JULES FEIFFER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:This is Christa Whitney and today is November 1st, 2017. I am here on Shelter Island with Jules Feiffer. We're going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Do I have your permission to record?

JULES FEIFFER:You do.

CW:Thank you. So, I wanted to start by asking about your name. Do you know where your name comes from?

JF:Yes. My mother, Rhoda Davis Feiffer, read a lot. She liked the novels of Jules Verne. She also had a certain pretentious side to her, and since Julius 1:00was the name of my grandparents on both sides -- and going back, perhaps, generations -- thank God, she was not going to call me Julius, which is a name I wouldn't have liked. And she called me Jules, which was a name that I didn't like either. And giving a little boy in the East Bronx during the Great Depression a fancy name was not a good idea. But she did, and I've been stuck with it. But that's how it came to be.

CW:What do you know about your mother's family?

JF:Well, they were all from Poland, so far as I know. I mean, going back generations. And they may have moved around, but they came from the area around Lodz. And my grandfather was a tailor, as so many grandfathers on both sides -- 2:00tailors or furriers, that's what they did. And that's all I know, because both my grandparents, all four, had died some years before I was born. So, unfortunately, I never got to know them. But I have on my -- the screensaver on my computer has a formal portrait of my grandfather standing with my father and my uncle Sidney, his brother, both of them dressed very formally, with canes. And it's one of my treasured possessions.

CW:So what about your father's family? Where are they from?

JF:Also Poland. The families knew each other in Poland, and they lived near each 3:00other when they moved to New York. I mean, originally, on the Upper East Side that became Yorkville and a repository for German families. But there was a mixture of Jews there, too, I imagine, because that's where they first lived. And my father's family stayed there, so far as I know. My mother's family moved when she was very little to Richmond, Virginia. So, Rhoda, when she was a little girl and going to school -- and was mocked and made fun of because she sounded like a funny little Yid -- was determined not to be laughed at, and to sound like one of them. And in later years, as I used to describe it, when my mother talked, you thought she sounded like Walter Cronkite. She had perfect locution, actually far better locution than any of her three children, who sounded 4:00(laughs) as if they were from the Bronx, God help us.

CW:Do you know why they moved to Virginia?

JF:I think that's where the work was. You moved because you had family there, because people think -- there was a network for all the immigrant groups, whether they were Jews or Italians or Germans or whatever they were. And they would communicate. And they said come -- New York had periodic depressions. It may have been hard making a living. They also may have hated the city. And where they lived was much -- originally, in Poland, was much more country-ish and rural and maybe comfortable, and they thought Richmond would be a better place. I don't know, that's all -- if my mother ever told me any of this, it was my 5:00position as her son, as I thought at the time, to deliberately not hear anything she was saying, because I was trying to wipe it all out. I didn't want any part of her background or anybody else's background. I wanted to be self-invented. I didn't want to be from her family, I didn't want to be from anybody's family, except a comic family, some cartoon family. And I certainly didn't want to be a Jew. [BREAK IN RECORDING]

CW:Do you have any sense of what life might have been like in Poland for your ancestors?

JF:Well, the way it was for all of them -- they had their own communities. Ghettos, or little villages, wherever they lived. You saw "Fiddler on the Roof," 6:00or the stories of Sholem Aleichem. And they stayed among themselves because they were forbidden to mix. And also, their culture was so different. The culture was more as you'd find in Brooklyn today, in Browns--- not in Brownsville, in wherever the Jewish centers are. And religion was a very important part of -- a vital part of everybody's life. But they also did their work and they did -- all that. And the women did much of the work, (laughs) and the men studied the Torah. The men had the good deal.

CW:Do you know roughly when your family came to America?

JF:I know exactly. I saw my father -- I don't know when my mother's family came, but we took a trip to Ellis Island in my previous marriage, with one of my daughters, and we looked up my -- David Feiffer, and there he was, coming over in 1906. So, he came over in 1906. I think my mother's family, who had another name but were named Davis, given the name Davis on Ellis Island. That was not their name. They may not have had a name. People took the name of the village they lived in, which I think was something like Skudz or something like that. But in any case, they were named Davis and that was their name. They came off 8:00Ellis Island with a new name, and that happened to a lot of people.

CW:And what did your parents do for work?

JF:My father, who was a socialist in Poland and might have been arrested if he hadn't left the country, never really adjusted or fit in properly, or happily, with America. And what might have become of him had there not been Hitler, had they stayed in Poland, had there not been other pogroms and all of that is hard to say, but he would have had a more successful life, because he was an intelligent man, he was a curious man. He read a lot. He was very gentle. Had a 9:00great sweetness to him, but he never found himself. At the outbreak of World War I, the government announced that Jews and other minorities, if they entered the service and fought in the AEF, which was the American Expeditionary Force, and went abroad to fight, they would be granted automatic citizenship. And my father did that. And he was in the 77th Division, 307th Infantry. I know that because they had a clubhouse on Thirty-Ninth Street in Manhattan, and when I was a kid, he used to take me at least once a month to this clubhouse and I'd meet all of his buddies. And those were his friends. They were his friends during the war and they seemed, so far as I could see, to be his only friends when I was a kid 10:00and when I was in my twenties. I mean, he never had -- my mother, who had lots of friends and was very sociable got rid of all of them during the Great Depression years, because she thought the Depression was my father's fault, because it was a personal attack and if he were a real man he would've gotten us out it. He was incapable of doing any of that. So, she made a living for the family during the Depression years, but she took the Depression as a personal offense. And, in fact, all of her friends, who became former friends almost immediately, were doing better than our family. So, they, who had been maybe middle class or lower middle class, might have gone down a notch or two. We 11:00became poor. And there was a sense of shame that my mother never recovered from, and an injury to pride that she never recovered from. And her only way out of that was to stop knowing all the people she had known. She was a very social creature, stopped socializing with all the people she had socialized with, and a kind of -- self-hermit herself, because being poor was a shame. And it didn't matter to everybody around us. Everybody in our community, everybody in the Bronx, everybody in the country was suffering. If they were, it was because of Dave Feiffer. If he was a real man, that wouldn't have happened.

CW:So, can you explain what she did to --

JF:What --

CW:-- make a living?

JF:What did she do? She was a fashion designer. And the truth is, and I've written about this, she never was meant to marry. She had a very good life. She was very successful as a young woman. She had, at the time she married, five thousand dollars in the bank, which in the 1920s was a fortune. She saved money, she hung out with an art crowd who worked in newspapers and painted on the side. And she went to theater and she knew all the songs and she danced and she was happy and she partied. She never drank, and she was never a bad girl. She didn't believe in sex. I don't think she believed in men, but she did believe in culture and she was cultured, and she loved the culture of the time. She loved theater, she loved musicals, she loved the cartoons, the newspaper cartoons of 13:00the time. She would often, at home, in the Bronx, during the Depression years, entertain us by singing popular songs of her girlhood. And then she'd be a different person. She'd be dancing around and -- so you saw what she once was and could have been again, except for making a marriage she never should have, and the Depression catching us as it caught everybody else. Women did not have careers. Women did not work, primarily. Women worked until they found a husband, and then the husband worked. None of this, clearly, made much sense to her. She loved art, and I think she got married only because her mother insisted, and her mother was very strong, and that's what Jewish girls did anyway. And they picked 14:00out a guy she could handle, who she was stronger than, whose family was a friend of their family. So, she thought she could manage him, and she did manage him. I mean, she ran the show. And he was quite agreeable. He loved her madly. I think she liked him until she hated him. It was just another lousy marriage among many. Most of the marriages I knew among my friends were not good.

CW:Can you describe what it was like for you to grow up in this home?

JF:It was the way I grew up. I had friends. The only difference I noticed was that their parents were a lot younger than mine, because they married late and had kids late. But, except for a few, I never saw husbands and wives interacting 15:00joyously with each other or getting much of a kick out of being with each other or having fun. This became part of my material in later years, but boys had fun with boys, girls had fun with other girls. When they all grew up, the women maintained their girlfriends, and that's who they felt comfortable with. The men had their men friends, and that's who they -- mostly themselves with. And then, there was this thing called marriage, and they had children, and some of them may have started out really being crazy about each other. But then it descended into real life and they normalized themselves into the culture, which is there's 16:00one side here and there's another side there. And I guess thank God for that, because it became an important part of my later work, ending in "Carnal Knowledge," my play and my movie. It always fascinated me. That game that Thurber and others called the battle of the sexes. I didn't see it as a real battle. I thought it was a series of strategic withdrawals by people who had trouble in life interacting, basically, on every level. And that became my fascination, among other fascinations, in terms of what I wanted to write and draw about and comment on.

