(Author: Joanne Fedler, Vol. 80, #1, Autumn 2025)
Editor’s note: January 2025 saw the passing of the distinguished South African artists and cartoonist Dov Fedler. We thank his daughter Joanne for this insightful and heartfelt tribute to her father, which provides at least a glimpse into the man behind the images as well as recording his deep connections to his Jewish heritage and the Jewish community of which he was part. We further thank her for selecting and making available many examples of Dov Fedler’s work, which many Jewish Affairs readers will well remember from the days when he was one of South Africa’s foremost editorial cartoonists.
My father, Dov Fedler loved the spotlight but abhorred grandiosity so I’m not sure how he’d feel about being described as a ‘legend,’ or a ‘national treasure.’
‘He’s not a legend, he’s a very naughty boy,’ I imagine him mimicking Monty Python’s Life of Brian, one of his favourite movies.
Dov Fedler made people laugh. That was his superpower. Give him an audience and the plumage of his personality shone. He was a loveable Gruffalo of a man who could zap out a punchline with ferocious timing.
Humor was both his genius and shield, the way he made sense of the madness and tragedy of the world. His was an exquisitely original imagination which wrestled with life’s inexplicable paradoxes like Jacob did with the angel.
He was long-winded and loud, could infuriate, inspire, entertain, but never bore. He did not have a financial bone in his lumbering frame.
He was the key attraction at the Hobbies Fair each year at King David Victory Park school, where kids crowded at his elbows as caricatures streamed effortlessly from his pen. The Aladdin’s cave of his studio was a treachery of junk and treasures from which puppets, sculptures and other astonishments materialized, as if you could simply imagine something and, behold it would appear. From this he taught me a blank page was the deepest invitation to your own soul’s calling. Listen, and it would speak back.
Though he never considered himself a painter – this was a status reserved for the likes of his beloved friend, the artist Lionel Abrams – he once painted me a poster SUPERMAN LOVES JOANNE with Christopher Reeve flying through the sky. He told me to stop dieting because I’d never be a model, not with my build. ‘You’ll be other things,’ he promised. He seemed so certain that pretty and skinny were the booby prizes in life.
An effervescence of talents spilled out of him, like hidden tricks up his sleeve – cartooning, sculpting, painting and in his later years, writing. Never without a pen and paper, he doodled and drew, read and ruminated. He filled hundreds of sketchbooks with ideas and collected thousands of books and movies, ever fascinated with Einstein, Van Gogh, the Coen Brothers and the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of comics and movies and had a collection of DVDs of his favorites which ran into the thousands – much to my mother’s vexation.
Born Noah David Fedler in Johannesburg on 21 January 1940, in the shadow of the Holocaust, to immigrant parents from Lithuania, he was obsessed with Walt Disney and comic books. His earliest memory at the age of four was of a yellow pencil in someone’s hand making a mark on a page. Right then his hands grasped their destiny.
Dov’ mother Chaya Michaelson, a Yiddish poet, arrived in Johannesburg from Zhager, Lithuania in 1926. She was a founding member of the Society of Zhagerer Landsleit whose aim was to help and support newly arrived immigrants. My grandparents’ home in Mayfair, Johannesburg, was a hub of comings and goings, and when there was a problem for which a neighbour needed an ear and a cup of tea, everyone knew, ‘Gey freg Fedlerin,’ (‘Go ask the Fedlers.’)
Chaya’s warm personality and sense of humour belied the devastations of her depression which set in when her family was trapped and then killed by the Nazi’s in Eastern Europe. She suffered her first heart attack when my father was eight, after which, he often told me, he’d cry himself to sleep every night, knowing she was going to die. A fatal cardiac arrest just after his barmitzvah left him motherless. His father Solomon, who’d immigrated in 1926 and become a printer, remarried Dov’s Hebrew teacher Fania Rubenstein three years later. She had lost her son and husband in the concentration camps in Dachau. The darkness in his family home was smothering and at twenty-two, Dov fled into the arms of the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, my mother, Dorrine Cumes, a medical student. In due course, they married, and by thirty, Dov was father to three daughters. One, Carolyn, had a profound hearing loss, and he devoted himself to helping her learn to speak. He and Dorinne became active members of the Society for the Hard-of-Hearing Child.
For over fifty years, commencing in 1969, Dov worked as The Star’s leader page cartoonist (sometimes averaging six deadlines a week). Exposing the hypocrisy and injustices of South African political history, his cartoons and caricatures were poignant, satirical, sometimes biting, but never cruel. Some ended up in matric History exams.
Five collections of his cartoons were published, starting with My Son, The Cartoonist (1974) and followed by The Season of Violins (1991), Follow My Leaders (Ravan Press, Pan Macmillan, 2001), Walk This Way (2010) and Deface the Nation: The Best Cartoons of the Year (Royston Lamond, 2013). Of his own work, he once said, ‘Cartoons are dog-piss on the doorstep to history. The cartoonist doesn’t even make it to the door, we document and comment, but we don’t change anything.’ You can find a selection of his cartoons here: http://africartoons.com/cartoonist/dov-fedler.
