Gefilte Fish

Gefilte Fish started as a joke when someone suggested I do Jewish animated concepts and I replied, "Sure, like Gefilte Fish." It was a throwaway line meant for the dustbins of my mind. However, instead of dying a lonely existence as most singular random thoughts do, it rattled around my head for a few days. What would a Gefilte Fish series be about? I was doing some doodles and, after many failed attempts, came up with the first strip. The one with the Lobster and crab and denied entrance because they don't serve shellfish. It worked for me on many levels. It made a statement about discrimination, it poked fun at kosher dietary laws, and I thought inter-species dating between a crab and lobster is funny.

I played with the concept some more and, started coming up with characters including the Mohel, who is a sawfish.

And from that, grew the Gefilte family.

Like many of my works, there is an autobiographical element. Having a crush on a girl I knew from Hebrew School, growing up Jewish in a non-Jewish neighborhood (in a mostly Italian neighborhood in a northern Queens area at the edge of the Long Island Sound), and Sol's best friend Mickey.

Mickey is based on my best friend Michael. We met in the fourth grade and were so close we joined the Marine Corps under the Buddy system (The military guaranteed we would go through boot camp together - it didn't turn out that well but that's a story for another day). Michael and I had drifted apart through the years, but we always considered ourselves best friends. Michael became an EMY, who was a first responder on 9/11. He survived that day, but suffered from a number of ailments resulting from breathing in all that soot. In December of 2021 he passed from complications of Covid. I dedicate this series to Michael.

I fell in love with the series and the characters and thought it would make a great animated series or film. I had quite a bit of development done on the series along with a script I wrote. I took it to SONY animation with high hopes. After several weeks I received a letter stating they enjoyed the materials sent but felt the concept was too ethnic. Too ethnic! Was Fiddler on the Roof too ethnic? How about Annie Hall? I went back and reread the script. On every page there were a dozen Yiddish phrases. Ok, I guess I went overboard and it was a little esoteric.