‘Kavalier & Clay’ a tale of unbridled imagination

“The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so throughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.” — The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. A few years ago, I traveled to San Diego, and I stopped by a local bookstore. I asked the bookseller to give me a few recommendations, and he immediately ran off and came back with five books for me to read.

One of them was “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.”

I took one look at the cover and saw that it was a book about comic books, so I pushed back a little and said, “Comic books aren’t really my thing. Why should I read this book?” He told me it’s a historical fiction book on how comic books got their start in the United States.”

I was sold. As a lover of historical fiction, I had a feeling I was going to enjoy this book, and boy did I.

Sammy Klayman is a young Jewish man who lives in Brooklyn with his mother in 1939. Sammy had polio when he was young, which resulted in a lame leg. His world changes with the arrival of his cousin, Josef Kavalier, who comes to America after a long and harrowing journey from Prague. Josef's family pooled all their resources to get Joe out of Czechoslovakia and to the safety of his aunt in New York while Hitler was coming to power.

Joe and Sammy’s relationship is a tale of creativity and achievement, hard work, hard knocks and the hard-core business of corporate comics. Sammy is an entrepreneur and writer with an amazing imagination who writes under the pen name of Sam Clay. Joe is a phenomenal artist who brings characters to life with line and color.

Josef Kavalier’s backstory includes studying and performing magic in Prague. He becomes an escape artist, studying Houdini. His knowledge helps him escape to the United States and is a powerful influence on the creation of “The Escapist” comic book series masterminded by Josef and Sammy.


“The Escapist” featured an escape artist (like Joe), a kind of superhero/magician who fights for the weak (like Sammy), and humiliates Hitler with his strength and brainpower.

What follows is a complex, interwoven dual biography as the team of Kavalier and Clay find fame, break up, find love, risk death and eventually settle into something resembling happiness over the course of several decades.

The book mirrors the reality of the two Jewish boys who escaped to America to avoid the pogrom, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, the duo who created the wildly popular character of Superman.

Along the way, the complicated and adventurous history of comic books is a constant in their lives, from the days of wartime superheroes to the dark era of Senate hearings led by Frederic Wertham. Wertham was a German-born psychiatrist who campaigned against comic books in the 1940s and ’50s because he believed they were a primary cause of juvenile delinquency, moral corruption and mental harm to children. He was convinced that comics “seduce” young readers into imitating violent, sexual and anti-social behavior.”

“Kavalier & Clay” covers the diverse and unique topics of comics, magic and the art of escaping, with the bigger, humanitarian issues of identity, grief and love. The Holocaust and its impact infiltrate the pages of the novel, as do themes of Jewish lore, sexual identity, homophobia, corporate greed, unfair labor practices and copyright law. It’s a love story, a rags-to-riches tale and an adventure saga.

Readers will travel from Czechoslovakia to New York to Antarctica to iconic landmarks like the Empire State Building, all the while falling in love with the characters of Sammy, Joe and Joe’s girlfriend, Rosa Saks.

This book is worth a reread if you already read it. If not, pick it up and enjoy this page-turning book.

“Take care – there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.”

Deborah Condit is the owner of Books on the Bosque, 6261 Riverside Plaza Lane, Suite A-2 or at booksonthebosque.com.