“Sometimes Your Memories Are Not Your Own”: The Graphic Turn and the Future of Holocaust Representation

Victoria Aarons

doi:10.3390/h9040136

Abstract

“The legacy of the Shoah” writes Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, “is being passed on to … the post-generation … The inheritance … is being placed in our hands, perhaps in our trust.” We are entering an era that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony. As we move farther and farther from the events of the Shoah, subsequent generations, who see their own lives shaped by the defining rupture of the past, continue to respond to the call of memory. The current era has seen a burgeoning of Holocaust literary representation in the evolving genre of graphic novels, narratives that reanimate and materialize the past through the juxtapositions and intersections of text and image. Calling upon the Deuteronomic imperative to “teach your children,” second and third-generation Holocaust writers, through the hybrid form of the graphic novel, attempt to give shape to the traumatic imprint of the Shoah and its haunting aftermath for generations extending beyond that history.

Highlights

The Imperative to RememberAmy Kurzweil, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, in the 2016 graphic memoir FlyingCouch, sets her grandmother’s story against the backdrop of the ancient Deuteronomic imperative to “teach your children” to transmit and reanimate the stories of the past, as Kurzweil’s autobiographical narrator puts it, “making the unseen visible” (Kurzweil 2016, p. 51)
Calling upon the Deuteronomic imperative to “teach your children,” second and third-generation Holocaust writers, through the hybrid form of the graphic novel, attempt to shape the traumatic imprint of the Shoah and its haunting aftermath for generations extending beyond that history
The third-generation graphic novelist Kurzweil begins the illustrated narrative of her grandmother’s traumatic past—the loss of her family and her own perilous survival—by contextualizing her efforts in the long tradition of Jewish storytelling: “I meant to tell Bubbe that I’ve been reading her stories, that I plan to write and illustrate her life . . . that, in the tradition of curious and dutiful sons and daughters before me, I will polish and publish her history, immortalize it, fashion it into those stories to be imprinted upon our homes and on our gates, as we lie down and as we rise up” (Kurzweil 2016, pp. 50–51)

Summary

Introduction

Amy Kurzweil, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, in the 2016 graphic memoir Flying. The obligation of each generation to listen, to remember, and to memorialize the narrative of the past elides temporal and experiential boundaries in a refrain that shapes and defines post-Holocaust writing This is a legacy whose significance predates the young narrator of Kurzweil’s graphic memoir; it consists in the felt obligation to remember, to impart, and to transmit the narrative of the past. “Listen to me!” evokes the ancient prayer of the Shema, the mandate to listen, to hear, to heed, and to enter the space of memory In responding to her behest, the child of Holocaust survivors will extend the survivor’s eye-witness testimony, a story that, after her death, he must tell

The Graphic Turn

Reanimating the Posthumous Voice

The Limits of Representation

In Conclusion