Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons

Abstract

Reviewed by: Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory by Victoria Aarons Alan L. Berger (bio) Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory By Victoria Aarons. Rutgers University Press, 2020. 241 pp. Prophesizing in the wake of a devastating locust plague, the prophet Joel admonishes his listeners, a group of aged men: "Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers? Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation" (Joel 2:3). A locust plague then, the Shoah now. What does the biblical injunction have to do with the twentieth-century catastrophe? And what is its message for second- and third-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors? Several crucial links emerge: Each trauma is hideous. What is the nature of Jewish life after a physical and psychic devastation? Both the locust plague and the Shoah become part of the fabric of Jewish existence, prompting self-reflection on crucial psychological and theological issues concerned with Jewish identity. The imperative to bear witness to the intergenerational transmission of trauma engendered by these disasters is of utmost importance. The transmission of trauma endures, but its artistic manifestation will inevitably assume new forms depending on shifting cultural norms. Victoria Aarons's breathtaking study, Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory, is a masterpiece of interpretation that calls to mind Joel's prophecy. Casting her keen interpretive net widely, she focuses primarily on the second and third generations, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. The trope of memory looms large in her intelligent and insightful study. But this in turn begs the central question, what does memory mean in the context of those who are generationally and experientially removed from the Holocaust? Further, how do the images help reveal the central points made in graphic novels? Aarons, a gifted literary critic, responds to these questions in her engaging and lucid discussion of the hybrid nature of contemporary graphic novels. [End Page 336] At the outset it is important to recognize that Aarons has chosen graphic narratives as her subject and not comic books. In the author's words, graphic novels perform a variety of tasks: "They evoke the passage of time and memories both personal and collective and thus produce a material extension of trauma" (15). Moreover, "As the stories open up to history and to generations, we find a widening of the lens of perspective, a multidirectional, polyphonic chorus of voice and position from which the past is unfastened, retrieved, and negotiated" (15). Aarons analyzes five graphic novels, which illuminate her main thesis concerning the retrieval and negotiation of the past. Her book includes two second-generation works, Martin Lemelman's Mendel's Daughter (2006) and Bernice Eisenstein's I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006); a child survivor's (auto)biographical memoir, Miriam Katin's We Are on Our Own; and two graphic novels by the third generation, Amy Kurzweil's Flying Couch (2016) and the late Joe Kubert's Yossel: April 19, 1943 (2003)—a counternarrative imagining the fate of a Jewish youth fighting in the Warsaw ghetto. Aarons ends her discussion with Al Feldstein and Bernie Krigstein's Master Race (1955), an eight-page short story that is "in many ways a precursor to the genre of Holocaust graphic narratives" (178). Since Art Spiegelman's breakthrough Maus volumes over three decades ago, the concept of comics as a representational genre for the Holocaust has been widely discussed. But what does Spiegelman mean by using comics? For him, the word comics should be read as co-mix, that is, text and image together telling a story that is—in his case, but not always—both biographical and autobiographical. Graphic narratives employ facial expression, perspective, and shadows to help convey feelings, moods, and engagement with, or withdrawal from, the obligation to remember. Moreover, co-mix has significant genre implications, as Aarons's crisp discussions reveal. She notes correctly that over the past two decades the genre of the graphic narrative "has moved from underground to mainstream," and that the graphic novel typically combines the "authentically personal and the complexly political" (2). Consequently, graphic novels have emerged as...