Market Day

AUTHOR: Sturm, James

ARTIST: James Sturm (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Drawn and Quarterly

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2010

Publication History

Market Day was published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2010. Drawn and Quarterly had previously published America: God, Gold, and Golems (2007), also by James Sturm, which is a compilation of three previously published stories, including The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2001), one of Sturm’s first successes. In his earlier works, Sturm tended to focus on three main topics: Jews, America, and baseball. Market Day continues to focus on Jewish experiences, but in eastern Europe. Itrepresents a departure point for Sturm, as it is his first work to be published in color. Throughout, Sturm makes use of the relationship between the main character, his profession as an artist, and color selection.

Plot

Market Day is the story of one day in the life of Orthodox Jewish rug weaver Mendelman and is told from his perspective. Early in the text, the reader learns that Mendelman is content with his profession; he believes that rug making is his true calling as an artisan and that it will provide him with sufficient money to support himself and his pregnant wife, Rachel, in their shtetl (eastern European Jewish village). On the day that the story takes place, Mendelman goes alone to the market while Rachel stays home; he is nervous but also excited about this, as he enjoys the bustling pace and the friends that he will see in town. Upon arrival in the market, Mendelman is unable to sell any of his rugs because his usual buyer has relocated and the new owner is uninterested in additional stock. The rejection weighs heavily on Mendelman because he does not know how he will support himself. This leads Mendelman into a tailspin, as he worries about what he will do to subsist. He begins wandering through the market, eventually arriving at an emporium, where he sells his rugs for below-market value. This further demoralizes him, and he is ashamed to return home to his wife.

While wandering through the night, he oscillates between depression and the desire to learn a new trade. He encounters a group of homeless men who confuse him for someone else. Later, he even begins to fantasize about another woman. Eventually, Mendelman arrives back in his town, and his friends take him home. The final scenes of the text show Mendelman standing on his porch; the final shot is a picture of just his home, leaving the reader unsure whether Mendelman entered his home, returned to his wife, and will seek new employment or whether he left her to pursue his artistic craft elsewhere.

Characters

•Mendelman is an Orthodox Jewish rug weaver who dresses in the style of nineteenth-century eastern European Jews. He wears a dark suit, a white shirt, and a black hat and has a beard. Through reflections on his past, he demonstrates a need for approval. He succeeds in his craft under the tutelage of Mr. Finkler. His talents are recognized by the rabbis of the community; they ask him to weave particular color patterns when they make decisions about Jewish legal matters. On the day the story takes place, he is anxious about his ability to provide for his family after Mr. Finkler moves to a new town and his replacement is uninterested in buying the rugs. This leaves Mendelman with fine rugs but no clients and a pregnant wife at home. Mendelman struggles to adjust to his new situation and acknowledges that he does not have other marketable skills with which to earn a livelihood. Mendelman’s life begins to unravel. Whether or not Mendelman has decided to return to his wife is unclear.

•Rachel is Mendelman’s wife and is absent for much of the text. She has no speaking parts and is seen only at the beginning of the text while sleeping. Despite her physical absence, she is referenced many times throughout and is a central figure in Mendelman’s life. She is referred to as Mendelman’s better half by the fellow men in the marketplace, and they respect her as Mendelman’s wife. However, following his inability to sell his goods, her pregnancy causes Mendelman anxiety because he is unsure how he will provide for her. She expresses concern for her husband when he does not return home and arranges for his friends to search for him.

•Mr. Finkler is an elderly man who sold high-end custom merchandise. He was the first to recognize Mendelman’s artistic talent and encouraged Mendelman to practice his skills in order to improve. He purchased many of Mendelman’s rugs, not notifying him that sales were tapering off, in order to continue encouraging Mendelman to weave despite putting the shop in financial difficulty. Finkler leaves the town abruptly, abandoning his store and putting it in the hands of his son-in-law. This departure precipitates Mendelman’s bad day. The realization that Mr. Finkler continued to buy merchandise from Mendelman though no one was actually buying the rugs causes Mendelman great distress, as he feels that Mr. Finkler misled him about his talents.

