay creature has great potential to be a tragicomic, savior-misfit figure like Stan Lee's orange rockpile of a hero...
...Sung to the tune of "Matchmaker, Matchmaker," from the Mad par_ody, "Antenna on the Roof," 1973) Lawrence Bush is the assistant editor of Jewish Currents and author of Bessie, a novel (1983, Seaviewl Putnam's...
...Something is missing mm Mendy and the Golem, someihing that confines it to the "Little Lulu" and "Casper the Friendly Ghost" league of comic art...
...Mendy and the Golem is a bimonthly, full-color production featuring the Orthodox Klein family: Rabbi Yaacov and Sara Klein, their daughter Rivkie, their son Mendy and a "baby Golem" whom Mendy finds in the genizah (storage room) of the synagogue and brings home for adoption...
...Mendy's gang never gets truly rowdy, truly psyched up for battle like The Thing as he shouts, "lis Clobbering time...
...not exactly high-tech compared to his Star Wars namesake, but imposing enough to frighten the Klein family into seeking boxing lessons for their gentle baby Golem...
...Take the character of the Golem, for instance...
...Yawn...
...In issue seven, the most popular of the ten so far produced, according to marketing manager Joseph Kazen, Sholem battles a robot named "Oy Vayder"in "Yankel's Stadium...
...Instead...
...No doubt the home of Melvin Goombah, Roger Kaputnik, Hester Shvester and the redoubtable Alfred E. Neuman was an immigrant's home, crammed full of amazement and amusement at the culture of "America goniff...
...Doom, always worthy of a comeback, or any cverpresent dangers like (he various brands of kryptonite lhat Superman is forever dodging...
...We try to mix mitzvahs and mishegass," writer Leib Estrin, 34, told me on the phone from Providence, Rl, where he works also as a freelance ad-copywriter...
...And no one's stopping the Zionist movement from launching Adventures in Aliyah...
...Never mind the social causes of this phenomenon (too much organic food...
...Head-shrinker, head-shrinker, i'ma success— Three-car garage— Fancy address...
...Where are the non-Jews in Mendy's life...
...motto and glance hack nervously at his hassidic compelition...
...Mendy Enterprises, Inc., is eyeing the break-even goal of 25.000 subscriptions and formulating future plans to create animated cartoon versions of the comic books...
...the alluring melodies of the fiddler on the roof...
...or the secularists from producing Sholem Aleichem's Sunday Funnies...
...Head-shrinker, head-shrinker, Look deep inside And find out why I'm a mess...
...The Thing...
...Doom, suddenly pop up in Mendy Klein's backyard...
...In flavor, perhaps...
...Sholem the Golem's super-powers are not even explicated—another missed opportunity thai bars the young reader from genuine fandom...
...a furshlugginer Reform movement...
...No doubt, too, Mad was sprinkled with Yiddishisms like "furshlugginer" and took satiric swipes at American cultural myths and manners that were heavily laced with the same impudence, non-conformity and talent for mimicry that were the stock-in-trade of such Jewish comedians as Sid Caesar, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen...
...The power of prayer saves the day as Oy Vayder rusts in a sudden rainfall and Sholem the Golem can dispose of him with one enormous POW...
...Rather dogmatically, the mitzvah is the message each month—at ihe expense of imagination and character development...
...Ihe great ideas of Zionism and of the Jewish labor movement, the great events of immigration, anti-Semitism, resistance and nation-building—these non-Torah realities, full of potential for plot and character and SLAM BAM action—arc beyond the pale (rather, the colorful panels) of Mendy and the Golem comics...
...Where are the assimilationist temptations?—(he Italian kids who beat him up?—the shifaes who tease him about his payess?—the secular influences thai so confused Robby Benson in The Chosen?Granted, the Mendy editorial board would not have approved had Leib Estrin taken his cues from Judy Blume: still, the simple-minded mitzva/i-mongering of his characters creates a didactic mood (hat deprives (he concept of Jewish elhical living of subde(y and contradicts the "counterculture" spirit of imagination that I used to most treasure in my comic books...
...Nor could Amalek...
...Sholem, as the Golem is named ("because he usually doesn't know whether he's coming or going, and because he helps bring peace to the Jewish people"), floods the Klein's house with enormous tears every time his feelings are hurt and stops nogoodniks in their tracks whenever Mendy arouses him to action by saying, "Let us do a mitzvah...
...In another lesson-adventure we visit "Camp Gan With the Wind...
...In issue one, for instance, the mitzvah of hospitality to guests is stressed, as Sholem is transported to the Klein house in a "U-Shlep" moving van...
...Yet those children of suburbia, imbued with skepticism by my beloved Mad and other, more volatile influences, are in the 1980s moving back to the shtetl: to biblical names, to unabashed Jewish identities, to Jewish political movements and, in many cases, to traditional Judaism...
...More than any afterschool program or fabulous bar mitzvah reception, Mad magazine was an ingredient for the mental health of Jewish kids and their parents in the suburbs...
...NY 10001...
...Enterthe Lubavitcher Hassidim, for years the fastest-growing sector of the organized Jewish community among youth...
...or the Reconstructionists from creating Tales of Kaplan: or the havurah-niks from producing Egalitarian Comics, featuring Shirley the Woman Rabbi...
...this stuff is a poor man's version of Dave Fleischer's psychedelic "Out of the Inkwell" cartoons...
...Estrin has learned his "popular culture" subject well...