CW:Where in the Bronx did you live?

JF:Lived in an area of the East Bronx, the Soundview area. There was an elevated train running right over. When you descended the steps, there was a Hebrew National delicatessen that was right there. There were trolley tracks right under the elevated train, which later became the -- when the trolleys disappeared, it became a bus stop. And it was noisy, it was crowded. There was a movie theater up the block, about three blocks from where we lived, called the Ward Theatre because it was located off Ward Avenue, and they would have double feature films, and that became a very important part of childhood and adolescence.

CW:What kind of movies were playing when you were growing up?

JF:They were all from the big studios. So, they were MGM and Warner's and RKO, 18:00and those were -- my role models were taken from the films. Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, adventurous, swinging from vines. Cagney and Bogart. I learned how to kiss girls by watching Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy movie. I learned -- I got absolutely nothing in school. Learned nothing except how to resist. And twelve years of public education was a total waste, because what I learned in the public schools of the Bronx where allegedly, the teachers were supposed to be good or better than other places -- was never to ask questions that weren't part of that day's plan, lesson plan, because curiosity in a kid was not paid off. It 19:00was discouraged. And so, I, who was very curious, learned that school was not the place to satisfy my curiosity. In fact, I found that over and over again, I was put down and considered a wise guy because I would raise questions that really interested me. And the teachers were not interested in dealing with them. Screw you, you're getting in the way of my lesson plan. So, I was a victim of the lesson plan, and there had been good teachers, and lots of interesting teachers before I got to these schools. And this is in nineteen -- early 1940s. But the witch hunts which we think of as McCarthyism started long before that. And some of the most interesting teachers and interested teachers were the lefties and the communists, who, whatever their devotion to the Soviet Union and 20:00however misguided that was -- were interested in changing things and forming things and forming minds, getting people curious, getting -- and they were all fired by the time I got to school. So, my older sister, Mimi, who was a communist and a member of the Party and a devout Stalinist -- and I've written a play about her called "The Bad Friend" -- that she got the benefit of some good teaching. By the time I got to school, the Reds were kicked out. Everybody was playing it safe, and there was absolutely nothing in it for me, or very little in it except learning how -- I mean, what I learned from school, which was a valuable lesson, what I -- and possibly helped me to do all my life -- was the nature of power structures, how to deal with power structures, how to learn to 21:00give the answers that they expected, don't tell the truth, but tell them what they want to hear, and get by that way. And I thought, If I can make it 'til I'm twenty, I can be on my own and screw them all. But that was in my head from the time I was nine or ten, that I got to break out of this prison, and I can't do it as a kid 'cause I have no power. Also, I have no courage. I was scared of my shadow, and the courage came later. And so, it was all a holding action. And since this is a talk about Jewishness and Yiddishism, as oppressive as anybody else were the Jews that one had to deal with, because the local temple, where I was expected to be bar mitzvahed, and was -- I'm not sure what -- it wasn't 22:00completely Ortho-- it might have called itself Reform, 'cause I don't think my parents would have gone to an Orthodox temple. They were so-called Reform Jews. And they had really, pretty much, except for my father, dropped religion except as a social grace at the time. My father still went to temple, still knew the prayers, still knew the ritual and respected all of that. My mother, I don't think, bothered with any of that or believed in much of it, except as part of one's culture. And --

CW:What did it look like? What did the synagogue look like?

JF:I can't hear.

CW:What did the temple look like?

JF:Oh, it was like any shul, something -- it was a small neighborhood shul, a couple of blocks from us in the Bronx. And not impressive in any way, not 23:00different from any of the others. And certainly, not inviting, but none of them were inviting. In those years, I'd never been in a church, and certainly not a Catholic -- certainly not in St. Patrick's. I didn't know what grand Catholicism looked like or grand celebration looked like. What I knew is that the Orthodox Jews or the Reform Orthodox Jews or whatever they call themselves were more repressive than my teachers, that when I went into Hebrew school and the training for my bar mitzvah, the one thing they didn't want from me were questions. Again, what I was curious about was discouraged. I was just to learn this goddamn stuff, shut up and learn it. And yes, you're gonna be thirteen and you're gonna be a man, but we both know that's bullshit, so just do this and -- 24:00so, the more I was -- I had to learn and memorize and do all of that stuff I was never any good at anyway, and the more I mortified myself by making mistakes, and the more unsympathetic the rabbi was, the more, again, I couldn't wait to get out of here so I could stop having to go to temple and be the true atheist I was on my way to becoming. I had a great friend who was a comedian, named Milt Kamen, who came from Brooklyn and was about my age. And Milt had part of his comedy routine -- he had a Brooklyn accent, he talked like this. He said, "In my 25:00area of Brooklyn, was very political, 1930s and '40s. We had the communist party, we had the socialist party, we had a socialist workers party, we had a socialist labor party, we had the American Labor Party. It wasn't until I was twenty and moved to Manhattan that I ever heard of the Democratic and the Republican Party." And that was pretty much what the Bronx was like at that time. I mean, everybody was an FDR New Deal Democrat. But whether you were -- but other than voting the Democratic line for Roosevelt and the people connected to Roosevelt, everybody was -- and certainly my sister and all the people around her and I, too, later on, were involved in things far more left, ending in the Progressive Party with Henry Wallace. Particularly after Roosevelt's death and 26:00Harry Truman and the advent of the Cold War, the idea of a Republican Party and Democratic Party seemed just -- had nothing to do with us and we had to change that. And there was this notion -- now, the interesting thing is that growing up poor, where everybody was poor, in the midst of a Great Depression, there was no personal depression except among the grown-ups. All the kids, Jewish and otherwise, were assimilationist. They didn't see themselves as hyphenate, although they were hyphenate. They wanted to be American, and they wanted to join -- and they knew how to be American from movie images of Americans that were produced (laughs) and often written by Hollywood Jews, so that the mythic 27:00America was invented, (laughs) in part, by these Jews who themselves wanted to be American. And they invented the America they wanted to be a part of, and America bought into that fantasy. And when Donald Trump talks about making America great again, he means making it like MGM movies. He doesn't know what America was like. (laughs) He has no history, no sense of history.

CW:So, I want to go back a little bit and understand what was Jewish about your home, if anything?

JF:It was culturally Jewish. The way our family lived, the food we ate --

CW:What was the food?

JF:Mostly food I hated, because what Jews did, or poor immigrant Jews did, was 28:00overcook everything. If it was overcooked, it was food. If it still had taste, it couldn't be food. And my mother, who was supporting the family and going out to Seventh Avenue and trying to sell her fashion sketches, then coming home and cooking, she had no time -- an ordinary day for my mother, she would get up in the morning, she would make sure the kids had breakfast. If we got our own breakfast or she would make cereal -- which she knew how to make. I mean, Cream of Wheat or Wheatena, that was all right. She couldn't damage that too much. And then, she would take the sketches she had drawn, which were on eight-and-a-half by eleven sheets with pencil and water color -- designs, coat designs. Cloaks 29:00and suits, they called them. And she would go down to the center of the rag trade on Seventh Avenue, in the '30s, and go from office to office, showing her designs, and selling these designs to the buyers for three dollars a pop, out of which they would make clothing. But what she got was three bucks, having no rights to anything other than the -- and out of the three bucks a pop, she would feed her family. And my father periodically had jobs, but those jobs didn't last very long. And he was a rent collector for a while, which he hated, and he would end up paying the rent of people who couldn't afford to pay it out of his own pocket. So, that didn't last. It's 'cause it broke his heart to see -- [BREAK IN RECORDING] -- because my father could not figure out a way of making a living 30:00until the Second World War, when he found, as everybody did -- I mean, steady employment. That was essentially the end of the Depression. She would then come home, late in the afternoon, I would probably say four o'clock, and immediately talk a blue streak about what happened. She'd tell stories, she could be funny, she could be charming, amusing while she was starting on dinner, and we, the kids, my sister Alice, my sister Mimi. Mimi was four years older, Alice was four years younger. We'd help out or get in the way, whatever it was, but do what we were told. But I learned, as a boy, to housekeep when I was a kid: how to wash dishes, how to sweep, how to clean, because that's what she needed, none of which I objected to beyond being a boy, and saying why did I have to do all of 31:00this? But I understood why. I mean, there was nobody else to do it. And my sister Mimi was not going to do it, because she was a communist, she was too important. She was an individual, and she was beyond helping out. But Alice would be a drudge, being the youngest, and I would be a drudge. And you understood, that's what you did. And mostly, you felt sorry for this woman who was working so hard to make ends meet, and barely making ends meet, and getting through the Depression the only way she knew how. And the downside of that was she knew that it was my father's fault, and that got in the way of -- you just saw the way she treated him, and it created a breach among her and her children 32:00that was never to be repaired.

