Figure 8

Once Feinbroyt moves past the veil of Grepts, his vision dissolves into a bunch of numbers on tags, as if to say that language, even meaningless language, can take us only so far toward apprehension of the ineffable. Awoken from his vision, Feinbroyt hastily scribbles "a few words in an angelic script," "intricate designs and figures of an esoteric nature" [fig. 8]. These unintelligible squiggles defy human comprehension, and their appearance suggests that the visual encoding of written language is as helpless an audible utterance to express the inexpressible. Feinbroyt can only sell his visionary squiggles to a fabric maker, who uses them to surround the tetragrammaton as the decoration on faddish "kabbalah style" handkerchiefs. Nor is this Katchor's last word on langauge and meaning as it relates to the divine. In the endpapers of the Pantheon hardcover edition of The Jew of New York, Katchor has drawn a cross-section of a Manhattan street, showing the arterial conduits of the Lake Erie Soda Water Company [fig. 9]. Below the arteries themselves is a mysterious white patch—perhaps one of the vertebrae in Manhattan's spine?—marked with the tetragrammaton, the four-letter, personal name of the Hebrew God.

Figure 9

At the risk of blasphemy, I would like to suggest that Feinbroyt's vision of Grepts, a word denoting something nonsensical that cannot be fully realized in language, corresponds very well to the traditional Jewish use of the tetragrammaton. The tetragrammaton certainly belongs in this novel, Katchor's most Jewish work. It represents the most meaningful of all utterances, the very name of God; but its consonants are never pronounced as written, and the word's original vocalization has been forgotten. On the page, it stands as an unpronounceable word that only makes sense as a visual symbol—the sublime fusion of word and image that concludes Katchor's masterpiece of comics.

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