Sarah Glidden, How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less (2008- ), irregularly published, $3.00.
There are many unanswerable questions a
young cartoonist must face, the most immediate being, of
course, the Big Why. If you have ever had the opportunity
to listen in on cartoonists when they think we mortals are
not around, the conversation inevitably turns to the Big
Why. To paraphrase: “Why do we spend our lives
painstaikingly making comics, arguably the most
labor-intensive narrative form on earth and undeniably the
least-respected and least-profitable narrative form of all
time?” To which, of course, they smile, shake their heads,
and rush back to the drawing table. The good thing for the
rest of us in having storytellers who must regularly
confront such a conundrum is that cartoonists are by daily
experience made at home with unanswerable questions and
therefore find nothing out of the ordinary in using their
skills to tackle other unaswerable questions. It is armed with
precisely such talents that Sarah Glidden focuses her
sights on the impossible question that has tormented so
many American Jews for the past generation.
How to Understand Israel
in Sixty Days or Less recounts Glidden’s Birthright trip to
Israel, a program that defrays the costs for young
American-born Jews to visit their “homeland.” As she jokes
to her goyisha boyfriend before she leaves, “I’m going to
go there and find out the truth behind this whole mess once
and for all! It’ll all be crystal clear!,” a joke which
thinly disguises her fondest dreams for the trip, to know
the answer to the Big Questions: “What went wrong over
there? Why aren’t there any answers without bias?” Of
course, when it comes to Israel, there are also no
questions
without bias, and so between
her own deep-rooted skepticism about Israel and the mission
of Birthright to forge an unshakeable bond with Israel in
the hearts of global Jewry the joke of the title becomes
immediately clear. I am an American Jew deeply skeptical
(my more committed Jewish friends would say “hostile”)
about Israeli, and at almost twice Glidden’s age I have
been stewing in increasingly bitter questions about the
country, its history and its policies for decades. I do not
come to Glidden’s comic expecting her to make good on her
title. As with the Big Why, in the end we can only shake
our heads and keep questioning. But I never had the stomach
for a Birthright tour, never could bring myself, as Glidden
did, to see it for myself. So I am immensely grateful to
Glidden for taking me along with her on this journey in
search of whatever truths could be harvested. And
truthfully I can think of no one I would rather serve as my
guide.
The first two issues of How to Understand Israel
are available from
Glidden’s website (the comic is self-published), and I
very much hope that once completed it will be picked up
by a publisher and distributed in book form. I regularly
teach Joe Sacco’s Palestine and as much as my students enjoy that
brilliant book and the questions it raises, they often
express (especially the Jewish students) frustration
that Sacco chose not to spend more time with Israelis
hearing their stories. Of course that was not Sacco’s
goal: as he rightly points out, the Israeli version of
events is the only one most Americans hear thanks to our
government’s and media’s policies of supporting Israel
unconditionally. But it is Glidden’s goal, and she
brings precisely the right blend of skepticism and naive
wonder to the project to make every panel resonate with
the sense of having been there. This sense of immediacy,
of having somehow been there with Glidden, is all the
more surprising given her spare, sketchbook style which
escews for the most part the kind of photo-reference
detail that Sacco brought to Palestine. It works for her because Glidden’s
focus is less on the details of the environment and
individuals than it is on the intricacies of the
questions raised by the experience. In one particularly
witty moment, for example, Sarah drifts off during a
discussion on the bus of the Wall and holds a fantasy
trial in the case of “Birthright is trying to brainwash
me” vs. “Birthright is actually quite reasonable.”
Before the case can be decided, the bus stops for a
bathroom break and the first issue ends with the Israeli
landscape unfolding in the distance and a profound sense
of how many unanswerable questions must be asked before
we can even hope to get to the heart of the matter.
I am along for the full sixty days (or more), or as long as
Glidden cares to take us through the looping routes these
questions trace. And I am thrilled to having been
introduced to her work: she is a fiercely talented creator
who combines the directness and honesty of the best of
contemporary diary comics with the ambition and
fearlessness of some of the most important historical
graphic novels. I look forward to following her career for
the next sixty years (or more).
