1939.09.30 “The Cats and the Canary”
by Jay Alan Klein (1894-1965)
15 x 20 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection
Unfortunately on that kind of brittle art board and it snapped in half.
Born in Nebraska, Klein was an animator and assistant at Terry-toons in the early ‘30s and later became a print cartoonist, credited as “Alan Klein” or “Jay Alan.”
He attended the University of Nebraska and Chicago of Fine Arts. Known for his political cartoons during WWII but mostly for his work with Modest Maidens until AP terminated all its comics in 1961. He changed the name to Modern Maidens and began syndicating the cartoon himself.
On September 29, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union agree to divide control of occupied Poland roughly along the Bug River—the Germans taking everything west, the
Soviets taking everything east.
In the fine print of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviets were promised a slice of eastern Poland; now it was merely a matter of agreeing where to draw the lines. Joseph Stalin personally drew the line that partitioned Poland. Originally drawn at the River Vistula, just west of Warsaw, he agreed to pull it back east of the capital and Lublin, giving Germany control of most of Poland’s most heavily populated and industrialized regions. In return, Stalin wanted Lvov, and its rich oil wells, as well as Lithuania, which sits atop East Prussia. Germany now had 22 million Poles, “slaves of the Greater German Empire,” at its disposal; Russia had a western buffer zone.
On this same day, the Soviet Union also signed a Treaty of Mutual Assistance with the Baltic nation of Estonia, giving Stalin the right to occupy Estonian naval and air bases. A
similar treaty would later be signed with Latvia. Soviet tanks eventually rolled across these borders, in the name of “mutual assistance,” placing the Baltic States into the hands of the U.S.S.R. for decades to come. These “treaties” were once again merely the realization of more fine print from the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, giving Stalin more border states as buffer zones.
