Jaffee's inventive work has enlivened the pages of MAD magazine since 1955. To date, he has pickled three generations of American kids in the brine of satire, and he continues to bring millions of childhoods to untimely ends with the knowledge that parents are hypocrites, teachers are dummies, politicians are liars, and life isn't fair.

Jaffee's work for MAD has made him a cultural icon, but the compelling and at times bizarre story of his life has yet to be told. A synopsis of Jaffee's formative years alone reads like a comic strip of traumatic cliff-hangers with cartoons by Jaffee and captions by Freud.

Six-year-old Jaffee was separated from his father, uprooted from his home in Savannah, Georgia, and transplanted by his mother to a shtetl in Lithuania, a 19th-century world of kerosene lamps, outhouses, physical abuse, and near starvation. He would be rescued by his father, returned to America, taken yet again by his mother back to the shtetl, and once again rescued by his father, even as Hitler was on the march.