a superhero from the shtetl

8/13/2019 A Superhero from the Shtetl

1/6

THE JERUSALEM REPORT DECEMBER 30, 201338

Culture R epor tSports Books Film Architecture Music

A superhero fr


2/6

THE JERUSALEM REPORT DECEMBER 30, 2013 39rom the shtetl

C A R L O

A L E G R I / R E U T E R S


3/6


SUPERMAN WAS born light years awayas the last scion of a learned elite on the dy-ing planet of Krypton, with its two moons,scorching red sun and menagerie of fantasticcreatures. Or so comic book lore has it.

In reality, he saw the light of day righthere on Earth, during the Great Depression,in the Yiddishkeit milieu of a hardscrabbleJewish area of Cleveland, Ohio, with itsOrthodox synagogues, kosher butchers andYiddish theaters. Nor was his real father Jor-El, a wise Kryptonite scientist; it was Jerome(Jerry) Siegel and Joe Shuster, two shy, mal-adjusted Jewish kids who loved pulp ctionand comic strips.

Superman is the archetypal all-Americanhero an orphaned immigrant (literally,an alien called Kal-El) who arrives from

the ravages of his birthplace, embraces theAmerican Dream, and remakes both hisown destiny and that of his adopted home-land. Hes also the quintessential comic booksuperhero, blazing a trail for Spider-Man,Batman, Iron Man, and all the rest of theever-growing pantheon of angst-ridden andtortured souls with a penchant for vigilan-te-style justice and world-saving heroics.

Yet despite his impeccably Anglo-Saxonlooks, the Man of Steel is profoundly Jew-ish or so some Superman folklorists be-lieve. Like Moses, hes saved from certaindeath by being sent to an unknown fate ina tiny spacecraft, a futuristic reed basketof sorts, to wind up in a foreign land wherehes adopted by kindly strangers and takeson a transformative role by becoming a mes-sianic gure. And, as many Jews have feltcompelled to do throughout the ages, Kal-El hides his real identity behind a carefullymaintained public persona Clark Kent, amild-mannered journalist and brainy mis twith an Anglicized name.

Clark Kent was Superman trying to as-similate, insists Larry Tye, an American

journalist and author, in his rst-rate popularhistory, Superman: The High-Flying Histo-ry of Americas Most Enduring Hero. Su-

perman, Tye argues, was the ultimate for-eigner, escaping to the US from his interga-lactic shtetl and shedding his Jewish name.His very birth name, Kal-El, is reminiscentof biblical Hebrew and is routinely rendered

by fans as the voice of God.The three legs of the Superman myth

truth, justice, and the American way arestraight out of the Mishna, [which explainsthat] The world endures on three things: jus-tice, truth and peace, Tye posits. The ex-

plosion of Krypton conjures up images fromthe mystical Kabbalah, where the divine

vessel was shattered and Jews were calledon to perform tikkun ha-olam by repairingthe vessel and the world.

That may sound like exegetical overreach, but even the Nazis recognized the Man ofSteels suspiciously Jewish cosmopolitan-ism. In an article on April 25, 1940, the SSmouthpiece, Das Schwarze Korps, labeledSiegel a crafty Israelite, who was usingSuperman as a tool to corrupt Americanyouth. Siegel, who said he had used the Bi-

bles Samson as a model for Superman, was pleased his creation had got under the Nazisskin.

Just as the granddaddy of superheroesis enjoying a renaissance in print and onscreen, so has the picaresque true story ofhis two young creators come under renewedattention. Arriving hard on the heels of Tyeshistory is Cleveland native and Case West-ern Reserve University teacher Brad RiccasSuper Boys: The Amazing Adventures ofJerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, an equallythorough biography.

Whereas Tye bestows on us a biographerskeen-eyed account of the two precociousJewish artists exploits, Ricca takes us on aminutely documented, imaginative, and attimes fanciful, grand tour of their lives. Tyesticks to the facts. Ricca resorts to frequent

bouts of poetic license in trying to bring Sie-gel and Shuster to life.

Both authors tread familiar ground. Butafter perusing reams of contemporary newsreports and interviewing scores of insiders,theyve dug up plenty of telling and deliciousdetail. Together, the two books make for anexhaustive, de nitive history. And what agreat story they have to tell.

