![]() My mother would shout “Abraham,” and it sounded to them like she was calling aberhemd. MJ: And your name also caused you problems as a kid in Lithuania?ĪJ: In Yiddish, the word aberhemd meant outerwear, and unterhemd was underwear. And I did all the pamphlets and illustrated posters. I was sent eventually to the Pentagon, where I worked for Colonel Howard Rusk-who later created a world famous rehabilitation center. He could send people anywhere he wanted, so he just looked up to see where an art instructor was needed and sent me there. I learned much later that this young man’s brother-in-law was a major. (As if I wouldn’t want to be an artist instead of a machine-gunner!) Subsequently, I wound up as an art instructor at a rehabilitation center in Coral Gables, Florida. Wouldn’t you like to do something like that while you’re in the service?” And I said sure. He said, “I’ve been admiring your artwork. I met a young soldier whom I befriended and took out for dinner one night. I heard words to that effect by many soldiers.ĪJ: Sometimes fate has a role in your life. So I think simplistic minds very easily put it together that I’m in this goddamn Army where I don’t want to be because I have to go fight Hitler for the Jews. I think the whole thing stemmed from the fact that the US was involved in a war against Hitler. There were also lot of jokes about “Abie and Sadie,” this Jewish couple who could get extra ration coupons, could get tires for their car if they needed it-there was strict rationing at the time. I had very good friends in the Army who refused to even call me Abe-they would call me Al for some reason. ![]() How’d you end up as Al?ĪJ: During World War II, there were a lot of anti-Semitic feelings, even among our own soldiers. I mean, I’m pretty sure they had Mother Jones on that list, too. And it turns out, years later, the FBI did have a dossier on Mad as a possible suspect Communist-sympathizing organization. ![]() Edgar Hoover of the FBI and the McCarthyites and all those people, they probably had dossiers on all of us. And, of course, the Cold War was in full bloom, so the fact that Mad could come out and in a humorous way criticize American institutions like advertising-I’m sure J. Senator McCarthy was accusing anyone who had a liberal thought in his mind of being a communist sympathizer. And also, Mad came out at a time when things were looking politically pretty dim, with the McCarthy movement. MJ: Well, it certainly affirmed the direction we were going at that age.ĪJ: That’s correct. And from what I’m gathering from the minds of people all over, we succeeded. It was designed to corrupt the minds of children. She regarded Mad as a children’s magazine.ĪJ: Yes. She’s an author and a more high-brow literary type. Her children knew about it, but she didn’t. Mother Jones: So, was Mary-Lou Weisman a reader of Mad?Īl Jaffee: No. ( Click here for a slideshow of Jaffee’s cartoons.) Here Jaffee reflects on shtetl life, the golden age of comics, and how he ended up shaping Mad‘s subversive mission. “We were hungry all the time,” the cartoonist recalls. In his new memoir, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life (Mary-Lou Weisman wrote Jaffee illustrated), he recounts how his immigrant mother spirited off six-year-old Al and his three kid brothers to Zarasai, Lithuania, leaving them to fend for themselves in a world of poverty, religious orthodoxy, and anti-Semitism. “It’s utterly silly, I know, but serious people my age are dead.” Silliness, of course, was stock and trade for Jaffee, who created some of the long-lived humor rag’s most-beloved features, from Mad Inventions to Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions to the satirical fold-in back covers-which Jaffee still churns out on deadline at age 89. ![]() “It may be my most successful drawing,” he says of the hurling canine. People sometimes introduce cartoonist Al Jaffee as the “retching jackal guy” on account of a repulsive gag he once drew for Mad magazine. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
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