Stalin’s Boy (1899-2008)

Boris Yefimov, Russia’s leading political cartoonist of the 20th century, made it to the ripe age of 109. Yesterday’s Daily Telegraph obit explains that Yefimov lived through revolution, civil war, genocide, two world wars, the Cold War, and the death of both his wives.

That Joseph Stalin ordered the execution of Yefimov’s brother–a journalist immemorialized as Karkov in For Whom the Bell Tolls–only makes cartoonist Yefimov’s later treatment by Stalin that much more galling:

        “The head of the Communist Party saw political caricatures as an effective form of       propaganda, and would often phone up newspaper offices suggesting themes for cartoons.

The previous day he had requested a picture ridiculing the American military build-up in the Arctic. But Yefimov had not yet started it. “A few seconds later, I heard that familiar voice. He did not greet me but got straight to the point. ‘The cartoon we spoke to you about yesterday, I’d like to see it by six o’clock today.’ It was already 3:30. I thought to myself: ‘I’m dead.’ To do all that remained in two and a half hours was impossible.”

Yefimov somehow finished the artwork, just as the messenger boy was arriving to pick it up. But a couple of days later, when he was summoned in to party headquarters, there was a further surprise in store – the Soviet leader had managed to find time to rewrite the cartoon’s caption.”

I take back every self-pitying comment I’ve ever made about working for The Man.

We begin

About ten years ago I wrote an Op Ed for the New York Times that made fun of authors’ websites—all the photos of Sue Grafton’s cats on her site, the pictures of Clive Cussler’s “renowned and classic car collection” on his, etc.

I asked, “Shouldn’t an author’s website fetishize his words—say, a letter the writer forged to the school nurse as a tyke, or the addendum he included in his pre-nuptial agreement? Anything that would offer insight into a writer’s psychology.”

So, to inaugurate this site, I want to make good on my word by offering up a somewhat embarassing bit of marginalia that I scrawled at age 13 on page 347 of a book assigned me by my 8th grade English teacher. The book: Thoreau’s “Walden.” The passage: Thoreau asks, “What is man but a mass of thawing clay?” My dazzlingly astute comment, rendered in black felt tip: “Man = Pottery.”