Yossel: April 19, 1943—A Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

AUTHOR: Kubert, Joe

ARTIST: Joe Kubert (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Ibooks

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2003

Publication History

Yossel is Joe Kubert’s fifth work created specifically for the graphic novel format and second dealing with the human cost of war, following Fax from Sarajevo (1996). However, because it deals with events involving Kubert’s family, Yossel may be his most personal work.The graphic novel was first published in English in 2003. In 2005, Ehapa Press published a hardcover edition in German, Delcourt published an edition in French, and Public Square Books published a hardcover edition in Spanish. A new paperback edition was published by the DC Comics imprint Vertigo in May, 2011, as part of its Joe Kubert Library series.

Plot

Yossel was created as a stand-alone volume, a personal statement from Kubert on the Holocaust. Merging aspects of his professional life and family history with accounts of the Warsaw Uprising, Yossel tells of a young artist who lives in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland. The novelbegins with a rebel cell of Polish Jews huddled in a sewer, waiting to fight their Nazi oppressors. As they wait, young Yossel sketches and remembers.

A year after Kristallnacht, Yossel’s life in Poland is uncertain but idyllic. Vaguely aware of the impending Nazi threat, he is preoccupied with the Sunday funnies and the few comic books he has seen. Drawing is his passion, to the chagrin of his Bar Mitzvah instructor, the rebbe.

One evening, a Nazi soldier comes to the door of Yossel’s home in Yzeran and orders the family to leave immediately. Gathering what belongings they can, Yossel and his family join a ragtag parade of Jews bound for the Warsaw ghetto. As they trudge on, Yossel draws. After arriving at the ghetto and receiving orders from the Nazis, Yossel’s father tells him that he is leaving to find the rest of their family. He returns at dawn, having failed in his efforts.

The family adapts to this new life. A Nazi takes notice of Yossel’s drawings, and he becomes a favorite of the Nazi officers, which causes resentment in the ghetto community. Yossel’s family is sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, but he remains behind to provide entertainment for the Nazis.

Allying with a band of rebels led by Mordecai, Yossel uses his privileged position to convey information as ghetto conditions become dire. On his way to a rebel meeting, Yossel hears a gaunt man whispering in the shadows. The man has escaped from a concentration camp and told the rebels the truth about what has been happening in the camps. Revealing that he is the rebbe from Yzeran, the man tells Yossel of his family’s death in the camps.

Mordecai calls for action. The rebels kill a Nazi guard and hide his body; emboldened by success, they assassinate six more. The Nazis retaliate, and the rebbe is found and hanged. In retribution, after his next session entertaining the Nazis, Yossel surreptitiously leaves two live hand grenades in the office complex, destroying it.

In the ensuing attacks, buildings are destroyed, and hundreds of Jews are killed. There are rumors that Nazi official Joseph Goebbels plans to level the ghetto. A regiment of Nazis arrives, fully armed and accompanied by tanks. Mordecai and his cadre decide that if they are to die, they will die like men.

After the rebel attack succeeds, the Nazis regroup and begin to burn the ghetto systematically, destroying it building by building. Clearing the way with a Molotov cocktail, Mordecai and his cadre retreat to the sewers, where the story began. The rebels’ lives come to an inevitable end: Trapped in the sewers, they are killed with flamethrowers. A departing Nazi picks up Yossel’s final drawing and considers it silently. He lets it fall into the sewer, where its lines blur into obscurity.

Characters

•Yossel, the protagonist, is a teenage Polish Jew who lives in the village of Yzeran until his family is relocated to the Warsaw ghetto. He is a talented artist fascinated with comics and fantasy illustrations. His art enables his survival in the ghetto and is a catalyst in his contribution to the underground.

•Mordecai is Yossel’s protector after his parents are taken away. He is also the leader of the resistance cell that forms in the Warsaw ghetto. After hearing the rebbe’s account of the atrocities occurring in the concentration camps, he tries in vain to convince the Jewish council, which controls the ghetto’s population under the auspices of the Nazis, of the truth. When they refuse to listen, he decides to fight back.

•The Rebbe is the former rabbi of Yzeran. While in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, he survives through guile, hard work, and luck and sees the full extent of Nazi atrocity. After successfully escaping, he makes his way to the Warsaw ghetto, where he tells his tale to the rebels. He refuses to hide from the Nazis and is hanged.

Artistic Style

The art of Yossel was created using uninked pencils, rather than pencils and inks. This conscious choice by Kubert preserves the emotional integrity of the art. The value range is the result of mark making and erasure, techniques that create dark tones and highlights within the illustrations. The local color of the paper is preserved as an additional value. This further adds to the verisimilitude of the story, creating the sense that readers are privy to a personal sketchbook, an intimate experience.

