“Upon examining the illustrations of the original editions of Oliver Twist,” recalls Eisner in his introduction to the graphic novel,
I found unquestionable examples of visual defamation in classic literature. The memory of their awful use by the Nazis in World War II, one hundred years later, added evidence to the persistence of evil stereotypes. Combating that became an obsessive pursuit, and I realized that I had no choice but to undertake a truer portrait of Fagin by telling his life story in the only way I could. (FTJ 4)
Eisner offers a sympathetic “portrait” of Fagin’s life story. To Brian Bendis, a recognized comic book writer in his own right,
Will took his complicated feelings about race and caricature and applied them directly to his feelings about Judaism and how Jews have been reflected in the media for hundreds of years, by sinking his teeth directly into the classic Oliver Twist and one of the most famous Jewish stereotype characters in all of fiction … Fagin.” (2)
Two experiences influenced Eisner’s commitment to raise awareness of how still-existing religious prejudice against the Jewish people historically turned Jews into a stereotype that Dickens propagates in his novel.40 Eisner grew uncomfortable with his own racist caricature of an African-American, Ebony, an amusing counterfoil to the Spirit in his syndicated comic The Spirit created in 1940 at a time when comics had many racial stereotypes akin to Eisner’s. Further, during World War II, Eisner, who was Jewish, confronted horrific anti-Semitism firsthand.
Eisner frames the graphic novel as a conversation between Moses Fagin and his creator, Charles Dickens, set on the night before Fagin is to hang. The opening full-page panel depicts Dickens and Moses Fagin, who sits in a corner of his prison cell and pleads with Dickens to present a more compassionate portrayal of him. Fagin says in a word balloon (in a font that approximates handwritten, capital letters that carries throughout the entire script): “Tarry a bit, Mister Dickens, while ol’ Fagin here tells you, Sir, what I really was and how it all came to be!!” (FTJ 5). Moses is now a bearded old man who looks tired and worn out. Dickens’s face is not visible, and Dickens does not speak in this scene. Eisner never shows Dickens’s face in this panel or the closing panels that frame the graphic novel and also take place in Fagin’s prison cell. In these final scenes, Fagin defies his creator: “I’ve asked you here to confront a man you wrongfully portrayed! One who will soon be swinging lifeless in that yard! … Doomed to wear for eternity that warped and evil image!” (112). Eisner, speaking through Fagin, also challenges Dickens’s anti-Semitic portrayal of Jews in the final panel (before the epilogue): “A Jew is not Fagin any more than a gentile is Sikes” (114). Dickens, with his back to the reader-viewer, replies somewhat sympathetically as he exits the prison cell: “Goodbye, old Fagin … er, oh, in my later books I’ll treat your race more evenly!” (114). This line likely refers to Dickens’s kinder treatment of the Jewish “race” in his characterization of Mr. Riah, a benevolent Jewish moneylender, in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865).
Eisner notes in the appendix that even though Dickens insisted he was not anti-Semitic, there exists ample evidence of anti-Jewish remarks and epithets in Dickens’s letters and conversations (123). Jewish civil rights activists wrote to Dickens in the 1850s, asking him to present a fairer representation of the Jews. Eliza Davis, wife of a Jewish banker in London, wrote a letter of complaint to Dickens, asking him to eliminate this ethnic profiling for Oliver Twist’s republication in an 1867 edition. Davis, according to critic Jeet Heer, upbraided Dickens because the author does not identify his Christian villains by their religion, and “to identify Fagin constantly as a Jew was to conflate him with all Jews” (FTJ 131). Davis and Dickens engaged in spirited communication through the post, and Davis apparently influenced Dickens, who eliminated most of the references to Fagin as a “Jew” for the 1867 edition. To Eisner, Dickens’s revision “was too late, for the earlier and well-distributed editions still in use today contain the original text that uses ‘Jew’ to refer to Fagin” (FTJ 124). Hence, Eisner wrote and illustrated Fagin the Jew.
Eisner openly declares his aim to remediate an offensive literary and visual anti-Semitic stereotype in a book whose popularity endures:
It has always troubled me that Fagin “the Jew” never got fair treatment, and I challenge Charles Dickens and his illustrator, George Cruikshank, for their description and delineation of Fagin as a classic stereotypical Jew. I believe this depiction was based on ill-considered evidence, imitation, and popular ignorance.” (FTJ 124)
Dickens in many ways perpetuated a stereotype that grew out of “centuries of Christian mythmaking, while reflecting ideas that still permeated British society at that time,” notes Heer (131), but Dickens gave this racialized stereotype lasting life. Dickens introduces Fagin as “a very old shriveled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare” (OT, Oxf. 1982 50). Dickens does not reveal any particulars about Fagin’s past and simply names him “a receiver of stolen goods” (xxv) in his 1841 preface to the third edition of Oliver Twist.
