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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  the_awesome_opossum | Dec 23, 2009 |  A cat swallows a talking bird, and evermore can speak. It follows its owners (a rabbi and his daughter) and comments on their travels. (  ) stunik | Mar 29, 2009 | This graphic novel is set in colonial Algeria & Paris and tells the story of an Algerian rabbi coming to terms with religious and cultural change - oh and his talking cat. :) At first, the book drew me in with its story of a devilish cat who devours a parrot and learns to talk; he immediately demands to know if he's Jewish, wants a bar mitzvah and begs to be taught Kabbalah. If the book had been nothing more than a cute story about a cat, I still would have loved it. But it ended up being so much more - sprinkled throughout the text are little trinkets of wisdom on Jewish tradition, colonialism, cultural alienation & interaction, Jewish-Muslim coexistence & cultural syncretism, differences between Sephardic & Ashkenazi Jews in North Africa and in Europe - all done without being at all pretentious, in my opinion. Near the end of the story, the rabbi and his cat travel from Algeria to France and the book masterfully uses color to contrast how the rabbi perceives his home (bright, warm, dirty, alive, familiar) and the land of his temporary & self-imposed exile (dark, cold, rainy, foreign, somewhat menacing). Using both written and visual cues to demonstrate how alienated the rabbi felt during his first trip to Paris really enhanced the presentation of the story. Thanks to all who recommended this book to me - its my first great read of the year! (  )2  fannyprice | Jan 31, 2009 | Brilliant storytelling, great graphics. I want to marry the cat. ( ) thesmellofbooks | Nov 11, 2008 | An inventive story partly about Judaism and partly about family relations (no matter what religion you are). The cat is a perfect mix of the most annoying human traits and the most annoying cat traits, which serves the story well since he can question things that the "educated" people take for granted. Plus, he's a cat, so he can ask the uncomfortable questions without batting an eye. The drawings are very good, but I wish the narrator-font was a little more legible. This volume contains the three first books: La Bar-Mitsva, Le Malka des Lions, and L'exode. http://boklista.livejournal.com/54892... (  ) bookoholic13 | Oct 11, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0375422811, Hardcover)The preeminent work by one of France’s most celebrated young comic artists, The Rabbi’s Cat tells the wholly unique story of a rabbi, his daughter, and their talking cat — a philosopher brimming with scathing humor and surprising tenderness.In Algeria in the 1930s, a cat belonging to a widowed rabbi and his beautiful daughter, Zlabya, eats the family parrot and gains the ability to speak. To his master’s consternation, the cat immediately begins to tell lies (the first being that he didn’t eat the parrot). The rabbi vows to educate him in the ways of the Torah, while the cat insists on studying the kabbalah and having a Bar Mitzvah. They consult the rabbi’s rabbi, who maintains that a cat can’t be Jewish — but the cat, as always, knows better. Zlabya falls in love with a dashing young rabbi from Paris, and soon master and cat, having overcome their shared self-pity and jealousy, are accompanying the newlyweds to France to meet Zlabya’s cosmopolitan in-laws. Full of drama and adventure, their trip invites countless opportunities for the rabbi and his cat to grapple with all the important — and trivial — details of life. Rich with the colors, textures, and flavors of Algeria’s Jewish community, The Rabbi’s Cat brings a lost world vibrantly to life — a time and place where Jews and Arabs coexisted — and peoples it with endearing and thoroughly human characters, and one truly unforgettable cat. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
The cat, although he can be a smart aleck, is also fiercely loyal to his family and often the voice of hesitation and reluctance to change in such trying circumstances. Which, in some ways, makes him the most human of them all, as he both protests and adapts to the flurry of inevitable changes to his home. (