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Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel
Louis Klayman
blunt, quarrelsome nose.
he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money.
1939,
Josef Kavalier,
“My portfolio of drawings. To show your employer. Sadly, I am obligated to leave behind all of my work in Prague, but I can very quickly do much more that will be frightfully good.”
am an artist, like you.”
the usual caterpillar schemes.
WAS A CATERPILLAR SCHEME—a dream of fabulous escape—that had ultimately carried Josef Kavalier across Asia and the Pacific to his cousin’s narrow bed on Ocean Avenue.
sending the city’s famous Golem, Rabbi Loew’s miraculous automaton,
eaves legend had secreted the long-slumbering champion of the ghetto.
Bernard Kornblum was an Ausbrecher,
Kornblum knew at once that his unexpected visitor must be
Josef Kavalier, and his heart sank.
cathected
Josef began to learn the rigorous trade of the Ausbrecher from the lips of one of its masters. At the age of fourteen, he had decided to consecrate himself to a life of timely escape.
Hofzinser. It was a private men’s club, housed in a former inn on one of the Stare Mesto’s most crooked and crepuscular streets, which combined the functions of canteen, benevolent society, craft guild, and rehearsal hall for the performing magicians of Bohemia.
He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.
gelid
Within two hours, every household in the building had spangled its windows in blue. By means of this base stratagem, the room that contained the Golem of Prague was rediscovered. It was on the top floor of Nicholasgasse 26, at the back; its lone window overlooked the rear courtyard.
elbow of the right arm, the arm it would have used, as the legend records, to touch the mezuzah on its maker’s doorway every evening when it returned from its labors, bringing its Scripture-kissed fingers to its lips.
Seventeen hours after he climbed into the coffin to lie with the empty vessel that once had been animate with the condensed hopes of Jewish Prague, Josef’s train approached the town of Oshmyany, on the border between Poland
the word “Oshmyany” seemed to lie cold and rational between his fingers,
Milton Caniff.
but from a bad case of the carbon copies. Everything was a version, sometimes hardly altered at all, of a newspaper strip or a pulp-radio hero. Radio’s Green Hornet spawned various colors of wasp, beetle, and bee;
Then, in June 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the power of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation.
Fresno,
For costume he wore a tunic with deep creases, a heavy belt, and a big, shapeless stocking hat like something out of Rembrandt. The man’s features, though regular and handsome, looked frozen, and his intrepid gaze was empty. There were four Hebrew characters etched into his forehead. “Is that the Golem?” said Anapol. “My new Superman is the Golem?”
stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, and that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment of global vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime.
“The question is why.”
Professor Alphonse von Clay, the Mighty Molecule (born Alter Klayman in Drakop, a village in the countryside east of Minsk),
He knew that the Molecule, who derived his stage name from the circumstance of his standing, in calf-high gold lamé buskins, just under five feet two inches tall, had been imprisoned by the Czar in 1911, in the same
shvitz,”
furcate
Though Sammy continued to receive cards and clippings, the Mighty Molecule never again passed within a thousand miles of New York City.
Galveston, under the rear wheels of a Deere tractor he was attempting to upend, Alter Klayman had been crushed, and with him Sammy’s fondest hope, in the act of escaping from his life, of working with a partner.
Alfred Caplin, had gone on to meet with the kind of success they had all believed they would find—and the father of the Shmoo had spent only two nights there before moving on to better lodgings across town.
the Escapist was born.
The still-fresh memory of Harry Houdini in the American mind thirteen years after his death—of his myth, his mysterious abilities, his physique, his feats, his dedicated hunting down and exposure of frauds and cheats—is a neglected source of the superhero idea in general; an argument in its favor, as it were.
Omar quickly discerns the drizzled trail of water it has left on the stage, which he traces back to a small—a perfect—hole in the glass of the front panel. A pale pink ribbon twists in the green water of the tank.
Within twelve hours of commencing his career as a comic book artist, he retired.
Unlike the great anti-Nazi covers to come, there was no hullabaloo of tanks or burning airplanes, no helmeted minions or screaming females. There were just the two principals, the Escapist and Hitler, on a neoclassical platform draped with Nazi flags against a blue sky. It had taken Joe only a few minutes to get the Escapist’s pose right—legs spread, big right fist arcing across the page to deliver an immortal haymaker—and
Yes, on this last beautiful morning of his life as Sammy Klayman, he was feeling dangerously optimistic.
Anapol
the debut issue of Empire Comics’ premier title, Masked—”
Jack Ashkenazy
George Deasey,
A tall, corpulent man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a drooping ginger mustache, he still dressed in the stiff-collared shirts and highbutton waistcoats of his generation of literary men.
in the proximity of a gentile with a diploma to arrant toadyism.
