Feline Philosophy

Like so many cats that arrive on a doorstep and choose their owner, Le Chat du rabbin found me. I can’t explain why I was loitering in the bandes dessinées section of a students’ bookshop on the boulevard St Michel – maybe it was raining outside. I picked up Le Chat du rabbin and that was it: the coup de foudre. Only after a patrolling bookshop assistant tapped me on the shoulder some time later did I snap out of the Jewish quarter of Algiers nearly a century ago, where a talking cat lives with a rabbi and his daughter.

I coveted the rabbi’s cat as my personal discovery. Five years later, far from it: the cat’s adventures have been translated into English (though to my mind they read better in French), Hebrew and Spanish, and he is soon to star in his own animated movie. Joann Sfar, his prodigiously gifted creator, is the author of at least three dozen other cartoon books; and this summer his first film went on general release, a fanciful life of Serge Gainsbourg in which the French-Jewish singer-songwriter has a tall, thin alter ego with cartoon head and spidery fingers, and a fluffy black cat appears briefly as Juliette Greco’s maid. ‘It’s very difficult for me not to be Jewish so I don’t even try,’ Sfar said, interviewed about Gainsbourg. His family background is both Ashkenazi and Sephardic, his maternal grandfather having emigrated to France from Ukraine, his father from Algeria. Sfar was born in 1971; his mother died when he was 3. A recent photo shows him with cropped hair, dressed like a biker; but in an earlier portrait a sleeker Sfar sits in a striped suit, on his lap a grey cat with mad eyes, Doppelgänger of the rabbi’s cat. The five Chat du rabbin graphic novels are adult fables set in the vanished pre-war Levantine world where Sfar’s father was born, where Jews and Arabs co-existed in townships of flat-roofed houses spilling down to the Mediterranean. You can almost smell the orange blossom, cooking spices and fish off the boats in the harbour. Through the cobbled alleys plods the rabbi in his pillbox hat, jacket, knee-length pantaloons and pointed babouches, his grey cat riding on his shoulder. The rabbi’s cat is the nameless narrator. He has a long muzzle, huge ears, skinny legs and tail, and a pair of small furry balls which he puts to use on the tiles at night when the household is asleep. He does exactly what he likes and tries the rabbi’s patience mercilessly. They both worship Zlabya, the rabbi’s daughter, a Matisse odalisque as delectable as the honey-soaked pastry that shares her name. One day the cat eats the rabbi’s parrot whose constant squawking has been getting on everyone’s nerves. The rabbi is distraught; where is his bird? ‘Gone out,’ replies the cat. ‘Sudden business. He said don’t wait for him for dinner.’ The rabbi is amazed and aghast: his miraculous talking cat is a brazen liar. Banned from Zlabya’s presence as a bad influence, the cat absolutely insists on becoming a bar mitzvah, secretly believing that then the rabbi must surely let him return to his adored mistress. Can a cat become Jewish? The dubious rabbi consults his own rabbi. In an impassioned wrangle the cat tests his thrilling gift of speech to its limits, finally, devastatingly, pouncing on the truth – behind the scholarly cant of the rabbi’s rabbi is a lonely old man seeking solace in an illusion. The sage urges the rabbi to drown the cat and shows them both the door. What kind of comic book is this? The cat has barely learnt to speak before he plunges into a thicket of argument (all hand-written by Sfar, who occasionally breaks into Russian and even Aramaic script) about God’s existence and the meaning of faith. Argument is as integral to Le Chat du rabbin as the cat’s iconoclasm. As the rabbi explains to the cat (and the reader), unlike Western reasoning (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) Jewish discourse proceeds by continuous contradiction: thesis, antithesis, antithesis, antithesis. (Sfar’s religious schooling clearly left its mark: ‘I love to quarrel,’ he says. ‘When people agree, I want to leave the table.’) The cat bombards the rabbi with interruptions. The world invented in seven days 5,700 years ago? Even a kitten wouldn’t believe that. Adam and Eve? They must be a symbol. No, the rabbi explains, symbols and allegories don’t exist in Jewish teaching, which proceeds by analogy – again reflected in the narrative: the cat ate the forbidden prey, lost his innocence and was exiled from paradise/Zlabya. His Fall is a pitiless nightmare in which Zlabya has died and the cat and his master are drowning in a faithless, comfortless grey world. The rabbi, finding his daughter weeping for her pet, restores the cat on one condition: he must never speak. Jewish readers would have realized sooner than me that the rambling plots are actually deliberate progressions mirroring Talmudic learning. The effect is never thematic or didactic thanks to Sfar’s wit and irony, the