Life in the service of the muse … and, well, the amusing

On Sunday night, The Star’s cartoonist Dov Fedler won the prestigious Jewish Report Arts, Sports, Science and Culture Award for 2015 at a gala function in Midrand. Previous recipients have included David Goldblatt, William Kentridge and Johnny Clegg. Kevi

DOV FEDLER has been a political cartoonist for The Star for almost 50 years. His name on his birth certificate is Noah David Fedler, but no one has ever called him Noah.

Born in the opening stanza of World War II, he saw his first pencil when he was in a pram. His first words were about working for Walt Disney. His first draw- ings were of Mickey Mouse, Mussolini and Hitler – and he thought Stalin actually was his Uncle Joe.

His parents came to South Africa from Lithuania just before the Great Depression. The family lived next door to the Mayfair shul and the suburb was a happy vibrant hive of all things Jewish. Dov became best friends with a Lebanese boy.

The Fedlers left Mayfair the day the State of Israel was declared, emigrating to the gentrified Greenside – a move that killed Dov’s mother who died just before his bar mitzvah.

Drawing was always his escape, helped by a father who was a printer with an endless supply of paper. His dad wanted him to be a dentist, for the irrefutable logic that he could call himself a doctor but not have to be called out at night. There was no question about Dov going to varsity, only what he would study. The artist wanted fine art; the father said no, he would die penniless and hungry.

They compromised on architecture – a spectacular failure. Dov emerged older and wiser, and headed to art college. After a year, he parlayed a credit for the threeyear course into a job with VZ, one of the country’s leading agencies, today part of Ogilvie Mather. There he was mentored by VZ’s top art director Stuart Wilson, a closet cartoonist himself.

It was at VZ that Dov met veteran arts journalist Percy Baneshik who needed an illustrator for his column in The Rand Daily Mail. The rival Argus Group poached Percy as the arts editor on a brand new paper called The Sunday Chronicle. Dov went with him.

“The Chronicle was a dream newspaper which never made money. I was producing nine to 10 drawings a week. It was a grand time. I had the best apprenticeship,” says Dov.

The Chronicle folded after two years and his bosses were subsumed in the group flagship, The Star. Dov went along in their slipstream, but this time, it would be different. An editor insisted the tyro draw political cartoons. He didn’t think he could. He didn’t think he wanted do. But he did. And that was 50 years ago. Today, he’s a household name, having chronicled South Africa’s history through his pen from Vorster to Botha, De Klerk, Mandela and now, Zuma. His classic rendering of Mandela through a flock of seagulls flying through clouds over Robben Island hours after the great man’s passing remains the pinnacle of his drawing career. He is the grandmaster of the South African cartooning scene.

His second proudest moment is his biography, Out of Line, published earlier this year. Its genesis though dates to 1979 when Dov and his wife Dorrine had a yechidus (a private audience) with the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in New York. Dorrine, a doctor, was instructed to return to attend to the ailments of the soul. Dov’s injunction: “Finish your book,” said the great man.

Dov was puzzled. There was no book, he thought. But there was. As inspired as the rabbi was, so too was its journey, a deep introspection of a subject that was intensely Jewish yet championed by nonJews as one publishing house after another turned down the rights.

He’s 75 now, young not old. Still drawing cartoons that set benchmarks for others to aspire to at a volume that would slay any aspirant entrant to the game.

And he’s still as humble as ever. He’s achieved almost everything imaginable.

He’s ticked his bucket list, but he still hasn’t made it to Europe – or Brakpan.