As I have argued elsewhere, Dickens initially makes Fagin a nurturing character, a quality that would be reassuring to his middle-class readers41—for example, Fagin provides Oliver with food and shelter. But over the course of the novel, Fagin’s disturbing qualities far outnumber any good deed he does. Fagin’s character in Dickens’s source text grows dark when he colludes with Monks, Oliver’s twisted half brother; in time, the “merry old gentleman” (OT, Oxf. 1982 53)—itself a reference to the devil42—becomes simply “the Jew.”43 “If we accept Dickens’s description of Fagin as ‘the Jew,’” notes Heer,
then what conclusions can we draw from reading Oliver Twist? The Jew is filthy, the Jew is a criminal, the Jew is a corruptor of children, the Jew values money more than human relations, the Jew is linked with poison, the Jew is a Judas-like betrayer, the Jew is an animal, the Jew is a murderer, the Jew is the Devil. In sum, a large part of what makes Fagin’s character so oppressively unforgettable is that he combines in one package centuries of loathsome anti-Semitic stereotypes. (130)
Through the character of Fagin, this anti-Semitic “package” endures.
In Fagin the Jew, Eisner imagines a compelling personal history to change this perception of Fagin as an animalistic, dirty, betraying, greedy thief who corrupts children. Eisner elucidates Fagin’s past and why he must turn to crime in order to survive. We meet Moses Fagin as a child, an immigrant from Bohemia, who arrives in nineteenth-century England with his parents, Abraham and Rachael, during the second wave of Jewish immigration. Moses’s father believes “England is a tolerant country” (FTJ 10), but anti-Semites cruelly murder him. Rachael Fagin dies soon after. Moses finds a kindly benefactor in Eleazor Salomon, who takes orphan Moses into his home as a houseboy and then finds him a job to clean a school for poor Jewish children opened by a Jewish philanthropist named Emmanuel Lopez. Losing his job due to a misunderstanding involving Lopez’s daughter Rebecca, Moses Fagin, who is polite and hardworking, finds himself on the streets. Wrongfully accused of a crime, Fagin is deported to Australia, where Dickens sends many undesirables in his fiction, including Abel Magwitch of Great Expectations (1861) and the Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist.
Eisner takes not only Dickens but also George Cruikshank to task, noting how
Cartoonists certainly understand how easy it is to rely on a common image in the visual language to portray a character, but like the mistakes of illustrators before him, Cruikshank’s misuse of a necessary staple in portraying Fagin, one that was so common to contemporary publications, is a contribution to further reprehensible stereotyping of Jews by bigots throughout history. (FTJ app. 124)
Cruikshank draws upon the accepted visual stereotype of the Jew established by cartoonists before him, evident in Thomas Rowlandson’s etching “A Jew Broker” (1789). Cruikshank makes Fagin look like a Sephardic Jew, th
e first group of Jews to immigrate to England seeking refuge from the Spanish inquisition, as opposed to an Ashkenazic Jew of the second wave of emigration from Germany and Eastern European countries in the 1800s. “The popular illustrations of Jews,” notes Eisner, “including Cruikshank’s, were based on the appearance of the Sephardim, whose features, when they arrived, were sharper, with dark hair and complexions, the result of their four-hundred-year sojourn among the Latin and Mediterranean peoples” (app. 125).44
Eisner remediates Cruikshank’s “greasy flannel-gowned” Fagin, whose pronounced nose repulsively extends to his top lip, and makes him an Ashkenazic Jew with a pleasing appearance. Young Moses Fagin has a small nose, sensitive eyes, and a well-developed physique (see fig. 54). Cleaning the school for Jewish children, Fagin wears fitted pants that cling to his muscular thighs; his rolled-up shirtsleeves show off his biceps. Eisner’s Moses Fagin is also attractive to women, including wealthy Rebecca Lopez, whose father owns the school he cleans. When Moses forgets his class status and kisses Rebecca, Emmanuel Lopez throws him out, and Fagin finds himself back begging in the London streets and then sent to Australia. Even after a ten-year stint at an Australian penal colony, Fagin, who returns to London, has a round face and kindly, sparkling eyes; as Heer notes, “This is a sharp contrast to the original drawings of Fagin done by George Cruikshank, who depicted a hook-nosed, sinister Fagin every bit as ugly as the one Dickens described in prose” (132).
