Joann Sfar's graphic novel, The Rabbi's Cat, is a complex picture of people negotiating tradition and modernity. As Sfar has the character comment, "Playing a north African Jew just doesn't work, people aren't interested in it, it's too complicated. The public (the audience), Uncle, doesn't like things that are complicated" (122). Nevertheless, he contradicts this in this wonderful graphic novel, soon to be on the screen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPtZOUr0Ctc). Sfar presents the complicated relationships of living in 1930s Algeria with the colonial mirage of Paris in the background.
In some perspectives on post-colonial literature, such as Achebe or Ngugi, there is the assertion that one cannot truly express the experience of a people who have endured colonization in the language of the colonizer. The writer is inherently compromised by the expression of the language of power. However, in a graphic novel, he draws in his own language and his own perceptions of the complicated life the Rabbi and his cat live in Algeria, as Jews, with Paris in the cultural background. The Rabbi shows the reader how tradition and modernity, colonized and colonizer, negotiate a livable peace. One poignant example is taking the "dictation" to stay the official Rabbi of the community. In order to keep a position he has occupied for thirty years, he has to study La Fontaine et cetera, and pass the test in French. The Cat knows his cannot do it, and sacrifices his ability to speak so that the Rabbi can experience and miracle and pass the test. The Cat, despite his cynicism, his curiosity, and his pragmatism, believes so firmly that justice should be done to his beloved master, that he will give up his most precious gift for that justice.
Equally poignant, and utterly believably, Sfar gives us gentle examples of people just getting along in everyday life. Certainly Muslims and Jews have had a great deal of strife in North Africa, but Sfar has the unhappy Rabbi Abraham meet up with and old Arab on the road to visit a saint holy to both Jews and Muslims. The Rabbi and his traveling companion have a great time talking, singing, and dancing. The Cat and the Donkey get into an argument that merely underscores how really people are people and should just get along because they have more in common than in opposition.
But what I love most about this graphic novel is the Cat. He is irreverent, pragmatic, and sometimes gauche, but his is also loyal, affectionate, and downright cute. The clever dialog that Sfar gives to the animal occupants of this graphic novel is some of the best dialog in the text. He draws The Cat in multiple styles, and each time The Cat appears, his artistic morphing expresses his emotions. Pages 92-93 show The Cat in several levels of anxiety because his mistress is getting married, and Sfar puts him through realism, expressionism, and surrealism in expressing the feline's anxiety.
The text is complicated, the pictures are detailed, and the themes are critical yet delicately dealt with. Every human being in this novel suffers a certain amount of identity crisis, except The Cat. The Cat knows who his is.
