The Magical Images of Israeli Political Cartoonist Shay Charka — “Roots”

Shay Charka is one of Israel’s most talented comic book artists and political cartoonists. Dara Horn, writing in TabletMagazine, called “From Foe to Friend,” Charka’s pictorial versions of stories by the Nobel prizewinning author S. Y. Agnon, “miraculous” and “so breathtaking that I almost thought I dreamed it.” Born in 1967, Charka has published twenty graphic novels and cartoon collections, his work drawing playfully and profoundly on Jewish sources such as the Bible and Talmud. His “Jewdyssey,” a graphic-novel retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey” as a Holocaust story, has recently been prepared in English translation. He is the political cartoonist for the Israeli paper Makor Rishon, where his deft and brilliant visual commentary on current events is relished by thousands.

In these three recent “shorts,” Charka meditates on Europe—the “old world.” The first, “Berlin,” captures the haunting experience of the Jewish visitor to that city, figured as the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto photograph. The second, “Nehemia,” mischievously retells the Hasidic tale of the Baal Shem Tov and the boy who played flute on Yom Kippur, making a place for the cartoonist in a story Agnon included in his “Days of Awe.” The third story is an acerbic, affecting reflection on family memories and the impulse to look for our “Roots” in the landscape of post-Holocaust Europe.

Michael Weingrad is a professor of Jewish Studies and lives in Oregon.