CW:I'm curious, can you describe what her sketches looked like?

JF:I'm sorry, what?

CW:What her sketches looked like? Her designs? What do you remember them looking like?

JF:Oh, yes, well, I have some. And some are in my books. I knew nothing about fashion, and I didn't want to know anything about fashion. My mother would take me by the hand and parade me down Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue to look at store windows. A little boy! And she would point out dresses, and she was trying very hard to make me gay. And pointing to this and pointing to that, and I blanked it all out. So, to this day, I don't know how people dress. I don't know 33:00how they look. I mean, I know their physical appearance, and I'm a quick study on body movements and body language. But I can go into a room -- I don't know what anybody's wearing. I mean, looking at you, I now know what you wear for the first time 'cause I'm looking at you. I don't see it, because I spent years blinding myself, to get away -- to escape my mother's demands, and the kind of drawing I wanted to do was all action: running, jumping, leaping, punching, somebody beating the crap out of somebody else. The good guys beating up the bad guys, but also the good guys getting hit so they could hit back. That's what art was to me.

CW:Well, before we get to that, when you say that your home was culturally 34:00Jewish, what does that mean?

JF:Well, the age we're talking about, the notion that today there would be a powerful Orthodoxy would be shocking, because the Orthodox religion seemed to be on its way out. And Jews were primarily -- at least the Jews that we knew -- were secular. They were Jews in terms of culture. They were Jews in terms of identity. And religion was the last part of it, that that was a detail, that of course they were Jews. And we're talking about the time of Hitler, so they strongly identified with the Jews in Europe who were their family or friends, so that made them -- Hitler made them more Jewish than they might have been 35:00otherwise. But in terms of being on their own, the desire to be an American and be like an American and have the culture of America -- and that culture came from the movies, from radio, old-time radio -- this is before television -- and to assimilate. And all of us, all the kids I grew up with, everybody I knew, as poor as we were, all of us assumed we'd do well. All of us assumed this was temporary and we're going to find our way out of here and we're going to be an American, and we'll be successful Americans and we'll be part of that American dream, which was very important to us. And that was not at odds with being 36:00Jewish. Although we saw the Jewishness, the notion of being a Bronx Jew -- or I did, certainly, or a Brooklyn Jew disappearing, 'cause I, too, wanted to sound like Walter Cronkite. When I first heard a tape recording of myself in an interview, shortly after I was getting to be well-known and getting taped, I was shocked at how Bronx I sounded, and appalled, because I thought I had gotten rid of that, and worked very hard over the years to do it. Because I wanted to sound American, and that was the dream. That was it. But that didn't stop you from seeing yourself, also, culturally Jewish. Religiously -- I didn't believe in 37:00religion, and I stopped believing in religion at a very early age. So, it had no meaning to me, and I thought it was, in a sense, total hypocrisy.

CW:Do you remember how that happened?

JF:I'm sorry, what?

CW:Do you remember how that happened for you?

JF:I think the rabbis (laughs) were a very convincing lesson on how I had to escape Judaism. You know, that if I couldn't be curious and be a Jew, and if I couldn't ask questions and still be a Jew and couldn't have adventures in my mind and still be a Jew, what the fuck was the point? Let me out of here. (laughs) Get me away from these people. Because, as far as I could see -- and 38:00they were racist, as well -- that they were the -- outside of not being anti-Semites because they were Jewish -- and that's the only thing that stopped them, (laughs) they were everything else I despised. While all the other Jews I knew were liberal and were for civil rights -- not these guys. They despised anybody who wasn't them. So, that was not any life or anything that I wanted to get near.

CW:Did you have any exposure to Jewish culture in terms of books or theater, movies?

JF:Well, first of all, movies, whether you knew it or not, had a strong -- particularly Warner Brothers, had a strong Jewish influence. Theater, I did -- 39:00when I was very little, I didn't go to, but when I was a teenager, there was a theater in the Bronx that got Broadway plays after they closed on Broadway. It was called the Windsor Theatre. It was near Poe Park in the Bronx, and I used to walk there or go there, take the trolley there, and we'd go to theater all the time. And that's where I saw "Death of a Salesman" and that's where I saw "Streetcar Named Desire." That's where I fell in love with the American theater, and there was a revolution going on in theater. I mean, great, important playwrights were coming out at that particular time when I started going to theater. So, that affected me deeply and strongly. I never wanted to be a playwright. I never thought of myself as a writer. My sister, Mimi, my commie sister, was the writer in the family, and she was going to be the important 40:00writer and I was going to be the boy cartoonist, the famous cartoonist. But that wasn't literary or serious. That was just what I was meant to be.

CW:Did you hear any other languages growing up?

JF:My parents spoke Yiddish, but only so that the children wouldn't understand. And I know that other children in other families learned Yiddish so they would know what they're saying. My attitude was screw you, if you don't want me to know, I don't want to know, either, that you got nothing to say that I'm interested in. It was just deep resistance and resentment. So, I didn't learn any Yiddish, or very little Yiddish. And I have a lousy ear for language anyhow. I took a Hebrew class in high school. You had to take a language, and I took 41:00Hebrew for some -- well, the reason was so I didn't have to go to an annex and take a trolley somewhere. I could stay in the main school, which was three blocks from my house. I learned virtually nothing and managed to get through that class and get a passing grade the way I did all of high school, which was to cheat and write answers on -- basically, I cheated my way through high school, and that's how I got out, 'cause I was incapable or resistant to learning what they had to teach.

CW:And it was a Jewish neighborhood, right? The --

JF:Oh, yes! Well, not -- it was a Jewish block or two, and then the next block, which had the library, Morrison Avenue, was Italian. And I spent a lot of time in that library. But the library was populated by a lot of Jews that went in, 42:00and the library was far more important than the synagogue in terms of affecting me and those around me who were curious, because you'd go in and you'd see books with strange covers. You picked them up, and suddenly you're reading something you didn't know anything about and wanted to know more. And for people without money, the library was a way out, and it was great. And we had a nice little library, and I was there all of the time. And that was -- that and listening to radio -- my education came by way of the library, radio, and occasional talks I heard on WNYC, the local station, that got me interested in subject matter, whatever it was. And eclectic stuff like that, just picking up knowledge here and there, but not in the official places where you're supposed to learn it, 43:00because they were not there to teach me. They were there to control me.

CW:So, as you mentioned, you were growing up during the rise of Hitler and a very political time. Were you aware of what was going on in terms of the European Jewish population?

JF:Oh, you couldn't be a kid in the Bronx or anyone in the Bronx or anyone anywhere, particularly if you were Jewish, and not have that everywhere in your --- 'cause we all knew, and we all knew before the country knew, because it was happening to our families. I still remember being very little and not quite understanding why the mood of the household was so dark. But the feeling of everything was brown and black all around me and gloomy, and it was because my 44:00mother and father were talking about what was going on in Poland and in Germany, and they were not talking politics. They were talking about their family. They were talking about -- and they had relatives who came over here to escape Hitler, and hated America and went back, thinking, This is bound to be over. This is just a passing thing. And then, what happened happened, and they were in the camps. Long before there was a general public recognition, there was, among all Jewish families, and certainly ours -- and certainly, to me, by the age of eight or nine, a sense of what was going on.

CW:I'm curious about the politics at that time. I mean, in the Jewish left, Yiddish often was a part of politics. Was that around at all, the Yiddish -- were you aware of Yiddish as a connection to the political --

JF:Well, the -- not Yiddish, no. [BREAK IN RECORDING] My mother spoke Yiddish, the -- Mrs. Moscowitz next door, who was my mother's age or a little older, spoke Yiddish. There are other families in the building who spoke Yiddish. And they spoke Yiddish sometimes among each other. But they spoke English, mostly, or -- when I heard them, with a thick accent. So, there were all of these Jews speaking with heavy vaudeville Jewish accents. And one was used to that. That's 46:00what you grew up with, and you understood them, but there was a real dichotomy between that generation, the parent generation, and the kids -- that generation always saw themselves as European, and the idea of assimilating didn't occur to them. They just had to survive, but the kids were going to be Americans. And by American, they meant what they heard on radio, what they saw in movies. That was the role model. That was the real church.

