The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Will Eisner, Umberto Eco, Umberto Eco (Introduction)

From Barnes & Noble

Does history hold a more hateful or successful fabrication than the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"? Concocted by the czar's secret police in 1905, this spurious document purported to be the Jewish blueprint to take over the world. Though it was exposed as a blatant forgery as early as 1921, the Protocols continue to resurface and circulate widely among anti-Semites throughout the world. The Plot is Will Eisner's graphic attempt to forever neutralize this vile counterfeit.

From the Publisher

Deeply concerned that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continues to be published and disseminated throughout the world, Eisner came up with the idea to tell the history of the fabrication (it is a total forgery, exposed as early as 1921 in London by The Times) in graphic form. Several documentaries are in the works, both on Eisner and this book.

Publishers Weekly

Famed innovator Eisner showed the creators of modern comics what a potentially rich medium they were working with. In particular, he used the term "graphic novel" to sell A Contract with God (1978), a collection of interrelated comics stories about residents in a Jewish tenement section of New York. He returned to that territory in A Life Force (1988), showing one man's uncertain progress, and in Dropsie Avenue (1995), an historical panorama of the whole neighborhood. Printed together for the first time in this volume, the works reinforce each other beautifully. Eisner's virtuoso art always has been admired, but his writing sometimes has been disparaged as thin and sentimental. Over the span of these three books, though, emotions jostle and balance each other; sometimes the stories seem upbeat, sometimes fatalistic. The characters frequently are defeated in the short term but always yearning for more than their surroundings offer. In any case, Eisner's illustrations are superb: water drenches a man walking alone at night in a thunderstorm; a fat housewife athletically performs a "heart attack" right after her husband has collapsed with a real one; aerial cityscapes expand; and every possible expression flickers over the characters' faces. This is an important, wonderful book. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This nonfiction work, Eisner's final book, provides a great service to the truth by detailing the history of an infamous hoax. The so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion purported to be a plan for world domination drawn up by Jewish leaders-but the document was actually a forgery, created in 1898 for use as anti-Semitic propaganda by a Frenchman employed by the Russian secret police. Incredibly, the hoax seems not to have been perpetrated because the conspirators hated the Jews; they were simply a convenient target in a campaign meant to influence the easily led Czar Nicholas II. Eisner dramatizes the Protocols's creation, the 1921 expos revealing that they were plagiarized from a satirical 1864 French book, and many later denouncements of the hoax. Eisner also shows how the hoax influenced Adolf Hitler and, sadly, continues to influence people today despite proof of its falsehood. Eisner's extensive reprinting of text from the Protocols side by side with excerpts from the French book doesn't make for riveting comics, but it does demonstrate the plagiarism explicitly. Recommended for all adult collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/05.] Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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