Superman Isn't Jewish (But I An...Kinda) by Jimmy Bemon and Émilie Boudet

With supposedly-nonfiction books, I'll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that's pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we're being told, how constructed they are, to know how to respond.

But it's not always clear how much the book is claiming to be nonfiction. This graphic novel - or bande dessinée, since it's originally from France - is in the "Life Drawn" series from Humanoids, which I thought meant it was clearly, well, drawn from life. But I just took a look at their website, and the series is described as "Biographies and slice-of-life tales that show us what it means to be human" - and, more specifically, Wander Antunes's adaptation of Twain's short story Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, which I read recently, is also included in the program. So my assumption that of course anything published as "Life Drawn" would be nonfiction has been proven to be inoperative.

In other words: this is probably close to true, more or less. But only...kinda.

Superman Isn't Jewish (But I Am...Kinda) is a coming-of-age story told in the first person by a French boy, Benjamin, and covers mostly his youth in the late eighties and early nineties, in a large extended family with a (now-divorced) Jewish father and Catholic mother. It was written by the film director and screenwriter Jimmy Bemon and drawn by Émilie Boudet, first published in France in 2014 (when Bemon also made a related short film with the same name) and translated by Nanette McGuiness for this 2018 English-language edition.

Jimmy is immersed in Jewish culture and history by his father's side of the family, encouraged to believe himself part of a long, storied cultural tradition stretching back five thousand years, one of the chosen people. And he's happy with that part.

But being Jewish also meant that he was circumcised at birth - which is vastly less common in France than it is in the US, something Bemon didn't need to point out to his original audience but might make his histrionics come across weirdly to American readers - and so he is Different From Other Boys.

There are other issues as he grows up - undertones of how much "Jewish" means "Zionist" to a bunch of schoolboys, some of whom are Arabic, things like that - but the chopped willy is the big one. Benjamin is worried that, when he ever gets together with a girl, she will point and laugh, and then tell everyone else.

Superman Isn't Jewish is relatively short and conversational, like a film driven by a single narrative voice. We don't see a whole lot of Benjamin's young life: just what matters to his possibly-Jewish identity. He has classes with a rabbi, and celebrates his bar mitzvah. There's a moment where he's pulled in to be the tenth man for a minyan. But he doesn't quite feel Jewish, and eventually works up the courage to tell his father that. This is a mostly amiable, positive book, so that goes OK in the end.

I do wonder a bit how much of Jimmy is in Benjamin, and what there is of Jimmy that didn't make it into Benjamin. But that's the inherent question of semi-autobiographical fiction, isn't it? In the end, this is a nice story about a good kid who figured out how he wanted to live and found happiness, in bright colored pencils and big faces from Boudet's art - that's a fine thing to have.