Holocaust novel about inmate who tells jokes to stay alive is no laughing matter

AVIVA LOWY: It’s taken 35 years for cartoonist Dov Fedler to complete his provocative novel, Gagman, thanks to the loving but firm hand of his daughter and co-author, Joanne

“Have you heard the one about the Jew in a concentration camp, who manages to stay alive by performing gags for the commandant . . .?” 

THAT’S NOT THE opening of a joke, but the provocative premise of Gagman, a novel by South African political cartoonist and writer, Dov Fedler, and his daughter, author Joanne Fedler, which was due to be launched at Sydney’s Holocaust Museum this Thursday (Editor's Note: the launch has now been delayed until May 10 due to a member of Joanne's family contracting Covid) .

The one problem for the gagman of the title is that he’s only as good as his last punchline. If he doesn’t keep the commandant laughing, then it’s curtains for him. His audience of one can do more than just boo him off stage; he can take his life. 

Did I say that was his only problem? His other problem is being treated as a traitor by the rest of the inmates, and dealing with the guilt of seeing one of them being murdered each time he is spared. You lose some . . . and then you lose some. 

Gagman began as a short story that “burst like popcorn” in her father’s head when he was on holiday in Israel in 1986, and a cancelled tour of Masada left him at a loose end, says Joanne, who lives in Sydney.  

By the end of the day, Dov had written the first draft of the book. He has been writing and creating illustrations for Gagman, on and (mostly) off, for over 35 years. 

So why has it taken so long for the novel to see the light of day? One reason may be the sanctity of Holocaust memorialisation. 

While Dov’s maternal relatives had been trapped in Hitler’s Europe, and his stepmother was a survivor of Dachau who had lost her husband and son there . . . “I did not live through those gates of purgatory. I do not have a number tattooed on my arm. Does this disqualify me to write a story about the camps? It’s a question I have wrestled with over many decades.” 

In our three-way Zoom interview with father and daughter, Joanne says Dov needed to be reminded that “the Holocaust forms part of every Jew’s intergenerational story.

“Never mind the fact that his life was indelibly and directly traumatised by the events in Europe, despite he and his family being safely in Africa. His mother Chaya died of a heart attack when he was 13,” her heart troubles starting when her sister, brother-in-law and nephew were killed in the camps. 

The spur to finally bring the book to completion was Dov’s own near-death experience just short of his 80th birthday, when he spent ten days in an ICU ward in Johannesburg. He knew that time was running out. 

But since Gagman’s initial conception, the project had been growing and growing, and boxes were filling with cartoons and story lines.  

“My dad’s a kind of genius. He’s brilliant and his mind goes off in all directions.” But that profusion of creativity, over more than three decades, meant there was too much material to wade through. “I think he’d given up and felt it would never see the light of day.” 

Fortunately, Joanne stepped in to wrangle the mass of words and images into a publishable book. 

She believes that making light of the suffering of life was how her father made meaning. Still, how funny can a joking concentration camp inmate be? In truth, the humour is very black and gagman starts by humiliating himself, acting like the commandant’s guard dogs and fighting with them for food.

The laugh is at his expense. Next, he mines his religion for comic inspiration. As gagman says, “First mock the Jews. Correction. Always mock the Jews.” 

Here’s a taster from the novel:

“You want to know the real story about Jonah? The whole whale schtick was a myth, a piece of revisionist history . . . The poor schmuck was just a refugee looking for a better life than being the Almighty’s messenger. It’s a crap job doing the Lord’s dirty work.” 

In gagman’s routine, Jonah is morbidly obese and has earnt the nickname of Whale. Despite going into the desert for a 40-day fast to lose weight, he regains it all when he returns to his mother’s homemade kneidlach. Later, when the storm hits the boat he’s travelling on, the sailors decide they don’t want to drown because of the ‘fatso’, so they throw him overboard.  

“Prophet, schmophet! screamed the captain. You’re nothing but a fat whale.’”  