CW:Yeah. Looking back at that time, what were your feelings about being Jewish?

JF:I saw nothing for me in being Jewish except I had to be because there was 47:00Hitler. The anti-Semites made me a Jew. The Jews made me want to escape being a Jew, or the Jews that I knew in the Bronx. I didn't know the kind of Jews that I wanted to be hang out and be around with until I moved to Manhattan or started hanging out in Manhattan. Then I discovered a whole other class of people who were, my God, like me! But I didn't know any smart-ass, funny, wise-guy -- what later became known as Jewish humor -- Philip Roth, Mel Brooks -- I didn't know any of that in the Bronx. We didn't have that. The only funny guy around was me, 48:00that I knew. And so, it was only when I started -- long before I moved to Manhattan, only when I started hanging out in Manhattan that I realized it wasn't so bad being a Jew, because I'm not the only Jew like this. There are other -- there's a second Jew like that and a third, and there's a whole army of Jews who didn't seem to be in the Bronx. They came from Brooklyn, mostly. I'm sure some did, but I just didn't know them. And so I felt totally cut off until I was in my teenage years, when I started working in Manhattan, getting part-time jobs, and discovered I was not alone.

CW:So, I want to talk a little bit about your early work, and starting out. So, 49:00when did you start drawing?

JF:Oh, I was drawing from the age of four or five, [BREAK IN RECORDING] and I loved newspaper comic strips.

CW:Who were your models?

JF:There was always Popeye, written by a genius named Elzie Crisler Segar, because it was explosively funny, explosively violent, but in a very comic way. Larger-than-life sounds, actions, everything. It was just brilliant. Then, I fell in love with the early adventure strips. There was something called "Wash Tubbs" and "Captain Easy" by a great cartoonist named Roy Crane, whose -- characters who were often running and jumping, but they're lighter than air. 50:00Flying. They were dancing. And fistfights were dances, everything's a dance. It was amazing. And he was a huge influence on me and many other cartoonists. I mean, right now, yeah, there's this book on my -- Action Comics number one, where Superman gets introduced. That's there because I'm writing an introduction to the hundredth anniversary of Superman. And the wonder of all the stuff is how it affected everybody the same way. The sense of excitement that these drawings on paper that seemed larger than life and lighter than air could affect one. And that's what I'm trying to talk about in this introduction. And for that matter, I've written about this -- Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created Superman, 51:00were two Cleveland Jewish boys. I mean, from the suburbs of Cleveland. Going to high school -- they were about ten, fifteen years older than me -- going to high school during the heyday of not just Hitler, but native-born anti-Semitism and right-wing isolationism in the heartland of America, right near the Cleveland they were going to school at. And they were in this school. They saw the jocks around them who were all (laughs) gorgeous blondes, and all the Lois Lanes were going out with the jocks, and all these shlubby, nerdy cartoonists could think of -- would-be cartoonists could think of, is if they only knew the real me, that someday I'll have those girls. Someday, Lois Lane will be mine, because inside, I look like -- I got these funny-looking glasses on and I got acne and 52:00I'm small, I'm unathletic, but inside I'm Superman. The Superman myth, I read about this once, that the notion that Superman came from Krypton is misleading. Superman actually came from Poland. Superman was a Polish Jew, or he came from Vilna -- that that's where it all started. These guys wanted to be -- Superman was the ultimate assimilationist fantasy. I don't have to be a nerdy Jewish kid. I can be blonde and goy and get the girl, because the way I am now I can't ever get the girl. And that's how I felt as a kid, that the way I look -- I was smaller than everybody else, I was less well-built and I had no athletic 53:00ability, I had no muscles. Until I sprouted in my teens, I was shorter than all of the girls. How horrifying! And the way -- I was only going to get along -- was somehow to make it as a cartoonist and get famous, and then maybe someday I'd get laid, if I was lucky. Or have a girlfriend, if I was lucky, if I couldn't get laid. But it all had to do with getting to be famous. I have to get famous to have anybody be interested in me. I was very shy. I couldn't possibly talk the way I'm talking now. I didn't -- unless it was a wisecrack, there wouldn't be any words out of me. I'd stumble, I'd fall over myself.

CW:So, when do you think that dream of being famous was born?

JF:Oh, I think it was from the time I was little, because I saw myself -- I 54:00looked in the mirror and I saw there was no equipment there and there was no future there. And I wasn't going to be a muscular hero. And I saw other small kids work out and do athlet-- and pump iron, and they got muscles. But I was not willing to pump iron or do any of that, do anything physical. I wanted to ignore my body (laughs) and somehow happen because I willed it into happening. So, I was not willing to do any of the things you needed to do to physically change myself to be more than the shlubby little Jewish kid that I was. I wanted to sit there, close my eyes, draw pictures and have that happen that way. And eventually, it did. So, only took thirty years or so, but it worked out.

CW:Your mother gave you your first drawing table, I think I read. When did that happen?

JF:The important thing in regard to my mother being a fashion designer is where other parents would discourage this silly ambition of their male child to be anything but a doctor or dentist, my mother loved the idea of being an artist, particularly since she was a fashion designer. Cartoonists had a lot of status in those years, when she was young, and she still remembered that status. They were on a much higher level than they were when I was a kid. And while my father took none of this very seriously and understood none of it, my mother was all for it. I mean, if she was against me being a cartoonist, believe me, I wouldn't 56:00be one. She encouraged it. And it became clear later on that I was going to be the success that she wasn't, that she was banking on me, vesting all of her thwarted ambitions in her son, and someday I would get to be famous and I would buy her a mink coat. She often talked about the mink coat I would buy her. And I was determined to get famous and buy her a mink coat. I was going to do that for my long-suffering mother, who had worked so hard and gotten only so far, and I was going to take her the rest of the way. And she talked about Moss Hart, the playwright, and how he bought his mother a mink coat. So, I was going to buy my mother a mink coat. And I was going to be the cartoon equivalent of Moss Hart.

CW:Did you buy that mink coat?

JF:I offered to buy my mother a mink coat, and when I told her I was going to get her one, she just got very embarrassed and said, No, she didn't want one. It 57:00was just an idea. She was very touched. But I told her I wanted to take her downtown to try on mink coats and she just wouldn't have any of it. It kind of mortified her. She didn't really want the mink coat, but she loved the offer.

CW:Wow. So, how did you start working for Will Eisner?

JF:Among the cartoonists I loved as a kid -- as I started to do, there's Popeye, Segar's Popeye. But I also loved the adventure strips, starting with "Wash Tubbs," Roy Crane. And then, as I got a little older, there was Milton Caniff in the "Daily News" and "Terry and the Pirates," which was this astonishing exercise in realistic storytelling and movie images on paper. And I was madly in 58:00love with him. And then, I became aware, in comic books, of this guy Eisner, who didn't look like anybody else, who looked more gritty, somehow more -- I don't know, he grabbed me. He didn't draw as well as Caniff, particularly in the early days. But he worked with different angles. I didn't realize it, but he was being influenced by German Expressionism. And Caniff and Eisner became my two role models, the two guys that I loved the most. And I wanted to do an adventure strip the way they did. And Eisner did many strips in comic books before he ended up with his masterpiece, "The Spirit." But by the time he was doing "The Spirit" and out of the service -- he stopped doing it and when he got drafted in 1942 and didn't return -- he was four years in service, and he came back, 59:00started again in '46. And I was just graduating from high school, needed a job, and decided, amazingly, 'cause I had no courage at all, that I would look him up in the phone book. Found he had an office on Wall Street, took my samples down there, and there he was in his outer office and he couldn't be more genial and more welcoming -- until he looked at my samples, told me how shitty my work was. And I, who had spent my life figuring out how to deal with bad personal news, knew -- long before Donald Trump was deflecting, I understood the art of deflection. So, if somebody was assaulting me by telling me my work was bad, I'd just change the subject. And I changed the subject to Eisner and his work. And 60:00he learned in about five minutes that, unlike all the people who were in his employ in the other office who were his assistants, turning out this sixteen-page comic book supplement called "The Spirit Supplement," I knew everything about him. I knew his whole bio. I knew everything he had ever done, and I could talk cohesively and lovingly about his work. So, by the end of that conversation, he had no alternative but to hire me as a groupie. But he was not going to offer me any money, nor did I deserve any money. I could hang around the office, they would give me crap to do till I learned how to do things. And when I went home to tell my mother this wonderful story, my mother did what she always did until I learned not to tell her anything wonderful, and that was she threw water on it. "You can't do that. You have to work for something. They have 61:00to pay you. They always have to pay you." I had this great apprentice opportunity and she didn't hear any of that. She knew I was being exploited the way she had been exploited. So, I lied to her and told her I'd gone into Eisner and he offered me twenty-five dollars a week. I wasn't getting anything, but I took the job. It was the first time I understood that I have to be very cautious when I give my mother good news. Because of her past, she instantly converted good news into bad news and made me think that I was making a terrible mistake. And when I followed her advice, I was making a mistake. When I ignored her advice, I realized that was the way you get to be famous, (laughs) because she just repeated -- what she learned was mistakes and she never learned herself out of repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again. So, the value system she got, which helped destroy her life, was the value system she kept and 62:00she couldn't break her way out of it or draw any lessons from it or switch. She had to hold on for dear life, and I knew when I brought her into my own ambitions and dreams that she would destroy mine. So, I started lying to her, about everything, and it worked wonderfully. (laughter)