...You've got Mendy Enterprises, Inc., creators of the world's first "kosher comic book," The Adventures of Mendy and the Golem...
...not even in the land of Ihe living Golem...
...in another we witness the workings of a time machine that sounds like wet Rice Krispies: "Zap, crackle, pop...
...Nor do I think Spiderman, alVJ a Peter Parker, is about to shrug off his ;rpetual identity crisis to become a baal tshuva...
...Abracadabra...
...In addition to parodying mainstream culture, Estrin occasionally injects a delightful sense of the surreal, as when I. M. Canaanite, a villainous counterfeiter of mezuzot ("Without kosher mezuzot, the Jews will be weakened...
...Elsewhere, the artist/ writer team appears in a series of panels to comment and quibble about its work...
...especially for adolescents, the lonesome monster is by far the most sympathetic character in the cast...
...Meanwhile, though Mendy lends to be at the center of action (with Sholem hulking at his side...
...More to the point, it is the spirit of Orthodoxy that, for this critic, inhibits the fun in Mendy and the Golem...
...When Sholem is not performing n?tzvahs, he sleeps...
...Their creation is a serviceable, entertaining educational tool thai certainly (aught this amha'aretz a thing or two about traditional Judaism and rabbinic history...
...Sara Klein fixes automobiles, trims hedges with an electric clipper and studies Kabbalah while Rabbi Klein lixes dinner...
...the point is that a Jewish-Favored magazine does not satisfy many Jewish parents today...
...Rivkic and the girls at her Bais Challah cheder do their share of rough stuff, even if always wearing dresses...
...In fact...
...No doubt the founding editor, Harvey Kurtzman, through whose "tiny but hyper-active brain" everything in Mad filtered (so says the introduction to The Mad Reader, published in 1954), is Jewish—as were Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, creators of Superman, and Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics macher...
...Estrin's "mitzvahs and mishegass" scripting and Dovid Sears's simple, expressive artwork (which has become more ambitious and detailed with each issue) have won for Mendy and the Golem a circulation of 35,000—13.000 by subscription— and feedback in the form of more than 100 letters a month from young fans and their parents...
...Still, I doubl that the imperturbable Alfred E. Neuman need revise his What-Me-Worry...
...Mad was as Jewish as most Jews of its era—the second and third generation Jews who were crashing the gates of America with real success in the '50s and '60s...
...Estrin sweetens the pill with a surprising, sparkling sense of "hipness" that defies my stereotype of the hassidic community as being largely cut off from the surrounding culture...
...and certainly an improvement over the classic Supemiansaves-Lois comic bunko of yesteryear...
...Sex roles in Mendy and the Golem are suprising, too...
...Though still operating at a deficit...
...Enter Barry Grossman, for 15 years a colorist for Archie Comics...
...Yet the Mendy Enterprisers arc to be applauded for having the vision and social awareness to recognize thai ihe lime is ripe for a kosher comic book, whatever their rules of kashrut...
...a league ior the very young and very simpleiitinded...
...hides between comic panels while one of his pursuers declares: "According to my precise calculations, he should be 90° perpendicular to this picture...
...Put them all together and shazam...
...We want to teach kids that Judaism is healthy and fun, not a bitter pill...
...true absorption into a fantasy landscape...
...Halevail Gosharooties...
...our sages have said...
...212) 774-4660...
...SUPERMAN, WONDER WOMAN, BATMAN,SPIDERMAN, CAPTAIN MARVEL, PLASTIC MAN, THE GREEN HORNET, CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST ...AND THE SHOLEM THE GOLEM LAWRENCE BUSH Was Mad magazine, the Bible of my adolescence, a Jewish magazine...
...In the end, "the Force," of course, is triumphant: "You come with mighty weapons," Rabbi Klein quotes King David, "but I come in the name of Hashem...
...Oy Vayder's eyes are laser beams, "his claws can cut through steel bars, his armor is bulletproof...
...Copies of The Adventures of Mendy and Ihe Golem are available al 450 Seventh Avenue...
...for everything is in it.' " Taken literally, this means that the secular aspects of Jewish life and history...
...who no doubt could give lessons to Dr...
...Didn't Estrin learn from Boris Karloff lhat...
...Mad, like the above-named comedians, leavened the assimilation process with parody and helped ease the guilt of success—and meanwhile kept the hostile gentile world doubled over with laughter...
...Torah (ruth and poetic license don't mix...
...Learn it and leam it...
...Enter his friend and collaborator, graphic illustrator Dovid Sears, another "returnee" to hassidism...
...The Fleischer brothers, Dave and Max, creators of Popeye, Betty Boop, Koko the Clown and others of tfie best cartoons ever made, are two more unsung Jewish heroes of American pop culture...
...Then I'll take over the land of Israel...
...Enter Yankel Pinson, a plastics manufacturer with decent profits and an interest in Jewish education...
...His article, "Immigrants from the Woodstock Nation," appeared in moment in September 1982...
...But was Mad Jewish...
...It seems that the lalent and ambition of (tie Mendy Enterprisers, combined with the responsiveness of Jewish readers, including non-Orthodox families, should guarantee a long enough life for Mendy and the Golem to explicate all 6)3 commandments of Judaism and keep the editorial board of lour Lubavitcher educators busy for car* u> come...
...Though they engage in lime travel, cattle rustling, rock 'n' rolling and other adventures...
...The fantasy life of Mendy and the Golem seems stunted...
Vol. 8 • May 1983 • No. 5
