Joann Sfar was awarded the prestigious Jury Prize at Angouleme for the first volume of The Rabbi's Cat. He has drawn more than one hundred comic books for children and adults, including Little Vampire Goes to School (a New York Times best seller) and Little Vampire Does Kung Fu! (nominated for an Eisner Award). He lives in Paris with his wife, two children, and the model for The Rabbi's Cat.

Alexis Siegel has over fifteen years' experience in various fields of translation, and his interest in adapting graphic novels was sparked by one of Sfar's works—the whimsical children's story Little Vampire Goes to School, a New York Times bestseller first published by Simon & Schuster in 2003 and reissued in Spring 2008 by First Second Books. In addition to The Rabbi's Cat , several works from Sfar's prolific production have kept him both delighted and busy, among them Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East , Vampire Loves , and The Professor's Daughter . He has also translated Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, by Jean-Philippe Stassen , and, into French, Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese.

Joann Sfar's beloved, humorous, and wise talking cat is back for more beautifully illustrated adventures in Algiers and across Africa in the 1930s. While the rabbi is away, his cat tags along with Malka of the Lions (the rabbi's enigmatic cousin), who roams the desert with his ferocious-on-demand lion. Some believe Malka to be a pious Jew, others think he's a shrewd womanizer, but the cat will be the one to discover the surprising truth.

Back in Algiers, the rabbi's daughter, Zlabya, and her new husband fill the house with their fighting, while the city around them fills with a rising tide of anti-Semitism. On a whim, the rabbi's cat, the rabbi, a sheikh (also a cousin of the rabbi), and a very misplaced Russian painter set out on a fantastic journey (even encountering a young reporter named Tintin in the Congo) in search of an African Jerusalem. It turns out to be very fortuitous that the rabbi's cat is not just a talking cat, but a multilingual talking cat.