Jerome Siegel was the youngest of sixchildren of a hard-up Jewish immigrant, atailor from Lithuania, who eked out a living

with his secondhand clothing store in Cleve-lands predominantly Jewish neighborhoodof Glenville. Siegel was a middling studentand a bit of an outcast with a giant-sized in-feriority complex, as he later recalled. Buthe loved telling stories. Like many a teen

boy before and since, Siegel sought solacein an escapist fantasy world, in which an of-ten-mocked bookish kid with a febrile imag-ination could come into his own.

In 1929, when he was just 15, Siegel began publishing, pseudonymously, typewritten booklets of his science- ction stories withtitles like Cosmic Stories and Guests ofthe Earth, and lots of exclamation marks foremphasis.

A year later, Siegel met Joe Shuster. TheCanadian-born Jewish kid, who had relocat-ed to Cleveland with his parents, set out toillustrate a comic strip about Jerry the jour-nalist for another schools newspaper. The

budding illustrator, too, was born in 1914and the son of a penniless Jewish tailor andimmigrant, originally from the Netherlands.

Books

In creating Supermans universe, Jerry Siegel and JoeShuster found inspiration in their heartbreaks, failuresand daily travails By Tibor Krausz


4/6


5/6


Books

swimmer-turned-actor who played Tarzanon screen in the eras blockbusters, and usedphysical tness magazines as a visual en -cyclopedia for Supermans physique, Riccasays. The S in the diamond-shaped creston Supermans chest didnt, as commonly

believed, stand for the newly minted herosname. Rather, in an inside joke, it referredto the shared rst letter of Joes and Jerryslast names.

SUPERMAN WASNT an instant hit. Faced by a string of rejections from publishers,Siegel and Shuster made ends meet by col-lecting empty milk bottles for resale to shopsand hawking ice cream. Then, at long last, inJune 1938, Superman appeared to the publicas a tough-talking bruiser in a 13-page coverstory in the rst issue of the newly launcheddime-a-copy Action Comics. The elementsthat Siegel and Shuster adopted into thiscomic strip set the pace for virtually every-thing to come afterward, Jim Steranko, a

prominent graphic artist who was born thatsame year, has noted.

This early Superman was a hell-rais-er and an insurrectionist [who didnt care]about laws or social niceties, Tye explains.Half Huckleberry Finn, half Robin Hood,he had a technique as straightforward and a

purpose as pure as those of his teenage truth-and-justice-seeking creators.

Siegels prose could be clunky, and Shus-ters drawings clumsy. But most young read-ers didnt mind; they fell in love with Super-

man at rst sight. By issue #16 a few monthslater, sales of the new magazine had risen toover 600,000 copies thanks to Supermansongoing adventures. Real-life heroes like

baseball legend Joe DiMaggio became stal-wart Superman buffs.

Within a few months, the Man of Steel hadhis own nationally syndicated daily newspa-

per strip and, a year later, his own serializedcomic book. Soon, 30 million Americanswere reading Superman stories regularly.In time, Superman would conquer radio air-waves, television screens and the movies aswell.

The Man of Steels runaway success camecourtesy of another unlikely pair, a real-lifeLaurel and Hardy duo: Jack Liebowitz, alanky and aloof Ukrainian Jewish refugeewho lived by his wits on the mean streets of

New Yorks Lower East Side; and his pub-lishing partner, Harry Donenfeld, a squat,gregarious, wheeling-dealing RomanianJew who had once faced trial for publishingrisqu images of women in his magazines

and was chummy with the mobster FrankCostello. The partners, whose slicked-backhair and unctuous smiles made them looklike the scoundrels in that rst Supermanstory, were pros in printing and deliveringmagazines, Tye notes.

