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Today: Zach Rabiroff, a writer on books, comics, and culture living in Brooklyn, New York; and Laurie Woolever, author of Appetites, World Travel, Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography, and Care and Feeding.
Issue No. 558
Al Jaffee, Unfolded
Zach Rabiroff
Like a Fist Around Your Heart
Laurie Woolever
Al Jaffee, Unfolded
by Zach Rabiroff
Whether the universe is expanding or contracting has been a matter of cosmological debate for the past 104 years, but I would like to submit to you that it is possible to expand or contract the universe yourself, in any order, and as often as you’d like. To do this, you need only look to the back page of any issue of MAD Magazine.
The MAD fold-in was the signature creation of Al Jaffee, who came to the magazine in 1954 at the invitation of editor Harvey Kurtzman, who would angrily quit his job only three months later. It is typical of Jaffee’s life that when Kurtzman went off to found a couple of brilliant but failed publications (Trump, published at great expense by Hugh Hefner, followed by Humbug, published at much too great expense by Kurtzman himself), Jaffee followed: Jaffee always followed.
Allan Jaffee was born Abraham Jaffee in 1921 in Savannah, Georgia, where he spent his formative years. From the start, he was a fish out of water: a Jew in a very gentile, and genteel, Southern city, with immigrant parents from the Lithuanian shtetl of Zarasai. His mother Mildred, especially, could never reconcile herself to the American scene: she always insisted on traditional dress and behavior, dosed her children daily with castor oil to purge them of New World contaminants, and, in 1927, took six-year-old Al and his three brothers back to the Zarasai shtetl, just in time for the worst decade European Jewry would ever experience.
The story of these early years can be found in the manuscript of Jaffee’s biography, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, which is held among his art, papers, and ephemera in the rare books collection of the Columbia University Library. I went to Columbia to see this collection because I wanted to better understand what sort of experiences could make a man like Al Jaffee, and how a man like Jaffee could make work so brilliantly mad.
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