AUGUST 10 • 2023 | 47
child.” In melding the two sto-
ries, Lightman explores child-
bearing as a focus of desire,
fear, doubt, anxiety and also as
“central to Judaism.”
In Broken Eggs, produced
in collaboration with artist
Emily Steinberg, Lightman
writes, “Growing up Jewish,
born 20 years after the end
of World War II, there was a
certain unspoken obligation
that we, the next generation,
would replace those lost in the
Shoah . . . It was a heavy load
to carry.”
Abraham Cahan published
A Bintel Brief (A Bundle of
Letters), an advice column, his
responses to letters received at
the New York Yiddish socialist
newspaper Forward from 1906
for the next 60 years. In those
letters, immigrants poured
their hopes, fears and frustra-
tions, as Liana Finck dramatiz-
es 11 of the letters in A Bintel
Brief: Love and Longing in Old
New York (2014) in the form of
a graphic narrative.
She illustrates “condensed
and edited” versions of the
immigrants’ situations in black
and white; Cahan’s responses
in blue, framed with blue tears
dripping from a disembodied
eye; and a continuing imagined
dialogue between a figure of
herself and Cahan’s blue-hatted
ghost. Finck uses the graphic
narrative to explore her con-
nections to last century’s Jews
of the Lower East Side, and to
whatever Jewish identity will
mean to her in the future.
In The Magic Barrel, a story
published in 1958, Bernard
Malamud tells of a rabbinical
student, Leo Finkle, searching
for a suitable marriage partner
with the help of matchmaker
Pinye Salzman. Anya Ulinich,
in Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, a
graphic narrative published in
2014, recounts her character’s
search for love with the help
of an online dating service,
OkCupid. Malamud’s hero fails
to find love, finding rather the
dismal realization that he is
“an impostor not only to oth-
ers but to himself.” He offers
himself the bitter consolation
that “he was a Jew and that a
Jew suffered.” Ulinich’s heroine
likewise locates her impedi-
ment to finding love in herself,
as she admits that she “has no
idea who I am.”
Ulinich has much in com-
mon with her fictional her-
oine — born in Russia, an
immigrant in America. They
both experienced their status
as “Jewish” in Russia as a fact,
unencumbered by religious or
cultural commitments. They
felt culturally Soviet.
“In Moscow, you didn’t have
to try so hard to be a Jew. It
was like gender — you were
born with it.” In Arizona,
Jewishness amounts to a
choice, and both feel ambiv-
alent about “learning to be a
Jew.” Lena Finkle is not Anya
Ulinich, though; the artist
uses her fictional alter-ego to
explore her own overlapping
identities.
Lena acts impulsively,
exaggeratedly unaware of the
probable consequences, but,
as Lena makes ill-considered
decisions, a tiny version of
Lena intrudes on the panels,
issuing snarky and wise warn-
ings. Aarons calls our attention
to one panel in which Lena
encounters a former boyfriend,
while the tiny Lena admonish-
es her, against the background
of Lena and the boyfriend
from 20 years ago.
Lynda Barry begins One!
Hundred! Demons! (2017)
with a pair of panels. In the
left panel, Barry presents her-
self with a paintbrush, ready
to paint the first page of her
graphic novel, wondering, “Is it
autobiography if parts of it are
not true?” In the right panel,
Barry contemplates the fin-
ished work, and wonders, “Is it
fiction if parts of it are?”
Leela Corman, in We All
Wish for Deadly Force: Short
Comics (2016), tells and retells
the least comic of stories,
the unexplained death of her
young daughter. For Corman,
the traumatic event does not
stay in the past. It remains
present in her mind, some-
times in the background and
recurrently dominating her
thoughts. She calls on her
memory of her grandfather,
whose family was murdered
in the Shoah, and who “bare-
ly” survived in a hole in the
ground in the forest, to help
her learn to continue to live.
Corman illustrates this
image with an explanatory cap-
tion that she and her grandfa-
ther “trudge forward carrying
the weight of (their) dead.” In
one panel, she paints herself
painting herself and her grand-
father, against the background
of images from the Shoah.
In Bernice Eisenstein I Was
a Child of Holocaust Survivors
(2006), the artist presents her-
self dealing with her parents’
traumatic history, which she
learned in fragments. She feels
the need to learn everything,
even an eerie desire to expe-
rience what they did, along
with the desire to time travel
back to reassure them that
they would survive. Eisenstein
feels “postmemory,” wanting
to remember what did not
happen to her, and anxiety
that these memories will not
transmit to the future. This
anxiety has no potential clo-
sure, no end point. There does
not exist a balance between
not knowing enough and
achieving the right distance.
The graphic narrative presents
complex nesting frames — the
artist now painting her past
self learning about her parents’
even further past experiences.
Amy Kurzweil, in Flying
Couch: A Graphic Memoire
(2016), a generation further
on, presents a narrative of
the life of her grandmother,
collected from family stories
and from interviews recorded
at the Holocaust Survivor
Oral Testimony Archive at
the University of Michigan,
Dearborn. In one uncanny
sequence, Kurzweil shows her
young self walking with her
mother and grandmother.
As the grandmother recalls
her little sister who died
of hunger, the sister’s face
appears on the lenses of
grandmother’s mirrored
sunglasses, as witnessed by
her granddaughter. Kurzweil’s
mother, the in-between
generation, shies away from
the recollection that transfixes
the young Kurzweil.
In Memory Spaces, Victoria
Aarons provides in-depth
analysis of how these artists
use the techniques of graphic
narrative to create powerful
accounts of what it means to
exist as Jews and as women
at this moment in history.
Readers who already know
these works will find Aarons’
work enlightening; readers
unfamiliar with these works,
or with graphic narratives
in general, can use Memory
Spaces as an invitation to
begin to encounter fascinating
works.