Yossel: April 19, 1943 : a Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

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Ibooks, 2003 - Comics & Graphic Novels - 120 pages
His name is Yossel. In another time, in another place, this fifteen-year-old boy could have grown to be a great artist. But in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II, Yossel, a Jew, is an untermensch and thus has no rights-and no future. When the Nazis confiscate his family's home and force them to live in the overcrowded tenements of the Warsaw ghetto, it appears that Yossel's artistic gift will be shattered. Instead, the awful suffering of his family, the terrible conditions of the ghetto, and the increasingly barbaric treatment inspire him. Yossel: April 19, 1943 is his story, told through his sketches. It is a compelling account of increasing horror depicted by an artist whose soul drives him to bear witness through his art. And it is a tale of inspiring triumph; of how people deprived of everything rise above the horror and degradation that is their existence and, in a final act of defiance and humanity, turn on their oppressors and launch the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.

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Contents

Section 1
40
Section 2
61
Section 3
81
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Joseph Kubert was born on September 18, 1926 in the shtetl of Yzeran, Poland. He came to the United States with his family as an infant and was raised in Brooklyn, New York. At 11 or 12, he landed an after-school job as an office boy for a comic-book publisher. By the time he was a teenager, he had worked sweeping up, erasing, inking and eventually drawing comic books. The first comic he illustrated himself, Volton, was published when he was 16. After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, he served stateside in the Army before becoming a full-time artist. He was most closely associated with DC, for whom he drew Sgt. Rock, a World War II infantryman he created with the writer Robert Kanigher, and Hawkman, an airborne crime fighter. He also created Tor, a prehistoric hero, and, with Kanigher, Enemy Ace, whose antihero is a German pilot. He was also considered one of the definitive interpreters of Tarzan. In the early 1950s he helped develop the methods of drawing and reproduction that made possible the 3-D comic book. From 1967 to 1976, he was DC's director of publications. He wrote and illustrated several graphic novels including Fax from Sarajevo, Yossel, Jew Gangster, and Dong Xoai. He also illustrated the mid-1960s newspaper comic strip Tales of the Green Beret and a comic strip The Adventures of Yaakov and Yosef for the children's magazine The Moshiach Times. In 1976, he founded the Kubert School in Dover, New Jersey, the country's only accredited trade school for comic-book artists, where he helped train a generation of young colleagues. He died of multiple myeloma on August 12, 2012 at the age of 85.

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