![]() ![]() She studied at Cooper Union, an art school, and lived on the Lower East Side, earning plaudits from her instructors for her painting, but getting bored. ![]() In her teens, Kominsky-Crumb fled the suburbs for Manhattan. And then he took a piece of paper and he said,’ look, we can make it look like this.’ And I said, ‘Oh my God.’ My mother said, ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous, gorgeous.’” They took an instrument and measured your nose. “Like, I kept my nose, but it was really a close call, because my mother had me in Doctor Diamond’s office and he measured my nose. She told fellow Jewish cartoonist Sarah Lightman about the ordeal. “Me ‘n’ my friends developed a ‘big nose pride,’” she writes, and one of the characters says, “I could not stand to look like a carbon copy!” In one autobiographical comic, she recalls seeing one Jewish girl after another coming into school after plastic surgery. ![]() She resisted her mother’s pressure to get a nose job. She said she was named for a Five Towns clothing store, Aline Ricky, that sold French fashion knockoffs. She wrote about the warmth of her grandparents’ home and how she sought in it succor and about the pressures her materialistic parents placed on her. Kominsky-Crumb, born Aline Ricky Goldsmith in 1948 in the Five Towns, a Jewish enclave on Long Island, had a Jewish upbringing that was in many ways conventional, horrifying and both at the same time. She was the brassy Jewish stereotype who became the muse who guided her husband to a deeper consideration of Judaism. She started out as a self-acknowledged sex object reviled by second-wave feminists and became a hero of younger feminists for modeling unfettered sexual expression. Working with her husband and then on her own, Kominsky-Crumb brought to comics raw self-lacerating accountability and subverted crude stereotypes about Jewish women - including those peddled by her husband - by taking possession of them. ![]()
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