In 1986, South African political cartoonist Dov Fedler began working on Gagman, a story about a man who survives the Nazi concentration camps by telling jokes to the commandant.
35 years – many drafts and hundreds of drawings later – he has finally completed it with the help of his daughter, Joanne, an author in her own right.
After all these decades, Gagman has finally been liberated not only from the camps, but from Dov’s imagination and the boxes in which the many drafts have been stored.
A small team is working on turning Gagman into:
- a book combining text and Dov’s haunting illustrations
- a documentary about the making of Gagman and the artist’s response to the Holocaust;
- a travelling exhibition.
Gagman is a unique contribution to Holocaust literature in its use of humour, comic illustrations and storytelling and will be used in the ongoing project of intergenerational healing and re-humanization.
"Gagman is a searing and brilliant book which does more to expose the horrors of the Nazis than any book since Eli Wiesel's Night."
- Alan Gold, internationally bestselling author of The Gift of Evil, The Marmara Contract, Berlin Song, The Lost Testament and Minyan