CW:So, what was Will Eisner like personally?

JF:He was a sweetheart to me. [BREAK IN RECORDING] By that time, had some office jobs of one kind or another. And Will was certainly a boss, and he was very tight about money. And he joked about that. But he didn't act like a boss. He acted like a colleague. He acted like an elder brother. And he was devoted to 63:00comics. He saw that I was devoted to comics. And we talked comics endlessly, we talked about what different artists did. We went back and forth. We had real conversations. And I learned a lot in these conversations, and I think I gave him a lot of pleasure, because none of the guys who worked for him could take part in these conversations. Also, none of the guys who worked for him thought Eisner was anything but part of the past. They thought he was on his way out. They didn't like his style, which I venerated. They thought he was old hat. I thought he was great. So, they were working to pay the rent, and I was working for nothing but it was a dream come true. I learned a lot from him. I learned 64:00about storytelling. I learned how to tell stories by studying the structure of the "Spirit" stories that he himself was writing, and emulate them. And when I found that his stories began to suffer because he was involved in so many other enterprises that he basically was not writing well anymore -- he used to write very well -- I complained to him and he said, "If you think you can do better, write me one." And I did, about the Bronx, and he thought it was better, and I was the writer from that point on. And suddenly, being hopeless at everything else in the office and making lots of mistakes and screwing up technically and 65:00not understanding how so much of the process of what they were doing -- or getting it wrong and being clumsy and not being able to handle a brush the way you're supposed to, doing any of that stuff, I could write. I didn't know I could write. And I had no trouble writing those "Spirit" stories. And I just kind of aped what I had learned from Eisner in his old stories, but also what I got out of radio drama and movies. Noir movies were in vogue then. "The Maltese Falcon," "Double Indemnity," those things. And I just put in all the stuff that I had picked up, scooped up, blotted up from movies and radio and early television, and put it all in "The Spirit" and learned how to write this stuff 66:00that way. And also, stealing from old Eisner and Caniff -- I stole from whoever it was that would teach me something. And I loved doing that stuff. I loved the form, and it's interesting -- now, eighty-eight going on eighty-nine -- as it turned out, purely by accident in my eighties, I went back to that work that I loved as a kid. Having spent all the intervening years as a satiric, six-panel cartoonist doing a beginning, a middle, and an end in one -- without any backgrounds at all -- and became an atmospheric, noir cartoonist in the style of Eisner and Caniff, but also the old movies. Because, by that time, there were pens invented that looked like a brush and felt -- I began to be able to draw in 67:00that form that I never could because there were means that allowed me to do it. I was no more skilled at a brush than I ever was, but I could work in another way and make it look like what the big boys did. So, in my eighties, I became the cartoonist I always wanted to be: an adventure strip artist under the lofty title of graphic novelist.

CW:Can you explain what the process was for creating a -- the strips back then?

JF:Creating what strip?

CW:Creating the comic strips, when you started working for Eisner.

JF:With Eisner.

CW:Yeah.

JF:Well, Eisner loved short stories. He read O. Henry, he read de Maupassant. He loved the surprise ending, a twist. He also, more than any other cartoonist of 68:00his time, loved putting unique characters in the cartoons, people with personalities and styles, and put them in mortal combat. He loved the war between men and women. And often, most often, he would pit the Spirit against smart, villainous women who were smarter than he was and outfoxed him, outsmarted him, and they also found him sexy and attractive. And so, basically, they were more the male and he was the female -- that they would take him prisoner, they would kiss him, the women (laughs) dominated him. And he had 69:00interesting women characters. Anyhow, it was the strange characters he would introduce, the relationships he would have between his own characters -- these had a depth that were basically unknown in most comic strips, except for Caniff's "Terry," and certainly in no other comic strip I can think of running at the time in the newspapers or comic books. And that's what appealed to me.

CW:So, technically, how was it made? What was the process of making the --

JF:How Eisner wrote his stories, I don't know. My feeling is, my memory is, that he would have the finished sheet of Bristol board that he drew on, three-ply 70:00Bristol. And he would start writing right on that, in pencil. And he would write his scripts as he went along, and then when he felt like it, he would draw a panel and ink it. But I think he wrote it on the paper and then figured out where the story went. It was amazing how he made that work at all, because I don't think there was a first, second, and third draft. When I started writing it, I would take just ordinary stationery, break it into six or eight or nine panels and start scribbling dialogue and doodles to show what the action was, and write and rewrite, maybe a second time, sometimes a third time, until I had the story. And then, I would lay it out for him on the page, on a large page. And he would read it, and then he'd go over it with me and change it -- we'd 71:00have a conversation back and forth about why he thought this worked and why he thought this didn't work and what he wanted here, and I would change it. Sometimes, I thought he was right, sometimes I thought he was full of it, but he was the boss. And every time I tried to stick in my left-wing politics, he took it out. (laughs) So, I kept trying to stick it in. And that was, yeah, I thought that was funny and a necessity and it irritated him. But I remember doing something when the French were in Indochina in Dien Bien Phu -- and I did a story attacking the French Foreign Legion being in Indochina. He cut -- that went. (laughs) He made it some anonymous country. I wanted to make a statement about the French in what was later to become Vietnam. So, I mean, my early opposition to the war in Vietnam began with Eisner in "The Spirit." And then, 72:00whatever left-wing idea I had that I tried to stick in, most of them he exorcised. Will's politics were kind of liberal-stroke-conservative. I'm not even sure he didn't vote Republican. We never talked about that. I never thought he was a liberal Democrat.

CW:Did you ever connect about both being Jewish?

JF:What's that?

CW:Did you ever connect about Jewishness?

JF:Eisner and me? Eisner was not Jewish when I knew him, and he was as much ashamed of being Jewish as your average Jew was among goys. There were two women 73:00who worked in the office next door, and I think was raining hard, and Will offered to drive them home. And he was giving me a lift to the subway. And they were Catholic or Protestant, I don't know what they were. But they were talking to each other and to Will about seeing -- and one of them said -- they saw some item of clothing, and she went in the store, "And he wanted that much but I Jewed him down." And my hackles immediately rose and I waited for Will to say something and he never did. He didn't say a word. And I expected to say, "Look, we're Jews -- Jules and I are Jews, and we don't use that kind of language here. Thank you." Something. Not to kick them out of the car or anything, but he never 74:00did. Now, I don't think he was married to Ann at the time. Or if he was married, he was newly married. But I think his wife, Ann, brought Judaism more into their lives. And I think, also, he had a daughter who died at a young age. And I think the Jewishness and the accent on Jewishness in his later work, in the graphic novels he did, beginning with "A Contract with God," came out of the death of his daughter, the religious interests of his wife, which he picked up on -- but I think he was as hopefully assimilated as I was at the time I worked for him.

CW:Yeah. Do you remember when you were drafted --

JF:Every second.

CW:-- what your reaction was? (laughs)

JF:Yes. January 19th, 1951, a day that will live in infamy. It was also the day that made me a success, because without the Army, I never would have ended up doing what I'm doing. Now, what's your question?

