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talking and dreaming and walking in circles in the prescribed manner of golem makers.
These scenes have been described as wild, frenetic, violent, extreme, even Breughelian.
He wanted Anapol to understand the importance of the fight, to succumb to the propaganda that he and Sammy were unabashedly churning out. If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe’s existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.
“They are planning to restrict the Jews there.”
His missives were terse, as if to forestall the incoherence of emotion.
“I won’t stop you from cutting their goddamned heads off if that’s what you want to do, as long as it sells enough comic books. You know that.” “I know.” “It’s just … it makes me nervous.”
he had hitherto considered a young maniac to put up seven thousand dollars he could just barely afford, he was rich.
The only people winning the war that Joe had been fighting in the pages of Empire Comics since January were Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy. Between them, they had pocketed something in the neighborhood, according to Sammy’s guess, of six hundred thousand dollars. “Excuse me.”
$42,200.
The same masturbatory intensity of concentration that Joe had once brought to the study of magic and wireless sets he now focused on the fledgling, bastard, wide-open art form into whose raffish embrace he had fallen.
began to experiment with a cinematic vocabulary: an extreme close-up, say, on the face of a terrified child or soldier, or a zoom shot, drawing ever closer, over the course of four panels,
the one in which the characters’ emotions were most extreme.
simple joy of unfettered movement,
of the able body, in a way that captured the
yearnings not only of his crippled cousin but of an entire generation of weaklings, stumble...
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His thoughts veered between irritation with the giddiness, the indecency, of Anapol’s sudden prosperity and dread of his appointment with the Adjutant for Minority Relocation at the German consulate on Whitehall Street.
There was no pursuit more disheartening than the immigration goose chase.
ever swelling satchel of documents,
He paid endless visits to the offices of HIAS, to the United Jewish Appeal for Refugees and Overseas Needs, to
The bribes and bureaucratic lubrications of the first years of the protectorate were a thing of the past.
the Jews of Prague were all to be sent to Madagascar, to Terezin, to a vast autonomous reservation in Poland.
superintend its population of Jews.
Over the past year, his family had had their bank accounts frozen. They had been forced out of the public parks of
Prague, out of the sleeping and dining cars of the state railways, out of the public schools and universities. They could no longer even ride the streetcars.
It was, for a moment, as if Prague herself were floating there, right off the docks of Jersey City, in a shimmer of autumn haze, not even two miles away.
The elegant black-and-white ship, all 24,170 tons of it, loomed like a mountain in a dinner jacket.
It was like a noseful
of wine that he could not drink; yet it intoxicated him.
had left to his mother, grandfather, and brother the awful business of watching his father die.
Emil Kavalier, like many doctors,
suck mentholated pastilles,
copious amounts of chicken broth, and go about his business.
He had convinced himself that it was far more likely that both his mother and Thomas were still alive.
there would now be one visa fewer to try to wrest from the Reich.
His weeping
sounded to his own ears like sad, hoarse laughter.
“Did you just spit at that man?” “What?” said Joe. He was a little surprised himself. “Eh, yes.”
“He’s just a little upset right now.”
“Joe, I think that man is Max Schmeling.”
COULD NOT HAVE BEEN more than a couple of thousand German citizens in New York at that time, but in the following two weeks, wherever Joe went in the city, he managed to run across at least one.
evil ones with sweeping certainty even if they
engage them in conversation that was menacingly bland and suggestive.
Ebbets Field.
thought he said something.” “Why are you smiling, god damn it?” “I don’t know.”
It was not that he felt he deserved the pain
It was like the memory of home, a tribute to his father’s stoical denial of illness, injury, or pain. “It’s going to be fine,” he said.
After that, Joe went looking for trouble. For
Yorkville, where there were numerous German beer halls, German restaurants, German social clubs, and German-Americans. Most of the time, he merely skulked around for a while
Nevertheless, there was a fair number of New York Germans who took open pride in the accomplishments, civil, cultural, sporting, and military, of the Third Reich.
jagged palisade of pencils bristled from an empty Savarin coffee can. Joe reached out and, with two quick sweeps of his arms, sent
