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In the Algiers of the ’30s, a nameless, scrawny gray cat belonging to a cheerful old rabbi, Abraham Sfar, eats the rabbi’s parrot and discovers that he can talk. The cat loves the rabbi’s daughter, Zlabya, and the rabbi is uncomfortable with the talking cat hanging around her: he’d better study the Torah and the Talmud, lest he give her bad ideas. That’s the premise that begins the French cartoonist Joann Sfar’s graphic novel series “Le chat du rabbin.” (The first three volumes were collected in English in 2005 as “The Rabbi’s Cat”; the fourth and fifth have just appeared as “The Rabbi’s Cat 2.”) The joy of the series, though, is that it hasn’t quite stuck with that setup. Instead, it has become a loose, playful exploration of a lost moment in Jewish culture, riffing on the Sfar family’s history and drifting freely between precise historical details, enthusiastic tall tales and meditations on what it means to live as a person of faith in a world that doesn’t share it. (via “The Rabbi’s Cat” | Salon Books)

In the Algiers of the ’30s, a nameless, scrawny gray cat belonging to a cheerful old rabbi, Abraham Sfar, eats the rabbi’s parrot and discovers that he can talk. The cat loves the rabbi’s daughter, Zlabya, and the rabbi is uncomfortable with the talking cat hanging around her: he’d better study the Torah and the Talmud, lest he give her bad ideas. That’s the premise that begins the French cartoonist Joann Sfar’s graphic novel series “Le chat du rabbin.” (The first three volumes were collected in English in 2005 as “The Rabbi’s Cat”; the fourth and fifth have just appeared as “The Rabbi’s Cat 2.”) The joy of the series, though, is that it hasn’t quite stuck with that setup. Instead, it has become a loose, playful exploration of a lost moment in Jewish culture, riffing on the Sfar family’s history and drifting freely between precise historical details, enthusiastic tall tales and meditations on what it means to live as a person of faith in a world that doesn’t share it. (via “The Rabbi’s Cat” | Salon Books)