Harvey Pekar and "Fresh Air"

I was interested in Pekar's work The Quitter where he exposing a bit of his childhood and deals more openly with his Jewish background.  I'll probably attempt to get hold of the book sometime but for now I found a 2005 interview with Pekar about his life on NPR's Fresh Air (appox. 20 minutes) that might be interesting.

Toward the beginning of the interview Pekar discusses his family and neighborhood.  His parents were Polish immigrants who were Jewish but he doesn't dwell on that fact too much.  I'm not going to speculate on why he never delved into that.  What he did talk at length about was the neighborhood he lived in - he was one of the only Caucasian kids in a predominately African American neighborhood and high school.  He explains that this is the reason he was singled out and beat up a great deal; he cites as the cause of a few things in his life.

This 'neighborhood' issue has influenced many of the authors/artists detailed in Kaplan's book.  A lot of the authors and artists seem to have come from metropolitan areas and are most likely to work with people they knew at a very local level.  "I went to high school or lived near so-n-so who knew that one guy" sort of thing.(Here's the point where we highlight that they didn't have the internet and didn't have such easy access to people in another city, on another coast).

While some people might wonder at the sizable amount of Jewish people in comics books in the Golden Age and even the Silver Age it makes a great deal of sense and it flushes out Kaplan's assertion that they flocked because it was a creative occupation that was easier to get into.  Business was a who-knows-who network and still is today.  When new mediums and industries arise, like comic books, there tends to be a close network of people at the outset - this one happened to arise out a metropolitan area, with some great Jewish artists and writers, who opened the doors for others at a time of prevalent anti-Jewish discrimination.  Neighborhoods, especially in urban areas, have a great impact for revealing new avenues and shaping perceptions of the world.