Feline Exegesis

The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read this on the strength of The Professor's Daughter that I found so charming.  This was a totally different kind of story about a cat in a sephardic household in Algeria.  Why it's in our library I can't imagine, but I am grateful!  I may also be one of the few people in town who can fully appreciate the book.  There are three stories in this volume, the first about the cat's desire for a bar mitzvah so he can return to his mistress.  Once he learned to speak (after consuming a parrot that would not shut up), he learned to lie, and so the rabbi separated him from his daughter.  The cat, however, argues theology with him. Heh!
In the second story, the rabbi is poised to lose his position as rabbi if he cannot pass a French dictation exam.  His cat, unable to enter and help him, prays for a miracle.  This is always a mistake, as my friend who helped someone pray to be released from the curse of daily hiccups could tell you.  I wonder if my friend is still hiccuping in her friend's stead ...  While the rabbi is waiting to hear about his status, a young man come to his grandfather's funeral and also announces that he is a not yet official new rabbi for the area.  The rabbi's cousin has a solution, a sword, and a lion, but nothing works out the way you'd think in these stories.
The rabbi travels to Paris in the last story in the volume.  By the end of the book, he is an enigma to everyone, except perhaps, his cat.
There's a lovely photo of Sfar and his cat on the flyleaf.  The cat is the model for the much more rangy looking drawn cat.  The art in this book is rough and all the text as if hand-written.  These are wonderful, amusing, and surprising stories.




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Serendipity

While wrangling with a problem in Scrapblog, I discovered another social site that amused me. It's called Catster. It's for cat owners to share stories and photos about their pets. There is also a companion site called Dogster (ew!). For those of us for whom pets are our children, this would be great fun. They have groups and little gift buttons (to give someone else's pet a virtual treat) and generally they are like Facebooks for pets. Of course, Facebook has some applications that are actual pet Facebooks (I've also registered Yseult and Collage for Catbook), but I get bored with these things quickly and feel the need to move on to fresher meat. The site is highly commercial, unlike Facebook, so it's more like MySpace. MySpace doesn't have a Catspace application that I'm aware of.
I wish I could tell you more about Catster, but actually I ran across it about 2 am and barely had enough energy to fill in profiles on all cats present and past. Now I have this major luggage labeled LV all over under my eyes.
I've added a Catster button for Yseult on this page. Show your pets you love 'em!