They were also pros as smooth operators.The two owners of DC Comics got the naveyoung artists to sign over all the rights totheir creation for the princely sum of $130.Siegel and Shuster would continue to churnout Superman stories on a work-for-hire ba-sis, helping ne-tune their hero and roundout his biography, but it would be Donen-feld and Liebowitz, founders of legendaryDC Comics, Inc., who would rake in the big

bucks from Superman.And big bucks there were. From 1940 on-

wards, Supermania took off and soared,like its protagonist: Up, up and away!In each medium, from radio shows to ani-mated features to matinee serials to movie

blockbusters, it was enterprising Jewish self-made men larger-than-life characters thelot of them who engineered Supermansfortunes, stamping their own visions of himirrevocably onto the character along the way.

There was Robert Maxwell Joffe, a can-doJew from Brooklyn who created The Ad-ventures of Superman, a hugely popular

radio series in the 1940s where he turned thecomic book hero into a crusader against thethuggish race-baiters of the Ku Klux Klan.There was Alexander Salkind, an impishGerman Jewish Holocaust survivor, suspect-ed embezzler and die-hard wheeler-dealerwho brought Superman, played by Chris-topher Reeve, to the big screen in a lavishWarner Bros. production in 1978.

And, above all, there was Mort Weisinger,a gifted but mercurial Jew from the Bronx,who singlehandedly created a cohesive, ifmuddled, Superman mythology as a veteraneditor of DC Comics while lording it over hisunderlings, including a disgruntled Siegel.An inveterate schemer, Weisinger wasntabove, in Tyes telling, stealing plot pro-

posals from one writer and hand[ing] themto another, informing the rst that it was acrappy idea and telling the second that it wasMorts.

Meanwhile, Jewish artists, many of themalso the offspring of immigrants who haded sti ing Eastern European shtetls and

persistent anti-Semitism, were at the fore-front of Americas comics revolution. Theywere following close in the footsteps of Sie-gel and Shuster. The great Stan Lee (bornStanley Martin Lieber), Siegels longtimefriend, has, with his brilliant collaboratorJack Kirby (n Jacob Kurtzberg), given theworld Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, theX-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man andThor. Kirby, with writer Joe Simon (n Hy-mie Simon), conceived Captain America.

Will (Shmuel) Eisner, a onetime vaudeville painter of Hungarian-Romanian Jewish de-scent from Brooklyn, conjured up The Spir-it. Bill Finger, the son of an Austrian Jew,

brought forth Batman with cartoonist BobKane (n Kahn), the son of a Jewish engrav-er from Eastern Europe. Jerry Robinson, aJewish teenager, cooked up Batmans neme-sis, The Joker, the most iconic super-villainof them all, drawing inspiration for the char-acter from some of the eras edgiest Jewishcomedians.

ASPIRING JEWISH writers and artistswent into comics for the same reason brightJewish doctors in the early 1900s practicedat hospitals like Beth Israel and Mount Sinai:It was the only option open to them, Tye ex-

plains. Anti-Semitism barred Jews from ad-vertising agencies [so] they turned to thenascent comic book industry, which, at thetime, made for a fairly lowly profession withdim career prospects.

Many of them, including Siegel at rst,

Super Boys: The Amazing Adventuresof Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster

Brad Ricca, St. Martins Press448 pages; $27.99


6/6

THE JERUSALEM REPORT DECEMBER 30, 2013 43

wrote under gentile pennames to hide theirethnic origins. Yet even as they did so, theycontinued to draw heavily on the long tradi-tion of Jewish fabulists and storytellers whohad in turn drawn much of their inspirationfrom the tales of the Bible and whimsicalJewish folklore. I write about the things Iknow. I know about Jews, remarked Eisner,who went on to publish, in 2003, the critical-ly acclaimed graphic novel Fagin the Jew,a subversive take on Dickenss antihero byreinterpreting him as a product of Victorian

prejudice.Apart from Samson, a prime inspiration

for latter-day superheroes was the Golem,a powerful creature of clay who wouldemerge periodically to defend downtrod-den and beleaguered Jews. Other modelswere closer to home. One was SiegmundZishe Breitbart, a Polish-Jewish black-smith turned vaudeville strongman. Billedtellingly for a 1923 show in Cleveland asthe Superman, Breitbart performed ex-traordinary feats like holding up automo-

biles lled with passengers and holding back a pair of bolting horses, one with eachhand. Another was Joseph Greenstein, a

diminutive, muscle-bound Polish Jew whoachieved fame in the circus as The MightyAtom and was legendary for his exploits,which included roughing up a group of Nazisympathizers in New York over their signthat said No Dogs or Jews Allowed.

