On Aarons's Holocaust Graphic Narratives

Abstract

On Aarons's Holocaust Graphic Narratives Phyllis Lassner Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory. By Victoria Aarons. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 256 pp., ISBN 978-1978802551 (pb), $24.95. Victoria Aarons is a distinguished scholar of Jewish American and Holocaust literature. Her studies of third-generation writers have set the foundation for extending how we view Holocaust writing as generationally demarcated. As she has argued, situated a generation away from the more direct emotional and testimonial transmission of Holocaust memory, third-generation writers must depend on their research and archival efforts. They also rely on travel to the sites of terror and interviews with those who bear some memory, fragmented though that may be, of the conditions and experiences of those who perished and those who survived. As Aarons's work has shown, each generation of Holocaust writers acknowledges the struggle to find a language of entry and engagement, whether that of their families or those that pronounce a relational distance from Holocaust sites and losses. A compelling response to vicissitudes of linguistic adaptation and cultural transmission has been visual representation, as the proliferation of Holocaust films evinces. Most recently the effort to transmit Holocaust memory to the second and third generations has resulted in graphic narratives. In concert with a key narrative form in American culture, the comic book, Art Spiegelman's Maus was the progenitor of graphic Holocaust narratives. The [End Page 271] son of survivors, Spiegelman drew the fraught relationship between the first and second generation as an inescapable, inherited trauma that challenged the possibility of resolution. The extraordinary influence of his book is evident in the profusion of graphic memoirs and fiction by second- and third-generation writers as well as graphic memoirs by diverse authors beyond the Holocaust. Among the many significant contributions made by Aarons's study, Holocaust Graphic Narratives, it brings together an international array of graphic memoirs and fiction to offer a comprehensive, sensitive, and incisive analysis of three generations of survivor consciousness and representation. Given her areas of expertise, it is not surprising that Aarons structures this new book generationally. Establishing the book's design, her introduction posits that the "focus on individual familial experiences [serves] as a metonymic or synecdochic expression of collective suffering," which attempts "to re-create and reimagine the events that have shaped the landscape of a post-Holocaust world" (12). Yet the vicissitudes of memory and its transmission demand a structure that cannot be definitively delineated. Instead, each chapter demonstrates how graphic narratives depict memory in images that appear to crumble before our eyes or are so sharply etched they threaten to break under the weight of pain and the effort to remember. The precarity of these images suggests the sense of a desperate attempt to hold on to and narrate the horrific past while protecting the next generation from experiencing the terror that never ceases. Aarons's first chapter analyzes the acclaimed memoir of child survivor Miriam Katin's We Are on Our Own as visualizing complementary, sometimes opposing perceptions between the indefinite memories of a two-year-old child and her mother's fraught stories. Here and elsewhere throughout Aarons's book, intergenerational conjunctions and disruptions raise critical questions about reclaiming an ever-receding past in relation to anxieties about capturing its experiential confirmations and fears about the future. With graphic, incisively analyzed detail of her own, Aarons interprets the book's physical design, typography, and the child's shaded lines of pencil drawing to show a disjunction between form and content that marks the indelible apprehensions characterizing intergenerational, multivocal Holocaust responses and representation. Holocaust Graphic Narratives also addresses how genres are grafted by visual representations to create new instantiations of hybrid genres. One such carefully examined account is Martin Lemelman's Mendel's Daughter: A Memoir. Attempting to recount his mother's Holocaust experiences and interlace her [End Page 272] story with his, with no conventional framing, Lemelman must rely on his mother's testimony, which is mediated through his voice and graphic representation, including drawn photographs. Aarons extends her analysis by showing how a multimedia consortium of first- and second-generation narratives expands and adds complexity to how...