•Mr. Finkler’s son-in-law assumes control of the business, following his father-in-law’s decision to retire, and is uninterested in maintaining the rapport that his father-in-law had with his artisans. He approaches the store purely from a business standpoint and refuses to purchase unnecessary stock the way that his father-in-law once did in order to support the development of local artists. It is perhaps not coincidental that he is unnamed, especially given his demeanor and his refusal to develop any type of personal relationship with his customers that would encourage him to share his name or for them to ask him for it.

Artistic Style

Market Day is Sturm’s first published work in color and is a departure from his earlier work in black, white, or brown outlines of individuals as is seen in The Golem’s Mighty Swing. For the most part, colors are muted, but in certain scenes such as those featuring sunrise, sunset, and the fruit stands in the market, the colors are richer but never actually bright. The colors reflect the overall mood of the text as a dark experience.

Throughout, text color is used to reflect the ways in which Mendelman sees the world as an artist. Entire panels are dedicated to depicting the world through Mendelman’s perspective, which views everything as a pattern for a future rug. Life is literally an artistic piece for Mendelman, as he sees art everywhere he looks. By presenting scenery in this way, Sturm is reinforcing Mendelman’s gift as an artist, yet the scenes also reinforce Mendelman’s dilemma that is shared by artists and craftspeople throughout time: Mendelman was born to craft rugs, to create art, yet he is living a world that is increasingly unsupportive of his art.

Sturm also uses scenery for pacing. As Mendelman walks throughout the panels of Market Day, the world around him operates at a frenetic pace and Mendelman’s day continues to spiral out of control as he is rejected in the market and left forlorn. Through the use of two-page visuals of scenery without any text, Sturm forces his reader to slow down the reading pace and fully internalize and consider what is happening to Mendelman.

Images are also used to convey information that would be difficult to communicate in words yet is essential to the story. For example, Sturm identifies Mendelman as a Jew. One of the panels on the opening page is of a mezuzah, a Jewish ritual object affixed to doorposts. By showing an image of a religious object that many readers would identify as Jewish, instead of entering into an explanation of Mendelman’s religious identity, Sturm welcomes the reader into the text and into Mendelman’s life in a subtle way. By doing this, Sturm narrows the distance between Mendelman and the reader while still providing important information. Sturm’s strategy is particularly effective given the sensitive subject of the text. Without a connection to Mendelman, it would be more difficult to empathize with him and his plight.

Themes

The major theme of Market Day is the role of the artist in society. Through his presentation of Mendelman’s struggles, Sturm focuses on the relationship between an artist and the society in which he or she lives. Sturm presents a series of examples of this relationship through the reactions of different characters. That Mr. Finkler supports Mendelman’s craft despite the fact that he is losing money represents a belief that the artist contributes something beyond financial remuneration to society. On the other hand, Mr. Finkler’s son-in-law refuses to support the artist because he stands to make no money from such an endeavor. Between these two poles is Mendelman, who does not know what his role will be after losing his patron. Mendelman wants to create, but he knows that he cannot support himself on his own. Sturm’s concluding image, showing Mendelman’s home without an indication as to whether Mendelman returned to it, places the burden on the reader to decide what Mendelman should have done. Should he pursue his craft elsewhere and abandon his family, or should he abandon his craft and support his family through some other means? This conundrum forces the reader to consider what society’s responsibility is toward artists.

Impact

Market Day is a work of the Modern Age of comics, having been published in 2010. It has received positive reviews from Time magazine, National Public Radio,and The New York Times and has met with particular acclaim throughout the comics industry. It represents an evolution in Sturm’s craft, as he experiments with color, a departure from his earlier work. Market Day shows a commitment to the medium and demonstrates the importance of assessing each work independently and what each text needs in order to properly convey meaning. This accurately reflects Strum’s role as a teacher of comics, cartooning, and education through comics.

Further Reading

Sfar, Joann. Klezmer: Tales from the Wild East (2006).

Sturm, James. The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2003).

Bibliography

Harde, Roxanne. “‘Give ’em Another Circumcision’: Jewish Masculinities in The Golem’s Mighty Swing.” In The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, edited by Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman. Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010.

Kacyzne, Alter, and Marek Web. Poyln: Jewish Life in the Old Country. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

Shandler, Jeffrey. Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Vishniac, Roman. A Vanished World. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999.