magic marriage between drawings and dialogue, and the cat’s piercing knack of going straight to the heart of the matter. The scratchily expressive illustrations, coloured by Brigitte Findakly in the earthy shades of North Africa, are an enchanted gateway to the rabbi’s exotic yet homely universe. Zlabya’s domain is the kitchen, her bedroom and the roof terrace where she gossips with her friends; the rabbi sometimes visits Oran to perform circumcisions and slaughter chickens. But their traditional ways are threatened by ‘progress’ imported by the French colonizers, along with tree-lined streets and café waiters who refuse to serve Jews and Arabs. In the second book, a letter from the Consistoire Israelite de France informs the rabbi that to qualify for his post he must pass a test in French dictation, never mind that for the last thirty years he has led prayers in Hebrew for his Arab-speaking Jewish congregation. Through the window the cat watches the rabbi flunking his test: only a miracle can save him. To utter God’s name, even destroy a scrap of paper on which the sacred name is written, is a mortal sin. In desperation the cat invokes the forbidden word and . . . but I shouldn’t spoil the story. Both rabbi and cat are appalled when Zlabya falls in love with Jacques, a pale young rabbi from Paris who has studied reformist teachings and wears a suit and lace-up shoes. The prospect of losing her to marriage brings out the worst in them, especially the rabbi, who invites himself on their honeymoon to Paris, then refuses to enter the in-laws’ house after Jacques has rung the electric doorbell on Shabbat; his pedantic insistence on strict orthodoxy condemns him and the bedraggled cat to wander in the wilderness, in other words Paris in the rain, where they have many adventures. Hence the title of the third book: L’Exode. Ailurophobes will welcome the distraction of other animals (who can all talk), such as the small stray dog in Paris who speaks street argot and helpfully sniffs out the lost rabbi’s trail – though his incessant tail-wagging irritates the cat. Several delightful characters also recur, including an old Muslim musician and song-collector who travels the desert with his donkey. The rabbi and the sheikh’s peaceful pilgrimage to their shared ancestor Messaoud Sfar’s tomb is interrupted by their animals shrieking like bigoted sectarians about the saint’s true religion. Research in Paris often took me to the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet near the Panthéon, which inconveniently opens on just four afternoons a week. After hours at the coalface, I would walk back to the bus stop via the bandes dessinées bookshop in the rue Monsieurle-Prince. Each new episode of Le Chat du rabbin became the current favourite. The fifth book, Jérusalem d’Afrique, introduces a Russian painter who stowed away in a misdirected coffer of Jewish texts intended for Ethiopia, where Communist spies had reported a tribe of black-skinned Jews surviving in an African Jerusalem. Rabbi and cat join the painter, a vodka-crazed White Russian, the sheikh and his donkey on an expedition to this fabled place; among their adventures they meet Tintin, who turns out to be a racist bore, in the Congo. Threaded through the farce is a running theme of racial tolerance, a brilliant digression on the artist’s need to create, and a cautionary subtext that the Promised Land, when you find it, may not be the one you expected. Most of all, though, I returned to the fourth book, Le Paradis terrestre. This episode follows the cat’s travels with the rabbi’s cousin the Malka, a nomadic storyteller with fierce blue eyes like the Kabyle Berbers, and his companion, an elderly lion. The ageing Malka has to dye his moustaches and can no longer live up to his legendary reputation, to him more essential than survival itself. A poignant sequence of tales recounting his life and death ensures that his myth will fortify his people in darker times ahead. Sfar’s disarming note states that these events are scrupulously accurate, being just as his granny told him. Sfar’s stories delight both strangers to the rabbi’s enclosed world and those familiar with it. Meanwhile the characters develop during their adventures together. The cat, having sacrificed his gift of speech, at last regains it; he now suspects that the rabbi is a better musician and car mechanic than a scholar but has learned enough tact not to say so. With heightened awareness he can see ahead, a discomfiting exercise for a Jewish cat. He even feels compassion for the rabbi’s students, mollycoddled wimps who are prey to fleshly temptation. One youth joins the partisans training in self-defence, against the rabbi’s teachings. They will get their army and their land, the cat muses, but their enemies will always outnumber them – and will they still be pure enough in heart to find the Malka’s tomb?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 28 © Anne Boston 2010