CW:Well, first of all, can you describe what happened, how you felt when you were drafted?

JF:First of all, I desperately was fearful of going in the Army. I thought of being a conscientious objector, because I was against the Korean War, as well. And that was the war that was just ending up. And I was very critical of the Cold War, and I was very much more of a communist fellow traveler at that time 76:00-- my sister's influence -- than I was in later years. But mostly, more than having any objection at all, I was a total coward and was terrified of being drafted and being killed. I had work to do. I had to become famous. You can't kill me! And they were going to get in the way. They were going to take two years of my life and stop me from being a famous cartoonist. And I had a bad back. I've written about this in my memoir, yeah, and which -- it went out once a month, and I was in bed and couldn't move, and I thought this would keep me out. The day I was supposed to go for my physical, I did everything to make my back bad, and I couldn't. I went up on the roof with -- and tried to chin, one-hand, and to do all the things that threw my back out. Nothing. And I went 77:00for my physical, I passed. And for two years, I didn't have a backache, and the day after I got out of the Army, I was in bed for two weeks with a backache. (laughs) So, I can believe in God to that extent. He wanted me to serve so I'd have a career later on.

CW:And can you just explain, for you, personally, how --

JF:What's that?

CW:Can you explain, for you personally, how this experience influenced your work?

JF:What it did -- all through my Bronx years, which lasted 'til I was drafted, I had a problem with anger, admitting my anger, expressing rage. I would never do such a thing, because I was so angry at my mother and so angry at the passivity 78:00of my father in not protecting me against my mother, and I was so angry at all the people around me at the Bronx, including the ones who I liked because they aided and abetted what I felt was my suppression and submission. And I was totally submissive, because I was afraid of hurting anyone's feelings, I thought. My sister Mimi was a rolling temper tantrum and she stood up to my mother, and my excuse for not standing up to my mother was that Mimi continually broke my mother's heart, so I would be nice. I would be submissive. I would be 79:00the good boy. I would be the good son. But the price I paid in that submission gave me stomach aches and gave me a backache and give me this and gave me that, but I could not express against my family and the other grown-ups in the Bronx the anger that I had buried because it was -- they were doing it for my own good, in quotes. And whether that was real or not, it was a cover story I accepted. They weren't out to kill me. They weren't out to get me. They were out there -- and they may have been wrong, and I knew they were wrong, but they thought they were doing it for my own good, so how could I explode at them? But the Army, from the first second I was in there, didn't give a crap about me. They rendered me anonymous, they gave me a number, they treated me like shit, 80:00which means --- like everybody else. I wasn't treated any worse than anyone else. The Army was -- they made me feel as if I could finally express my rage, because they weren't out for my best. They were out to make me a number, not a person. They weren't out to help me be a cartoonist. They were going out to help me be a body in a bag. And so, the rage that I concealed all those years suddenly blossomed, full-grown, and it was a blessing. And suddenly, I could write, and write about the Army, and write increasingly angrily. And so, the story of Munro, the first thing I did as a satire, which I came up with sometime 81:00during my first year in the Army, came out of trying to turn my rage into a satirical form, which, in that kind of storytelling, was generally unknown at the time. So, I was finding a new form. I decided -- again, copying from Eisner -- he would occasionally do "Spirit" stories in the form of a children's book. So, I was going to do this children's book for grown-ups, and it would be about a four-year-old kid, me, being drafted by mistake and the Army refusing to admit it's a mistake, 'cause the Army, like my parents, never admitted mistakes. Like Donald Trump. Like grown-ups. I mean, this was the age when grown-ups never admitted when they were wrong, because that was a blow to -- that was before Freud. It was before parents always apologize to their children because they're 82:00wrong about everything. Parents were always right, even when they knew they were wrong, because it was a matter of status and whatever it was. Self-respect. So, the Army opened me up to the anger that was a stranger to me, and started letting it out and letting it out. And it took another forty years to get rid of it. (laughs) But it made a satirist out of me and made a man out of me. It gave me the courage I never had before. In the beginning, it took away my power of speech, so I stammered and stuttered. By the end of it, I was talking a blue streak. I matriculated through the Army, and I went in as a freshman, knowing 83:00nothing, and I came out as a graduate student knowing everything about what I had to do with my life. And I've been doing it ever since.

CW:So, considering the subject of our -- the focus of this interview, I'm curious if your Jewishness, your Jewish identity, has come out in your work in any way that you identify?

JF:Well, there's no way I would have had this work without my Jewish identity. It's in my memoir, or maybe in "The Great Comic Book Heroes," I forget which, but in one of my books, I write about my strong influence on humor early on was the great humorist, Robert Benchley. And what I did, essentially, was take the 84:00shlubby Benchley character, very much a gentile, circumcised the fucker, (laughs) and turned him into my Bernard Mergendaler and Jew him up, and give him Jewish attitudes and Jewish identity and Jewish humor and Jewish -- and make him lose out to girls the way I was doing, and other shlubby Jews were doing. Bernard -- and my other characters were based on the Jewish life I was living post-Army in New York, in the 1950s, where everybody was trying to establish themselves. And most of my friends -- not all of them, but most of them were 85:00Jewish. And the ones who made out were Jewish, the ones who didn't make out were Jewish, the ones who behaved well were Jewish, the ones who behaved badly were Jewish. I mean, there was -- it was a generally Jewish culture in Manhattan at that time. All of us young, all of us, again, thinking of ourselves as assimilated. Not particularly Jewish, not particularly anything. There were Jewish comics who used Jewish -- there was Mel Brooks, there was Sid Caesar. Very Jewish. The Caesar show, and everybody on the Caesar show was Jewish. Carl Reiner, Howard Morris. And you knew you were watching Jewish humor. That felt 86:00great, there's a TV station now that runs old Caesar shows. I was watching one last night, going back to the '50s and laughing like crazy. It was just wonderful. They did it all. But the culture -- when I started out in the "Voice," I didn't think of what I was doing as Jewish humor, but it was permeated with what was around me, and that was Jewishness. And I was showing that as part of the culture which was all around me, in ways that nobody else was showing it at the time: what we said, what our attitudes were, how we felt, 87:00how we lied to ourselves, how we lied to each other, how the hypocrisy which wasn't so much hypocrisy as it was an ethic, because we were living in the Cold War where everybody lied. If you were in a job, the employer lied to you all the time. When you went out to lunch and talked to your fellows, you lied to each other. Nobody ever told the truth, except perhaps when you were drunk. And so, you drank to get out the truth and then you went back to lying. And when you were in therapy, you told what you thought was the truth, but often, the therapist would turn that into what he or she wanted it to be and that became the therapist's lie. So, everybody had -- it was all about cover stories. And, 88:00as the years went on, I saw that my job as the boy cartoonist was to uncover the cover stories. As I wanted to do as a kid, from the time I was little, I just wanted to ask a question -- will you answer my curiosity and tell me the truth? And nobody was telling the truth, so I had to tell the truth. And that was Jewish, the search for a truth. The search for who am I, who are you, who are we, what's going on here? This is supposed to be a free country and nobody's behaving freely. We're supposed to be speaking our minds and everybody's afraid of getting fired if they speak their minds. This is during the height of McCarthyism, the Hollywood blacklist, all the things that became my subject matter and, for that matter, never left.

CW:Well, first I wanted to ask a question that Heather came up with, actually. 89:00Earlier, you were talking about movement in your work and how you're a quick study for movement. I was curious if there are -- people talk about Jewish people as talking with their hands a lot. Is that -- does Jewish -- movement particular to you?

JF:No, I think it goes back to early love of comics and action and pow and whack and zap and running and jumping and falling and all of the -- I was unathletic, and all my athleticism went into the work. And when I outgrew the violence of comic books and did the "Feiffer" strip, the "Voice" strip, the only physicality 90:00I could find, excuse for movement, was in my dancers. A dance to spring, a dance to this, a dance to that. And then, discovering Fred Astaire as a character and getting -- and using him. So, dance became my excuse for movement and action and gesture, because the strip, because it was totally dependent on characters speaking and dialogue, was mostly limited to profiles or frontal faces, but small gestures or expressions of body language here and there. But the broader thing, which I loved doing, exploded into the dancer because, until I rediscovered my comic book self just a few years ago -- I couldn't do violence, I couldn't do anybody beating anybody up. Now I'm back to beating people up. 91:00It's a lot of fun. (laughs)

CW:Well, I wanted to ask about -- for the feature, particularly, in the "Voice," for the "Feiffer" strip --

JF:Yeah.

