Review:Jew Gangster by Joe Kubert
2005, 142 Pages
This little hardcover graphic novel is a compact story of the development of a Jewish boy from the streets of New York City into an adult gangster, moving the youngster-then-man through moral choices that sometimes coincide with background family pressures. Through these episodes the tale evolves the reasoning for being "gangster" from one of conscience (or lack thereof), issues about social status, and the pressures to obtain income (and also plenty of outright cupidity). There's also some lessor strains having to do with the pressures of a religious morality that's seemingly always present but not strong enough to make a difference.
Kubert fleshes out a world that doesn't much deepen over the space of the 143 black and white pages (almost always with 4 panels to a page). His storytelling style here, though clear when it comes to the plot, tends to isolate the cast of characters into their own slipstream of events while the shadow of the millions surrounding them doesn't interfere or distract, but it also doesn't much inform our understanding, either. The historical time-frame (pre-WW2 depression-era NYC) is moving along in the background, but only in such narrow snatches (both in words and pictures) that it doesn't intrude on the story but doesn't help place that story completely into a time and place with an atmosphere, nor does it really explain the supposed novelty of a "Jew gangster." This doesn't seem anything like what Kubert apparently intended for the book to show. When Kubert pauses to let us know about something outside of the gangstery parts of the story, even if its something as simple as how some of the characters set up a restaurant in a shop space and worked endless hours to gain enough money to survive, the story blossoms out of its "gangster" straitjacket for a few panels, but then we're pushed back into the sorry saga of a nice Jewish boy who just isn't that nice.
While this is a plus for the relative brevity of the tale about the ups and downs of the criminal trade, it also keeps a lot of what's happening inside Jew Gangster superficial and even sort of mysterious when it comes to our main character, Ruby. Is being a crook corrosive to the soul? Doesn't' seem so, the character remains a kind of "boy" throughout. He's supposed to be haunted by his father's admonitions to be morally upright, and Kubert does give the character a few chances to explain why he is rejecting this call, and more instances of the father (who dies midway) to be injected back into the plot, but none of it adds up to anything. Along this same line of "no explano" are the presence of other "Jew gangsters" who get no moral examination at all, a weird kind of sterility considering the scope of the story and the number of pages devoted to it.
Kubert does have good moments in Jew Gangster, though, such as when the Jewish criminals have to get even with the Italian criminals because to not do so is to invite more trouble, in this case, the murder of one of Ruby's childhood friends. This reminds me slightly of Jack Kirby's famous "Street Code" short story which told of how street gangs dealt with each other in NYC, motivated by a lethal system of conduct that at least seemed mandatory. Kubert stretches out his own sort of explanation and examination of this to well over a hundred pages but doesn't quite get a grip on it.
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Original Page May 12, 2025