Ben Katchor serves up a kosher read with “The Dairy Restaurant.”
Ben Katchor was the first cartoonist to receive a MacArthur Fellowship — in 2000 for his humorous take on Jewish culture. But readers expecting a graphic novel such as “The Beauty Supply District” or “HandDrying in America: And Other Stories” are in for a surprise. Although profusely illustrated with ink-washed line drawings, “The Dairy Restaurant” is a “real” — that is to say, typeset — book, exhaustively researched and authoritatively well-written, not a comic strip.
Nonetheless, the integration of word and picture are at issue in “The Dairy Restaurant,” not only owing to the author’s drawing-board background, upon which he generated both words (on an uphill slant) and pictures by hand, but because this story must be illustrated since it can’t be tasted. The author is also designer and de facto typesetter, making every correction (it is already going into a second, slightly revised printing). Throughout, therefore, image and text are brought together in a variety of intentional very meaningful ways.
The opening section employs a children’s storybook approach. Wash drawings splash across double-page spreads as accompanying text dilates on the Sumerian origins of the Garden of Eden as archetypal restaurant. Each picture is worth at least a few hundred words, and several firsts are enumerated: Adam and Eve as the first customers (who meet on a blind date), an “upright creature” (a wily serpent in the Bible) as the first surly waiter, and Yahweh as the first apologetic proprietor fresh out of appetizers (the Forbidden Fruit). The diners, shamed into dressing for dinner, are also the first tip-stiffers.
A history of Jewish dietary law and the subsequent origin of the restaurant as a European enterprise follow. Here, words and images break out into open conflict: The text wraps around every contour of the exuberant drawings like they formed a graphic obstacle course. The reading experience verges on a struggle only because the narrative becomes so compelling; the reader is more engrossed in the ancient taboo separating milk from meat in cooking and eating and the evolution of kosher hygiene resulting in a unique cultural cuisine. Here, one is advised to circle back and engage the art separately.
Tevye, made famous in Broadway’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” is analyzed as the archetypal literary “milekhdike personality”: the hapless, impoverished dairyman forever daydreaming of marrying off his daughters to rich families while delivering fresh milk to peasants in the Russian Pale. The dishes derived from his product — potato knishes, milkhiker borscht, cheese krepelkh, varnishkes, blintzes and more — not only feed a modern, anti-urban hunger for pastoral romance but also form the basic menu of the modern, sanitary, spotless dairy restaurant that emerges in distant “Jewish city-states” like New York. Eternally stymied in his pursuit of wealth like a dairy version of Ralph Kramden, Tevye modestly consoles himself in the knowledge of his pure, semi-sacred social function.
In the latter two-thirds of the book, the drawings are tamed within a rectangular grid. This more conventional format recounts the Jewish vegetarian and dairy restaurant industry, both kosher and not, as it once flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Every address from the Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Israel that can be ascertained or even inferred from a “Jewish-sounding” phonebook listing is recorded. One hankers for pandemic takeout until one realizes: Most of these eateries don’t exist anymore.
Drawings surrender finally to reproduced menus, matchbook covers, postcards and newspaper advertisements in Hebrew. In a few instances a single paperwrapped sugar cube is the only evidence the author can find. Such sparse documentation is all that remains of a oncethriving industry and uncelebrated food movement that was never conscious of itself as such.
The final section is a memoir of the author’s own meanderings through the twilight of the dairy restaurant. Many still echo with the voices of Zero Mostel, Walter Matthau, Leo Tolstoy and other regulars, both Jew and gentile; most are on their last legs and close within weeks of discovery. Through these recollections an agenda becomes clear: to re-create the landscape of the dairy restaurant as it once existed, everywhere at every moment in time, all at once.
Reproducing this once-real landscape is nonetheless an act of the imagination as breathtaking as the author’s earlier graphic novels. “The Beauty Supply District” was a make-believe place where wholesalers dispensed cosmetics along with aesthetic philosophy, lovingly chronicled by intrepid Julius Knipl, real estate photographer (voiced by the late Jerry Stiller on NPR). In “The Dairy Restaurant,” the chronicler is the author himself, who has compiled a testament worthy of its savory history.