Brow Beat

Friday at the Old Market in Jerusalem

Guy DeLisle is a graphic memoirist with a specialty in travel cartooning: His books Pyongyang and Shenzhen offered glimpses of those cities “so vivid we may imagine we’ve actually been there,” as a reviewer for the Guardian put it.

His new book is Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Delisle, who is originally from Quebec and who lives in France, spent a year in Jerusalem with his wife—an administrator with Médecins Sans Frontières whose work brought the couple to the city—and their children. In the excerpt below, Delisle illustrates an outing to the Old Market, with its curious mix of the sacred and the profane. Enjoy.