By the 1970s, as many as four out of veleading comic book writers in the US wereJewish, according to Tye. It was a succes-sion of Jewish writers, too, who wouldgradually take over from Siegel in craftingSuperman adventures. Yet while the author-ship of stories might change, Siegels origi-nal vision would remain intact a squeaky-clean all-American hero for all ages and forall time.

More than anything, its the childlike play-pretend aspect of Supermans charac-ter that helps make him perennially fasci-nating that and an almost Shakespeareandepth to him that can yield ever newer in-sights to inventive and inquisitive minds.Through the biographies of Siegel andShuster, and the stories they told of Super-

man, reality and ction came to intermingleand overlap in invitingly intricate combina-tions, titillating comic book a cionados forgenerations. Fans and historians alike have

been poring over Man of Steel trivia andapocrypha with the fervor of Talmudic ex-egetes, parsing, deconstructing, scrutiniz-ing, and theorizing.

Theyve uncovered that Supermans arch-nemesis, Alexander Lex Luthor, owedhis name (and perhaps smugly callous na-ture) to one A.L. Luther, who wrote a letterto crime-ridden Clevelands Plain Dealernewspaper after Michel Siegels death, urg-ing locals not to pursue vigilante justiceagainst criminals.

In creating Supermans universe, Siegeland Shuster had also reached into them-selves, nding inspiration in their heart -

breaks, failures and daily travails. Theirheros klutzy alter ego, Clark Kent, wasmodeled on Siegel himself both in his de-meanor and appearance. Siegel even posedfor Shuster when he drew Clark. Clarkselusive love interest, Lois Lane, was namedafter a girl, Lois Amster, who Siegel had acrush on in school. Lane was, Siegel said

later, gaga over super-powered Superman but not so much over his meek, mildClark. Unlike Siegel and Clark, Supermanwould always get the girl.

And, in yet another twist to the story, sotoo, in the end, would Siegel. Lois would oneday marry him or rather, Joanne (original-ly Joln) Kovcs, who lent her looks to thecomic book heroine, would. A coy 18-year-old daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Jo-anne answered a newspaper ad in 1935 byShuster and Siegel to sit as an artists model,which she did in a borrowed, ill- tting bath -ing suit, while Shuster lled her out to makethe slender teen better resemble Supermanscurvaceous squeeze. After a decade-longunhappy marriage to another teenage sweet-heart called Bella, Siegel bumped into Jo-anne again at a cartoonists costume ball in

New York in 1948. A few months later theywere married.

By then, Superman was a global icon andinexhaustible cash cow, but through theyears Siegel would remain penniless and

battle with depression. In 1975 he told the press that the money-mad monsters at DCComics choked my happiness [and] stran-gled my career. Shuster, the more upbeatand stoical of the two, wasnt faring much

better, either. Suffering from poor eyesight

and living in a grubby at in Queens, hemade a living drawing semi-pornographicimages and taking on odd jobs as a janitorand a messenger boy. The same year, aftermedia reports exposed their plight, they re-ceived annuities of $20,000 (later raised to$30,000) from Warner Bros., which nowowned DC Comics.

Though disillusioned, the aging boy won-ders continued toiling away on comics in rel-ative obscurity and remained fast friends tillthe end, living out their nal years near eachother in Los Angeles. Shuster, who died in1992, and Siegel, who did so four years later,couldnt beat the odds.But in the end, they still won. In Superman,the dynamic duo of Super Boys lives for-ever. In his last interview, a few months

before his death, Shuster told a reporter:There arent many people who can honest-ly say theyll be leaving behind somethingas important as Superman. But Siegel andI can, and thats a good feeling. Were very,very happy and proud and pleased.

THE THREE LEGS OF THE SUPERMAN MYTH TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND THE AMERICAN WAY

ARE STRAIGHT OUT OF THE MISHNA

Superman: The High-Flying Historyof Americas Most Enduring Hero

Larry Tye, Random House432 pages; $17

a superhero from the shtetl

Documents