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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. 