In 2015, he was the recipient of the Arts, Sports, Science & Culture Award at the Absa Jewish Achiever Awards.
Though he is best known for his social and political commentary, he was not a political beast but a spiritual hitchhiker, a yogi taught by the guru Manny Finger before he became a Lubavitcher for a few years. He often quoted passages from the Bible, and recited Hebrew prayers before he went to sleep, a hangover from his bearded tefillin days when he’d walk from Greenside to Yeoville on Shabbat morning just to hear Rabbi Mendel Lipskar speak.
He remained a soul-searching mystic who believed in signs and miracles and often spoke of a dead bird which flew from his hands just when he and my mother were waiting on a diagnosis to confirm my older sister Carolyn did not have brain damage. She went on to become the first hard-of-hearing person to qualify as a medical doctor in South Africa.
He was profoundly Jewish in gesture, sensibility and intellect. In May 2008 he wrote a poem, prescient for today’s times, called ‘In Every Generation’:
David Mamet
hears the rant and cant
against us.
What’s the fuss?
Why the need
to decry our creed?
He says that we are
just the approved
target of hatred.
Rashi said that
it is a law
that Esau
hates Jacob.
It is good
to know
the world
is so
law abiding.
Dov worked incessantly, not only on his craft, but on his way of thinking. He owned thousands of books, many of which he never read, but always intended to. His mind never stopped whirring and turning. One of the most devastating consequences of ageing for him, was the loss of work. It had defined who he was.
An old friend of his, David Gemmell, remembered that when he’d pop in to visit, Dov would always be drawing. But when asked how work was going, he would reply, ‘Dire. I have none…’
‘So what are you working on there?’
‘When the gods who give you work – in your case the muses – look and see you aren’t working, basically doing nothing, they pass you by,’ he said. ‘When they see you working, they reward you with more work. So I always keep myself busy…and you know what? The phone always rings.’
When he was diagnosed with macular degeneration, I don’t think he ever recovered from the distress when instructed by doctors that he could no longer drive safely. In truth, though, he was always a terrible driver, slow and ponderous as he surveyed the kingdom of Johannesburg with an abiding affection. Even more tragic, was the realization that he could no longer see well enough to draw. My sisters and I watched him withdraw and isolate himself even from old friends. He would often sit in his chair in the loungeroom he loved, in silence, ruminating and sitting out the loadshedding with stoic endurance, entertained by his own thoughts.
Like many artists, Dov was cared for by selfless women all his life – his older sister Rae, when his mother was too ill, my mother, sisters, cousins Charlene and Sandra and beloved domestic workers Violet, Alexina, Nomusa and Bridget. My mother, and then my sister Laura managed his financial affairs, so he never had to worry about ‘The Money’ as he called it.
Over the years, I helped him write, edit and publish four books including his memoir Out of Line (Tracey MacDonald Publishers 2015), If You Can Write You can Draw, (Joanne Fedler Media 2018), Starlite Memories (Tafelberg, 2019) and Gagman (with Joanne Fedler, Brio books, 2022) about an inmate in the concentration camps who survives by telling jokes, a project that took over thirty-five years to complete. To watch a video of the story of Gagman, see here: https://www.gagmanmedia.com/.
Dov was absurdly creative, with more ideas than he could keep up with. He invented a comedic artistic persona, Noland Marx, the father of ‘Numerism’ which inspired dozens of paintings of Cezanne, Lautrec, Van Gogh and Monet. It included one of Noland urinating in Monet’s lily pond. He envisioned a coffee-table book filled with these paintings, one of the many unfinished projects I’ve been left to complete.
Years back, he gave my daughter Jess a sketchbook with the bones of a story about a magician named Shamansky which she has now turned into a three-part romantasy trilogy.
He was generous with his ideas, realising he couldn’t keep up with them, as he was with his books, sketches, paintings and sculptures. Guests from our home would often leave with a Dov Fedler original in their hands. I don’t think he ever appreciated the value of his own work.
On 23 December 2024, I rushed from Sydney to be at his bedside as he began to slip away. I sat vigil with my sisters and his angelic carers, playing his favourite Leonard Cohen songs, whispering last words of love and comfort into the giant elephant flaps of his ears and rubbing his size 12 feet. Even then, he couldn’t help being funny.
When the doctor asked him how he was, he responded, ‘I’ve been worse.’
I promised I would find a home for his massive body of work in a public source archive so it can continue to be enjoyed as part of the commons.
‘So many promises,’ he said. ‘I just want a Coke.’
His humour remained shatterproof to the end.
But after my mother died in October 2021, his spirit flailed.
‘What shall we do, Dad?’ I asked.
‘We carry on,’
‘What does ‘on’ mean?’
‘I wish I could find the off switch,’ he sighed.
On 11 January 2025, ten days shy of his 85th birthday, he finally found it.
