The Cat and His Rabbi

I was raised on The Chronicles of Narnia, and that, of course, is where the title of my blog comes from. (If you're confused: C.S.Lewis wrote a series of children's books called The Chronicles of Narnia. One of those books is titled The Horse and His Boy.) Mostly I'm trying to be clever with my blog titles, but I did wonder about the title of The Rabbi's Cat. Though the cat calls the Rabbi master, I think it would be accurate to say that the cat views the Rabbi as belonging to him, just as much as he belongs to the Rabbi. He does, after all, refer to the Rabbi as "MY master". And it is this book read to me as a small child, paired with the way the cat acts, that makes me think the title of Joann Sfar's graphic novel doesn't quite fit. It feels to me that he was a little lazy in his title picking. But maybe I'm just imagining things.

Professor Benander may say this is a simplistic and surface reading of the text, but what what I remember most about reading the pictures of The Rabbi's Cat is how well they set the scene for me. When I was reading Nervous Conditions, or any of the short stories it wasn't as easy to see that the story was set in a different place than the place I live. I don't want to say that I forgot that I was reading about a place where the land is very different, and started to put the characters in America in my head. That's not quite right. But The Rabbi's Cat makes it blatantly obvious to me, all the time, that Algerian architecture is much different than American architecture. I like this. I like seeing a different part of the world, it's a bit like I'm off traveling.

Sfar is gnawing on the same bone as the rest of the African authors we've been reading this quarter; colonization of the mind. I recently watched a famous French film called The Battle of Algiers. In contrast to The Rabbi's Cat (and everything else we've read this quarter) The Battle of Algiers focuses on how the French violently crushed the Algerian movement for freedom, not on how the French colonized the minds of the Algerian people. This strikes me as typical of European/American thought versus African thought.
I've been thinking recently about the global perspectives on the problems in Africa. If you ask Americans what sort of problems are prevalent in African you'll hear things like AIDS, poverty, lack of clean drinking water, and lack of education. If you ask African authors about what sort of problems are prevalent in African, they will tell you colonization and colonization of the mind. I'm not sure if this is because Americans don't actually live in Africa, or because Americans don't like to think about colonization. Perhaps a combination thereof.
But back to The Battle of Algiers in contrast to The Rabbi's Cat. Both stories discussed the different "quarters" of the city; the European section, the Muslim section, and the Jewish section (is there a fourth quarter? If so, what is it?) and the inharmonious relationship between those quarters. While The Rabbi's Cat is short on violence, it talks a lot about colonization. The waiter at the cafe won't serve the Rabbi because he's Jewish and Algerian. The Rabbi has to jump through some hoops set up by the French in order to retain his Rabbi-hood. The Battle of Algiers presents the French as extremely "mean and evil" as Kirikou would say, in that they will do whatever it takes to keep Algeria as their colony, but not as taking the minds of the Algerian people captive to their way of life.

I identified most closely with the character of the Rabbi. This surprised me, as I am most like Zlabya: I'm female, I'm young, and I'm pretty naive about the way the world works. What I identified with the Rabbi about was religion. Abraham is Jewish, and a leader in his faith. I'm a Christ-follower, and a student in my faith. But I think Abraham has spent most of his life being Jewish, and if you were to ask him to describe himself, he would tell you about his relationship to God by saying "I'm a Rabbi" or "I'm Jewish." I too have spent my life inside a religious tradition and defining myself by that tradition. So the Rabbi's journey through his crisis of faith stands out particularly strongly to me. I feel that I should hate the rabbi for his hypocriticalness surrounding the observance of the sabbath in Paris, but I don't. I like how the graphic novel ends, with the rabbi questioning the validity of his faith, but comfortable with his questions. I hope that Abraham can continue to question without being overwhelmed by his doubts.