Dov says these “comedian’s notes” are essentially his revolt against what he was taught growing up. “I’m a Jew to my core but I don’t observe mitzvahs.”  

Joanne, laughingly, interposes, “You are a mitzvah-less Jew.”  

It may be one thing to joke about Judaism, but were the Fedlers concerned about mixing the Holocaust and cartoons?

No, says Joanne, who claims the legacy of Art Spiegelman’s classic Maus has made the comic book medium acceptable here. She also refers to the 2003 graphic novel Yossel by Joe Kubert, which deals with the concentration camps. And Gagman includes no images from the camps, just those of the Nazis it pillories and gagman himself.

In fact, Joanne believes that the format of Gagman provides potential for reaching new audiences. Through Lewis Levin, the architect of the Holocaust and Genocide museum in Johannesburg, she has been in touch with a number of international Holocaust education organisations, including one in Serbia which are using comics and graphic novels as a way to engage younger audiences.     

Originally intended to be a graphic novel, Gagman morphed into a novel with some illustrations. Hundreds of drawings were whittled away and gagman had to speak for himself.

Having made his career with images, Dov has become a zealous convert to the written word.  

“Drawing cartoons is almost facile. You have a deadline for tomorrow and you do that thing on the same day," says Dov. "But writing is the most amazing discipline I’ve ever had to learn.”  

He may be dismissive of cartoons, but the role of comic books is important to Gagman’s storyline. It covers the publication of Superman comics, which so upset Hitler’s propaganda guru Goebbels that he claimed the Jews stole the German notion of the Ubermensch, literally superman.  

Created by two Jews, Shuster and Siegal, Superman survives the near total destruction of his people to settle in the US. As cartoonist Jules Feiffer put it, it was the “striving Jewish boy’s goyishe American Dream”.  

And gagman also believes that his redemption will be through drawing comics in America once - spoiler alert - he escapes the camps.   

Comics played an enormous part in Dov’s childhood. “The first books I looked at were comics. We had a comic book about every story in the bible, and I read that over and over again. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck… every cartoon meant something to me.” 

There were Saturday morning shows where kids would stand outside the cinema with stacks of comic books for swapping. They circulated everywhere.” 

As a political cartoonist in South Africa, Dov was active during the time of apartheid.  

“The whole apartheid idea was just anathema to any thinking person, and one did what one could to bring down that edifice.  

“And then when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, it all fell away. Suddenly it was a brand new day.” 

Is it harder to be a cartoonist when much of the political tension is gone? Joanne says Dov’s work had a different flavour during this time. “A cartoon doesn’t always make you laugh. Sometimes it has that poignant moment.” 

She refers to one of his drawings when Nelson Mandela was dying, an image of his face and Robben Island, where he was imprisoned. “It’s the only cartoon of mine that’s worth remembering. It’s the only great cartoon”, says Dov. 

Joanne interjects. “There are other good ones, too, Dad.” 

However, it wasn’t long before he confronted more political angst to inspire his work.

“[Jacob] Zuma has ruined this country economically. He robbed it blind. So the same sort of gangsterism emerged shortly after Mandela left. Mandela was just a moment in time which has been virtually forgotten because of all the other rubbish which has superseded it.” 

It’s ironic that throwing himself into this project, which deals with one of the bleakest chapters of recent history, became a saving grace for Dov. “My mother had just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer,” says Joanne. “It was so traumatic, so awful and we wanted to distract him.” 

Having ‘lived with’ gagman since she was a teenager, Joanne was determined that Dov should witness the fulfilment of his life’s work. “I wanted my father not to be Moshe, seeing the promised land but never crossing over. 

"I wanted him to hold this book in his hands. I arranged, twisting lots of arms and at great expense, that a box of these books arrived [in South Africa] for him on his 82nd birthday.” 

GAGMAN LAUNCH
Joanne Fedler will be in conversation with Suzanne Leal for the launch of Gagman at 6pm on May 10 at the Sydney Jewish Museum.

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