I really missed this cartoon cat. There are some that you can easily do without, I just say: Garfield. And especially Garfield. But this one is already very rare. She is sometimes called Shaytan, mostly she is just the Rabbi's Cat. Another three albums are now in the new and now third anthology of Joann Sfar united, can and must recommend them all. Assuming it's playful and does not mind if things are a bit puzzling, unambiguous, unresolved and untidy.

The rabbi's cat is a tomcat, gray, thin, with huge ears (if you look at Whiskas, you get Devon Rex or Siamese cat, the correct variety may have an expert already written down to the forum). He can talk since he ate a parrot - what can you say, a miracle. The first adventure was that the rabbi then banned his cat from dealing with his daughter, which is why the cat - because she loves and venerates the beautiful daughter - desperately wants to become a Jew.

And exactly this question, whether a cat can become a Jew, outlines quite well, what it is about and with what humor you can expect. The cat is unruly, selfish and uninspiring. There are spiteful debates about the meaning and logic of religion, sex, relationships between man, woman and cat. And all this in the 1920s Algiers - giving the project an innocently dreamy nostalgia flair.

Much of the "cat" is reminiscent of Sfar's series "Klezmer". But while Klezmer sometimes looks so freshly nailed together that one fears grabbing hands when touching it, the "cat" is painted much prettier. There are no wretched musicians in Russia together and can be full, here you are well read and bourgeois. You sit in beautiful white and yellow limed houses on the Mediterranean Sea, the view goes over the harbor in the hills, because it opens your heart and the next travel agency from your head. One drinks tea and coffee and chomps small treats in the shade of the palm trees on the roof terrace.

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"The rabbi's cat": The main thing, the hangover purrs

At night one sleeps outside, during the day one flees from the heat into the Oriental shade. Sfar paints colorful carpets, re-fills his living room again and again, and the pretty daughter of the rabbi and her friends get merrily patterned clothes.

What happens this time? The daughter not only got married and moved out, she gets to the grief of the cat from her stupid husband even a child. As the cat measures their well-being exclusively by the attention - there one can argue now whether this is a comment to the "Like me, notice me, confirm me" world of the Internet.

When the cat lurches sideways at night over the rooftops of the summer night complaining that she does not want change, wants everything to stay as it is, or was or is supposed to have been, cozy and familiar with warm milk and carelessness and much, much earlier, of course you can nod wistfully. One can also recognize Mr. Trump and his voters in it, who - not completely incomprehensible - the beautiful tailfin cars of the fifties cry.

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Joann Sfar
The Rabbi's Cat Anthology 3

Publishing company:

avant-verlag GmbH

Pages:

200

Price:

EUR 29.95

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And if the rabbi offers his synagogue to the Muslims for sharing the house, because their mosque has just a water damage, and then the unbureaucratic help fails not the new, but the old imam, the rabbi's rabbi and their on both sides completely nailed believers, Of course you can record a highly political-current context here. But you can also enjoy it all as an insight into the beautiful nonsense of humanity.

Because the nostalgia gives the stories a pleasant late summer glow. The action takes place in the twenties, everyone still talks to each other and do not throw bombs at all. This makes the religious topic amazingly accessible: "At first I drew the comic for myself," says Sfar in an interview, "but after ten years I realized that it has an impact." At a school, a girl once told me: 'At first we did not want to read that, but then we liked it because we saw that Jews and Arabs are equally stupid.' That's what I wanted: the relationship of Christians, Jews, Muslims relax. "

And not only that: men go alien, women fall in love again, know how to assert themselves witty. There is no problem that you can not solve, or at least endure better, by scratching the belly of a cat, or the chin, or between the ears. With a sad exception: The cat of the draftsman, called Imhotep, the real model of the rabbi cat, unfortunately died in 2018.