Kubert’s art is characterized by its high degree of visual energy, fine lines, and dynamically posed figures. His comics use the trompe l’oeil device of forced one-point perspective to great emotional effect. Yossel contains a particularly compelling example of this: In one scene, the rebbe is shown loading bodies into the ovens at the concentration camp. The full-page scene is shown from inside one of the ovens. The viewer sees prone feet on a slab, an open oven door, and rebbe and his co-workers standing beyond it.

Kubert eschews panel borders throughout the graphic novel, a technique used earlier by Will Eisner in his seminal work A Contract with God (1978). As a narrative device, the absence of borders usually results in a slower reading pace, but in the context of Yossel, it reinforces the sense of urgency and tension in the narrative. Borders do appear around text, which is digitally lettered in a font based on Kubert’s own hand lettering. While this is occasionally jarring, as in the case of the typeset eviction notice depicted early in the novel, the disconnect it causes also has an emotional effect.

Within the narrative, readers also see Yossel’s own art, which is rendered in a more tentative style than the rest of the book, lending an additional sense of authenticity to the work. Yossel’s sketches take on nuances that reflect the narrative. Initially filled with heroes and monsters, his later sketches are influenced by his experiences in the ghetto. He creates fantasy art for his German oppressors, often depicting Nazis as superheroes, but this art is tinged with an urgency and resentment that they overlook.

Themes

Yossel follows in the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986, 1991) and Eisner’s To the Heart of the Storm (2000) in that it relates the intimate involvement of the creator’s family with World War II. All three books deal with aspects of Judaism as it relates to World War II, and both Yossel and Maus are directly related to the Holocaust. The narrative of Kubert’s novel is, in a sense, a cautionary tale. Yossel is clearly a stand-in for Kubert, who was an artistic teenager living in the United States at the time of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. This concept is reinforced by Kubert’s introduction, in which he reveals that while he and his family emigrated from Poland when he was an infant, they were nearly unable to do so; he and his family could have shared the fate of Yossel and his parents.

Within the narrative, everyone who sees Yossel’s art utters phrases such as “he draws like magic” and “I couldn’t draw a straight line,” echoing each other despite their differences. This reinforces the shared humanity of the Nazis and their Jewish captives, though the Nazis are unable to see it.

Readers are never told Yossel’s surname, and almost no surnames appear in the narrative. This lack of family names, along with the image of Yossel’s final drawings fading in the sewer, calls attention to the true goal of the Holocaust: the eradication of a people and their history. However, the narrative itself resists this attempt at eradication. Told in the first-person point of view and in past tense, the narrative makes readers privy to Yossel’s thoughts and emotions despite his ultimate death, implying the survival and endurance of the spirit of the Polish Jews. The name Yossel, an intimate form of Yossef, is Hebrew for “he will enlarge” or “he will grow,” which reinforces the conviction that the spirit of the Polish Jew lives on.

Impact

Critics received Yossel favorably, and the book is often used in classrooms to teach about the Holocaust. It is included in numerous lists of recommended books on the subject. The work is largely accessible to readers unaccustomed to the graphic novel form, though some report being put off by its more stark visual elements. Because of this, educators most often recommend its use in high school classes, as opposed to middle school classes.

The publication of this work was something of an event. As he has aged, Kubert has decreased his comics output, especially in comparison to his prodigious output as a younger man. He is one of a dozen or fewer major Golden Age comics artists who lived to see the medium mature. Of that number, most are in retirement or working in other fields, which gives an added significance to any new work by Kubert. His following work, Jew Gangster (2005), is also a veiled memoir of his youth. However, the newer work is based in observation, while Yossel remains a speculation.

Further Reading

Croci, Pascal. Auschwitz (2004).

Eisner, Will. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2005).

Speigelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986, 1991).

Bibliography

Irving, Christopher. “Keeping Current with Joe Kubert.” Graphic NYC, June 22, 2009. http://graphicnyc.blogspot.com/2009/03/keeping-current-with-joe-kubert.html.

Kaplan, Arie. From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2008.

Schelly, Bill. Man of Rock: A Biography of Joe Kubert. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2008.

Zuckerman, Samantha. “The Holocaust and the Graphic Novel: Using Maus and Its Narrative Forms to Bring Credence to the Medium.” Kedma, no. 6 (Spring, 2008): 54-72. http://www.hillel.upenn.edu/kedma/06/zuckerman.pdf.