Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER
The Woman With Fifty Faces has several faces of its own.
On its face, so to speak, it appears to be a so-called graphic novel — a tale told in words and illustrations.
Older readers may liken it to a hard-bound comic book, but unlike comics and the typical novel, it isn’t fiction.
It’s the story of a woman a century ago who claimed to be an actress and became so famous in Paris that she was portrayed by more than five dozen leading artists in a single year.
Another face is about Jews, both as persecuted people and in the person of the man said to have created her fame.
Max Abramowicz is drawn as an overweight, big-nosed Jewish stereotype. But antisemitic intent seems unlikely: Author Jon Lackman is the grandson of Shoah survivors whose German reparations subsidized illustrator Zachary J. Pinson’s 5,000 hours of work.
To add to the unusualness, the hardcover book is roughly letter-size — between the typical novel and a coffee-table book. Pinson’s black-and-white drawings defy easy description, ranging from realistic to cartoonish to somewhat grotesque.
So, what is The Woman With Fifty Faces?
It’s a story of Maria Lani, born Maria Geleniewicz, in 1895, in Kolno, Poland, a half-Jewish town of 5,000 with a veneer of Jewish-Christian amity. The story leaps to Czestochowa, her bankrupt trader father taking a factory job, at which he dies in an accident.
After pogroms, the mother moves the family to Warsaw, where she dies of cancer. Maria is 24, brother Alex, 23.
Maria sees dancers and actors, telling herself, “I could do that.” Outside a theater showing Antigone, she meets Max, who is trying to talk his way in by claiming to be a friend of Jean Cocteau. A relationship develops.
Max is a fake publisher of newspapers — buying them on loans and skipping town before payment is due.
They evade the law by fleeing to Berlin in 1925. She auditions unsuccessfully for a role under director Max Reinhardt. In 1928, Max has an idea: going to Paris, where he claims to be a movie producer, and she becomes Maria Lani, German film star.
It’s an easy illusion, for the book has Reinhardt describing Maria as tiny, “slim and beautifully proportioned,” with large and luminous eyes, “and her lips which are extremely attractive, hide the pearliest of teeth. Yes, Lani has a certain charm and there is nobody in Paris or Berlin exactly like her.”
Max decides to make Cocteau the route to success: “All Max and Maria had to do was wander into his path.”
Maria appears at the restaurant where Cocteau dines every afternoon. She charms him and flatters his drawing of her, and soon he takes her around town and talks her up to society.
First mentioned as painting her is Jules Pascin. The book’s publicity materials — but alas not the book — list 58 other artists, among them Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Man Ray.
The works are organized into an exhibition that is a big success in New York — the day after the stock market crash — and London, also opening in Chicago, Berlin and Rotterdam. A movie about her is to be made starring Greta Garbo.
But in Paris in 1931, the artists’ varied interpretations of Maria draw criticism. The exhibition closes and, Lackman says, the works are returned to their creators.
Max thinks of stealing them and selling them, but Maria says no. Cocteau, however, later alleges that this occurred, which Lackman says is a lie that persists for decades.
The 1940 German invasion — appropriately illustrated — sends the couple fleeing to New York.
There, Maria is a star as a Stage Door Canteen volunteer. Max revives the movie idea, but the movie never is made, and Maria returns to Paris in 1952 and dies in 1954.
All this easily keeps one turning the pages for a story resulting from Lackman’s two decades of trying to find out all he could about Maria. Still, the publisher categorizes it as a graphic novel, so what is fact and what is author and illustrator speculation or imagination?
Dialog and illustrations likely are largely imaginative, art with a good deal of license for effect. Pinson’s drawings of eyeballs looking at Maria have sexual suggestion, exaggerated into the shape of a woman’s breast, the pupil looking like a nipple.
Fifty Faces is not for kids. Quite engaging, it brings back recognition of a woman once a phenomenon whose life ended sadly and forgotten.
***
Neal Gendler is a Minneapolis writer and editor.
(American Jewish World, Sept. 2025)
