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.