CW:What was your process?

JF:Well, first of all, we're in the middle of a Cold War for much of the period I was doing that strip. And I found the abuse of language -- it was not exposing hypocrisy, so-called. Essentially, what I was frustrated at from doing as a kid, to get at the cover story, to get at the truth, to get at what are we really 92:00talking about when we talk about this? What is the president really saying when he says this? What is the parent really saying when he or she says to the kid this? What is one lover lying to the other mean? How do we -- how did we distort language so that it became rather than a means of communication -- more importantly, a means of avoiding communication, disguising what we mean? How did language get turned around on its ass? Or maybe it was always that way. But I wanted to show, in its various forms that I worked in, whether it's parents and children or politics or sex, men and women, how what we say is a cover story and 93:00I'm exposing that cover story. My job -- I was a private eye long before I started doing my private eye characters. And to try to show what's really behind what we see on the surface, and to do that in words and pictures, the comics form.

CW:And then, what comes first? The words or the pictures?

JF:No, the words -- well, first comes the idea. But first, it may be as simple as improvisation. When I first went to Chicago back in the late '50s and went to see the -- and the earliest version of Second City, long before Belushi and 94:00company came, when it was other people, mostly remembered only by old-timers, like Severn Darden -- and Nichols and May originally came out of that, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. I was startled by how their process in developing their sketches was like mine. They would start with an opening line or this or that, and that's what I would do. And they'd improvise. What they were doing -- much more difficult, with much more challenge in a theater with each other, in front of an audience, I would do privately on paper. I'd have an opening line. Where does it take me? Does it go anywhere? No? Throw it out. Another opening line. But sooner or later, the opening line would lead to something. I didn't know where it was going, and I would just follow the improv. But it would be an 95:00improv on paper. That's why, when I first saw the work of Nichols and May, first on television and later when I went down to a club to see them, I fell madly in love. They were me and I was them, and we connected. We had a long life of friendship and work together as a result of that. But it's about finding out what's behind the story that we're telling, which is essentially a cover story. And often, it's a cover story we tell ourselves. It's how we hide from ourselves, or how we hide as parents, how we hide as children, how our children hide, how everything -- and how government uses language to miscommunicate. The 96:00Trump administration is just a cruder form and a more blatant form of what we've been doing since -- well, forever.

CW:So, once you have the idea and the text, then what comes next?

JF:Once I have the idea and the text, I try to figure out a way of making it visually interesting. We're talking about the "Feiffer" strip now. Is it all in profile? Is it two people talking together? Is it a full body? What is going to work? And sometimes, it had to do with my state of mind. Sometimes, I just wanted to knock it out, so I'd just do a series of fast profiles, just get rid of it. Sometimes, that seemed the best way it worked doing it, because with the strip, except for dancers, the art was less important than the text. And the 97:00text was there to highlight the words. I mean, not the text. The pictures were there, the images were there to highlight them. But always, what I was saying had a lot of meat on its bones. And if I drew pictures that you were supposed to look at really hard, it took away from the text, which was supposed to guide you through this. Because what I was saying was -- it's a sleight of hand, what I also used in plays and movies. It's a sleight of hand where you take the reader or the audience, later on, from here to the next place to the next place, and before he or she knows where it's going, you got 'em. You trapped them into a 98:00point, an insight, an attitude that will be a surprise. And my hope, always, was that it would inform them. That didn't always happen, of course. And sometimes, they got the meaning all wrong. (laughs)

CW:When you were doing this, the "Feiffer" strip, did you write in pen, pencil? What were your tools?

JF:Well, no, I'd write the original, yeah, mostly on a yellow pad, with a Pentel pen. And I'd scrawl, in ink, the dialogue. And then if I got any visual ideas along the way, I'd scrawl them in the corner. And I think in "Out of Line," this book on me, there's some examples of that. But it was a very natural way of working. It's improvising on paper. And sometimes, it would start out being one 99:00thing and then turn into something else. And sometimes, as I've said before, as I came to the end, I'd realize I had no ending, and I'd put the strip away in a drawer, a file drawer. And then, maybe ten, fifteen, twenty years later, going through a bunch of stuff, I'd come upon it. I'd look at it, and I'd write the last panel right then and there. It would come to me. Suddenly, it would be easy. Suddenly, I'd have it, after twenty years.

CW:So, I know you've worked in so many different media. You've worked in comics and also screenplays and novel form --

JF:Well, the descending line of interest was, first, the satiric cartoon in a 100:00narrative form, like "Munro," like "Passionella," like "Boom!," like some of the others. Then, that became the "Feiffer" strip in the "Voice," which was very different because it was no longer narrative. It was six or eight panels, frozen in time and space. Then, with the assassination of JFK, November 22nd, 1963, I seemed to be one of the few people talking about how the country had changed. What later became very common -- I knew I was living in a different place than I had the day before, and certainly the week before Ruby shot Oswald, and that 101:00this was no longer the America that I had been, despite the Cold War, feeling positive about. I thought we had hit upon a darker time where structures were collapsing, where institutions were collapsing, where our belief in who and what we were was changing and altering, and we were hiding the truth from ourselves. And I couldn't tell that in a cartoon. That was too complicated. So, I started writing a book called "Little Murders" as a novel, and I wasn't a novelist. I spent two years discovering I wasn't a novelist. And so, I took all that material up to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, an art colony that my friend Philip Roth and Alfred Kazin helped me gain access to, and I started writing "Little 102:00Murders" as a play and discovered I was a playwright at the end of the first day, that what was frustrating me as a novel wouldn't happen, that suddenly it exploded. And in three weeks, I had a first draft, and I was a playwright. But I knew this was a play that was going to close before it opened. I mean, that what I had to say was too effing dangerous, but I loved it, and felt very excited. And the night I got home, I had dinner with Alfred and Ann Kazin, and he was my big supporter and he said, "Read me your play." And I said, "I'm a lousy reader." And he said, "Read it to me." So, he said, "I got you into Yaddo, read it to me." So, I started reading and five minutes later he was fast asleep (laughs) and I can't remember if he ever saw the play. (laughs) But I was a 103:00playwright, and I loved the play and I loved what it had to say and I loved also -- I had thought I had gotten too successful as a cartoonist, that the "Voice" strip had become, after being dangerous, I had become part of the conversation, an easy part of the conversation. I was not overthrowing the government anymore as I was in my early days. And it was important to me, for whatever the reason was, to retain my radical credentials and be shocking. And this play certainly was shocking. And if you see it, the movie, today, it's still shocking. And that's why the play is never revived. Never. And I took great pleasure in being 104:00a bad boy. I still do, you know? Spending so much of my childhood trying to be the good boy and make up for my bad older sister and please my mother and just basically doing anything to not get into fights, not get into arguments, that I spent my youth as an old man and my old age as a boy, and it's worked out very well for me.

CW:What was the hardest thing you ever created?

JF:The hardest? I think when I started "Kill My Mother," the first of the 105:00graphic novels, I was filled with such a sense of failure and inadequacy because I was drawing in a way I had never drawn before, that I accepted I didn't know how to draw in. I was inventing a form as I went along. And there, every page that I drew, these eighteen-by-twenty-four pages was trial by fire. And when I started each page knowing I'm going to fuck this up and I can't do this, I'm unqualified, I'm no good at this. How can I fake it so nobody knows? How can I get by? How can I find a way of -- and then, I'd get to the end of the page and 106:00it would be good! And I'd go on to the next page also feeling like a failure. I mean, the whole hundred forty-seven or forty-eight pages of the first book "Kill My Mother" went the same way. I can't do this, I don't know what I'm doing. I started showing it to people whose opinions I respect. They started reacting way over the top, which encouraged me incredibly but didn't stop me from feeling as if I don't know what I'm doing. I felt I had no right to be that kind of cartoonist because I'd been talked out of it by others and by myself over the years. And by the end of the first book and the reaction to the first book, I'd gotten over the hump so that I no longer felt I don't know how to do this. But by the second book, "Cousin Joseph," which went a lot faster 'cause I wasn't dealing with that certainty of failure, I went from feeling like a failure 107:00through just feeling stupid, (laughs) just dumb, I don't know what I'm doing, once again, and inventing it as I go along. So, that's the process. Each one of these pages -- with this last book, which I think is the best, about the Hollywood blacklist, going back to -- increasingly, there's a lot of stuff about the Jews, which I hadn't intended, in the second book. And the third is full of anti-Semitism -- the main character's Archie Goldman, who was a nebbishy private eye who was a kid in "Cousin Joseph," and it's about him dealing with the blacklist, and -- which turns out to be an early experimentation in Donald Trump 108:00and the life we're living now. But that's not what it was when I wrote it, because I'd finished writing the book long before Trump was running or before the camp-- it just became that.