Figure 54. “Fagin at the School,” 2003. Artwork by Will Eisner for his Fagin the Jew, 2013. Image © Will Eisner Studios, Inc.
The cover of Fagin the Jew shows Fagin smiling broadly as he walks down a London street, holding the hand of Artful Dodger and another of his steady boys. Eisner also draws a broad-smiling, twinkly-eyed Fagin dancing jollily with his young pickpockets, who sing, “We’ll all be rich as royalty ’cause we’re all in Fagin’s family” (FTJ 83). Nonetheless, Eisner acknowledges that Fagin has a brutal side: Fagin may refer to the pickpockets as “my boys” and his “family,” but the boys “required a bit of discipline” (FTJ 52); panels show Fagin kicking and throwing the boys around, although he justifies his actions: “Still, I kept myself and my boys from the bitter refuge of workhouses” (52).
Although Eisner changes some of the details of Oliver Twist, Fagin’s invented history seamlessly intersects with the source text. In a flashback midway through the graphic novel, Fagin, now well established in the criminal element of London, recalls how Oliver “joined my ‘family’ as usual, recruited by one of my steady boys” (FTJ 53). Fagin learns of Oliver’s origins from Noah Claypole, the charity boy who makes Oliver miserable at Mr. Sowerberry’s and whom Fagin later employs as his snitch. Fagin in this adaptation tries to persuade Sikes not to murder Nancy, crying out, “Stop Sikes! Have mercy! Nancy is a loyal girl!” (96), but Sikes kills Nancy with a chair in front of Fagin and Bull’s-eye. Oliver does briefly visit Fagin in the source text, and Eisner expands this scene: when Oliver seeks out Fagin in the condemned cell, the two characters piece together Oliver’s history, rendered through flashbacks (103–05). In these scenes in Eisner’s version, we discover that Fagin possesses the locket that lies at the bottom of the Thames in the source text. Fagin, while chanting the sacred Jewish prayer, the Shema, kindly tells Oliver where to find the proof of his parentage—“I give you a future boy!” (108).
A closeness between Oliver and Fagin resonates in Eisner’s adaptation through an interdependent combination of graphics and words. For example, in the panel where Oliver enters Fagin’s prison cell (see fig. 55), the caption, written from Fagin’s viewpoint, evokes sympathy: “I lay in my cell, exhausted from writhing and flailing against my sorry fate[.] … Aided by his influential new benefactor and patron Mr. Brownlow, Oliver was allowed to visit me here. His visit added to my comfort and helped me endure the agony of an undeserved fate” (FTJ 103). The cell is as barren as Cruikshank depicts it in “Fagin in the Condemned Cell” (see fig. 16, ch. 2, 75; fig. 36A, ch. 3, 135). Fagin sits not on a cot or a bench, as James Mahoney imagines this scene for the Household Edition of Dickens (1871; see fig. 36B, ch. 3, 135), but on a cold stone floor. Whereas Mahoney’s illustration of this same scene follows Cruikshank’s theatrical staging and recalls Cruikshank’s hook-nosed, Sephardic-looking Fagin (whose appearance evokes that of the Elizabethan stage Jew and eighteenth-century cartoons), Eisner’s Fagin is not Semitic looking or crazed as he contemplates death by hanging.
Figure 55. “Fagin in the Condemned Cell with Oliver,” 2003. Artwork by Will Eisner for his Fagin the Jew, 2013. Image © Will Eisner Studios, Inc.
Despite his incarceration in the many panels showing his visit with his “dear, dear boy” (FTJ 103), Moses lights up with pleasure that nearly restores his jollity. Moses hugs Oliver. He clasps his hands as if seeing Oliver has answered a prayer and kindly offers to assist him: “So tell me, how can I help you?!” (103). Wearing tattered clothes that hang on his now shrunken form, Fagin plays the role of the Good Samaritan and looks nearly as fair as blond-haired Oliver Twist. Although Eisner remediates Fagin’s stereotypical appearance from the text and illustrations of the source text, he reengages some of the theatrical staging of the caricature tradition within the original illustrations of Oliver Twist. For example, in one full-page panel, Oliver, moved by Fagin’s plight, sheds big tears while Fagin desperately clings to him, burying his face against Oliver’s chest to hide his own weeping; an accompanying caption narrates the scene melodramatically from Fagin’s point of view: “We clung together, I as a drowning man who holds onto a floating log, and Oliver as a mourner unable yet to separate from an attachment, the memory of which will forever remain with him” (FTJ 109). In the panels that follow, large thought bubbles dramatically emanate from Fagin’s mind to show Moses imagining Oliver’s happy future—finding the locket proving his parentage, being adopted by the childless Mr. Brownlow, and walking with his new “father” in the tranquil countryside.
