Mad for Al: New book tells the story of Mad Magazine illustrator

MUCH HAS changed since 1964, but one constant that can always be counted on has been the Fold-In on the back page of MAD Magazine.

Al Jaffee has illustrated this feature since its inauguration 48 years ago. But the story of Jaffee, the man who created the Fold-In - a sly picture within a picture revealed only when the page is folded vertically just so - as well as other MAD features, including "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions," is interesting as well.

Mary-Lou Weisman documented her friend in Al Jaffee's Mad Life, including more than 70 illustrations by the man himself. Jaffee and Weisman will speak about the book at the Gershman Y tomorrow. (For Fold-In freaks, Chronicle Books recently published The MAD Fold-In Collection: 1964-2010, gathering together all of Jaffee's back-page masterpieces.)

Originally, Jaffee was contracted to create only 30 illustrations for Mad Life. "As I was reading the [manuscript] by Mary-Lou, I was reliving my own life. I started to remember things from my childhood that were traumatic and wonderful, and I could see the scenes in my mind that I hadn't thought about for 60, 70 years," said Jaffee, who will turn 91 in March. "I grabbed a pencil and a drawing pad and I started to sketch these things. I forgot about the contract and I said, 'I know I'm bringing in twice as much stuff as I want to, so just pick the ones you want.' They picked them all."

Jaffee's story begins in Savannah, Ga., where he was born in 1921. When he was 6, Jaffee's mother, Mildred, uprooted him and his three brothers and moved them back to the shtetl in Zarasai, Lithuania, where she was from. His father dragged them back to the U.S. a year later, but again, his mother returned the family to the shtetl. Four years later, just as Adolf Hitler was coming to power in Germany, Jaffee's father took his kids back to the U.S. They never saw or heard from their mother again.

Later, Jaffee would attend the High School of Music and Art in New York, where he met Harvey Kurtzman, founding editor of MAD.

Weisman was impressed by how easily Jaffee could recall events that happened decades ago.

"When I was a kid, I thought people didn't live past 50," Jaffee said. "Well, in Lithuania . . . there weren't many people who lived past 50. When you start talking and people start probing, it triggers something."

But reliving his childhood did not unearth any latent stress. "You know something? I realized after reading the book that I came from a dysfunctional family," Jaffee said. "Either you survive these things and deal with it, or you sit and worry about it and become depressed. To use a cliché, you move on. I just kept moving on."