CW:Why do you think the Jewish stuff is coming out now?

JF:What's that?

CW:Why do you think this Jewish stuff you didn't anticipate is coming out now?

JF:Oh, I don't know, other than my life with Joan, who's much more open and accepting Jewishnesss. She spent a number of years living in Israel -- and she's been an enormous influence on me. I've been an enormous influence on her, and 109:00we've been happy influences on each other and we've changed each other. Well, first of all, to put it baldly and simply, I would not be here without her. I'd be dead. This later life, which is another life that I never anticipated, is more free and happier, so why not play? It's the time to play, and I will try anything and do anything because I'm living now in an environment where, because I'm crippled by age -- I can't walk, I can hardly breathe, (laughs) I can't hear, I can't do anything but this, and this. And I'm writing better and I'm 110:00drawing better and I'm having a better time and I'm having a better life, and it's the best life as a cartoonist I've ever had and the best life as a writer I've ever had and the best life as a man and a husband and a partner that I've ever had. So, I got nothing to knock.

CW:Well, could you tell me what you're working on now?

JF:What I hope to do after I do this show of drawings that I'm working on now for an exhibition is to go back to work with my long-time, almost lifelong editor, Michael di Capua, who did my first children's book, "The Man in the Ceiling" and who's published virtually all of my children's books since -- and 111:00design for him a series of young reader graphic novels, with a fantasy/sci-fi theme, because that's what kids like, and about which I know nothing. So, do my own version of it. So, in the process of designing characters, figuring out a story, and do all of that to take to Michael and show him, and hope that we can start a series together and work on it. So, that'll be the next -- because I don't want to -- I'm done with noir. I can't nor do -- have an inclination to go back to that and think of more noir stories. But I love the form of the comic book, and I want to keep working in it.

CW:So, because I work at the Yiddish Book Center, I'm curious to ask you: what 112:00do you think about Yiddish? Yiddish language?

JF:So much of what became Warner Brothers and what became the culture at large in the '30s and '40s came out of Yiddish theater. Yiddish theater became Clifford Odets and the plays he wrote, which were a strong influence on me as a kid. And without Clifford Odets there wouldn't have been Arthur Miller and "Death of a Salesman." And the best production of "Death of a Salesman" was by that Jew, Mike Nichols, who directed it as if it were 2nd Avenue Theatre, where it's not about Willy Loman alone, it's about a Jewish family. It's never been done as a Jewish family. Mike's production was pure Jewish family. Willy was not 113:00the larger-than-life prototype for a man, but he was just a member of the family and it was an incredible production. Mike was doing 2nd Avenue Theatre, and I just loved it. And Jewish culture that comes down from the left-wing Jewish writers as a kid, whether it's Odets or Miller or Jewish entities like -- read a lot of Sholem Aleichem stories when I was young. The storytelling, the attitude, the give and take, just moves into different forms, just as Jewish humor -- the 114:00Borscht Belt humor in the Catskills became the Sid Caesar show on television, became everything Mel Brooks ever did, became -- the stuff just takes over and moves here and moves there, and some of it works, some of it is just awful, doesn't matter. It's all affected -- and marvelous.

CW:So, there are a lot of famous Jewish comic artists. Why do you think that is?

JF:Because it was a way out. It was a way -- I mean, not that there weren't a 115:00lot of serious Jewish playwrights and novelists, and we know their names. But I think if you're raised in New York, the Bronx or Brooklyn -- and many of them come right from there -- your means of survival where there was so much competition within your family, outside your family, in the culture, in the neighborhood, in school, out of school -- was being funny and using humor to carve your way, to establish yourself. Woody Allen wouldn't exist if he hadn't learned how to be funny. I wouldn't have existed if I hadn't found out a way of being funny, because it was -- be long before I could talk this long and theorize and have ideas, I knew how to be funny. Funny was a way of survival, 116:00and survival wasn't in terms of your life. Survival was getting through this day or this fifteen-minute time span to the next. How can I make them laugh so they don't find out who and what I am? How do I disguise myself? How do I hide? So, first, you make them laugh and you hide out in their ability to laugh. And then, you turn it around and use laughter to tell the truth. But that comes later. That comes when you feel as if you've earned the right to be yourself. And that takes a long time and a lot of doing.

CW:What about cartoonists? Is there a particular reason you think there are -- but there are famous Jewish cartoonists before you and in younger generations 117:00now. Is there a connection there?

JF:The Jews as cartoonists I connect to and who helped change my life were the then "New Yorker" cartoonists when "The New Yorker" had good cartoonists -- no more. William Steig, who did these personal, single-panel essays in one drawing full of introspection and full of attitude about living and oppressing and being oppressed. And personal, and very Jewish. And Saul Steinberg, who was kind of a cultural anthropologist before we had them, and with a very spare line told us 118:00about -- this Romanian, was telling us about America, things we had never learned before. And the two of them were doing such personal and strong work that "The New Yorker" didn't touch this work until they each published books where the work sold very well, so "The New Yorker" allowed them into its pages, although it was running them as cartoonists, doing their more submissive work before then. But then, it published their good stuff, and they were -- enormous influence on me, among others. There were others. And Abner Dean, another Jewish cartoonist who did some very personal work. But they were -- even the goyim out there, like Robert Osborne, who had a great line as a cartoonist and was a friend of mine -- 'cause one didn't distinguish. But I learned the most in terms 119:00of what I wanted to say from these Jews before me. No question. I wouldn't be here without Steig and Steinberg, or Segar, who did "Popeye," who was not Jewish.

CW:Right. So, you talked about growing up and having this dream of becoming famous. What was that like when you realized you were actually becoming famous?

JF:I was so shy and so unprepared and so undersized. My parents' first crime, although they didn't know it was a crime, was to allow me to skip grades when I was -- from the second to the third grade or whatever it was. And then, 120:00everybody forgot about it, so that I didn't realize I was six months younger than everyone else. So, I was six months smaller -- I got pubic hair six months later than every-- in swimming class, you were naked, and I had nothing there, and never thought of the fact, Well, I'm younger than these -- it never occurred to me. I was just not good enough. I was not a man, I was not nothing. So, all fame did as far as I was concerned was to make me even with everybody else. Now, not that I'm better than you are -- now I'm as good as you are, because I'm famous. It took all of that -- it took fame to make me as good as you, and now I can tell you what I really think.

CW:I'd like to just end with one question, but is there anything else you'd like 121:00to add about --

JF:Are you kidding?

CW:-- anything we didn't talk about?

JF:I've been here twelve hours! What --

CW:(laughs) Okay. Well, speaking about the younger people and -- coming into the field, do you have any advice for them?

JF:Well, I just don't understand why they're doing this, because when I was a kid, you dreamed of doing this work but you dreamed of getting rich doing this work. You dreamed of making -- I read about the big shot cartoonist doing comics, Caniff, Al Capp -- a thoroughly detestable man, but he was a huge influence on me -- and they were making a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year, which is the equivalent of two or three million a year back then. So, you could be rich, you could have security, you could have -- the cartoonists working today, they work very hard, they do brilliant work, and I don't think they make 122:00much money. How can they? If they do, I don't understand how they do it. When I did my graphic novels, I got a huge advance. But by the time I finished the book, it amounted to a hundred fifty dollars a week, that -- it's three years of work. And so, it's a labor of love, but not a get-rich-quick scheme, which I wish it were -- so, I don't know (laughs) how anybody, including me, manages to get on doing this. But more power to them. I mean, I think there is more art, better work being done today in the field of cartooning and alternative comics and graphic novels, whatever you want to call them, than there has been since 123:00the beginning of the -- I mean, it has more of an outburst of inventiveness and energy -- and that's all the young people who learned from me and others, but took it a step further and a step further and a step further and are still doing it. And it's immensely exciting.

CW:Great. Well, thank you so much.

JF:Well, thank you.

CW:Really appreciate you taking the time and being so open.

JF:It's (laughs) charming and lovely to have two shiksas come into my house and talk to me about Jews.

[END OF INTERVIEW]