Eisner adds an epilogue that creates an even more staged ending to Fagin’s tale. We meet a grown-up Oliver Twist Brownlow, now a barrister, married to Adele, the granddaughter of Rebecca Lopez, who truly loved Fagin when he was an innocent youth cleaning her father’s school for Jewish children. Rebecca always maintained Fagin’s goodness because Moses returned stolen property that Sikes robbed from Fagin’s onetime benefactor, the wealthy Jewish merchant Eleazor Salomon.45 We learn Fagin might have had a respectable life if the kindly bachelor Eleazor Salomon, who wanted to adopt Fagin as his heir, had actually found Moses Fagin before Moses was transported to Australia. In the style of the realistic school of illustration, Eisner ends the tale with a close-up of a broadly smiling Fagin holding a locket that once belonged to Salomon; the locket contains Fagin’s portrait as a young man. This panel offers filial closure for Fagin through a material object that stands as a testimony to the love Salomon felt for young Moses Fagin whom he thought of “as his son” (FTJ 120). In this final twist, Fagin the Jew thus daringly aligns orphaned Moses Fagin with the eponymous orphan Oliver Twist, who is successfully adopted by his own “Eleazor Salomon,” the kindly bachelor Mr. Brownlow.46
Despite Eisner’s efforts to revise the character of Fagin, graphic novel adaptations of Oliver Twist that came out after Fagin the Jew, such as by Campfire and Papercutz, essentially reuse the anti-Semitic stereotype of Fagin as imagined by Cruikshank and carried by Du Maurier into his depiction of Svengali—particularly Fagin’s dark eyebrows and pronounced nose. Campfire’s 2011 adaptation of Oliver Twist, written by Dan Johnson with illustrations by Rajesh Nagulakonda,47 is only eight-four pages, so it omits much of the plot,48 but this version develops the major themes and characterization in Dickens’s source text. Nagulakonda gives Fagin not red but black hair, thick black eyebrows, and a large Semitic nose that extends beyond his mouth toward his sneering grin and jutting chin (for example, Johnson 34, 67, 74). Nagulakonda also recalls the caricature school in his theatrical posing of Fagin throughout this graphic nove
l including his excessively large and long nose and his long finger that he points at Oliver and at his own nose (for example, 34, 74).
Although Campfire does not include a version of the iconic “Fagin in the Condemned Cell,” it does, for example, recall Cruikshank’s illustration of “Monks and the Jew,” a plate that shows Fagin and Monks leering at Oliver through a window in the Maylie’s country home where Oliver finds refuge after the failed burglary attempt at this very house (in the source text, Sikes leaves Oliver in a ditch, believing he is dead). In the original Cruikshank illustration, a hook-nosed, black-hatted Fagin stands next to an equally sinister-looking black-hatted Monks. Both peer in to see Oliver dozing over his books in a “cottage-room, with a lattice window” (OT, Oxf. 1982 216). Cruikshank captures a moment between sleep and waking where Oliver perceives “the hideous old man” and screams for help, “‘The Jew! The Jew!’” (217). In Campfire’s adaptation, this scene extends over four panels (Johnson 60). Oliver is first studying and then falling asleep. An ominous thought bubble showing Oliver’s dream, an exquisite stage effect, depicts Monks and Fagin, again pointing his very long finger and nose at Oliver. The next frame closely resembles Cruikshank’s original design: Oliver awakes to see an ominous looking Monks and Fagin (who is now hatless) similarly positioned outside Oliver’s window.49 Nagulakonda draws Oliver’s eyes partially open (they are closed in Cruikshank’s illustration), suggesting Oliver actually sees Fagin and Monks. The two vanish from the scene in the next panel, leading Oliver in the fourth panel of the sequence to scream for help. Johnson echoes the Dickensian dialogue in the second and third frames where the sight of Fagin “sent the blood tingling to his heart, and took away his voice and power to move” even though “It was but an instant—a glance, a flash, before his eyes—and they were gone” (60).50 In staging the scene over four panels, Johnson and Nagulakonda present this instant both as a terrible dream and a real visitation by the sinister Fagin and Monks, engaging the two commonly held interpretations of the Cruikshank illustration of this same scene.
Serials to Graphic Novels Page 26