Graphic War: Jewish Women Drawing Contested Spaces explores how graphic memoirs written by women theorize borders of all sorts. In this book, Laini Kavaloski develops a “graphic border poetics” examines how graphic memoirs uniquely contest fixed geographic boundaries, configurations of identity, and narratives of violence. Graphic War focuses on graphic narratives by women that explore Jewish experiences of war and conflict. The book is theoretically complex, ideal for the reader comfortable with academic forms of discourse and analysis. It contains many insightful readings.
Chapter one discusses how Miriam Libicki’s jobnik! An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008) and Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010÷2016) visually depict the contested space of the modern State of Israel. Libicki’s memoir centers on her time in the Israeli Defense Force in the early 2000s, a time that included the Second Intifada. Being a firsthand witness to the Israeli – Palestinian conflict leads Libicki to question the extent to which Israel is a homeland for all Jews. As an American woman, she is subjected to the patriarchal power of the Israeli military. Glidden’s chapters open with a map of Israel-Palestine that follows her journey on Taglit Birthright. The maps, Kavaloski argues, drawn using watercolors, present alternative cartographies to the Israeli state. In contrast to Miriam, Sarah moves from skepticism towards the state of Israel to an enthusiasm for the Jewish state grounded in her Jewish identity.
The second chapter compares Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch (2016)and Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018). Kurzweil’s third-generation Holocaust survivor memoir weaves her grandmother Bubbe’s tale of survival with Kurweil’s own coming-of-age. Images of the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto serve as links between the recounting of Bubbe’s life and Kurweil’s’s developing sense of the weight of Holocaust memory, particularly when the author draws herself into the cracks of the walls. Krug’s memoir recounts her attempts to unearth her family’s complicity in the Nazi atrocities of World War II. Both Krug and Kurzweil acknowledge the burden the Holocaust places on their lives. By graphically narrating their stories, they exert agency on their inherited identities.
The third chapter explores Bernice Eisenstein’s provocative metaphor of her obsession with the Holocaust as the “Drug of H” in I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006). Eisenstein showcases how her parents’ trauma fundamentally shaped her identity. Becoming an artist afforded Eisenstein tools to grapple with how the Holocaust shaped her family life and her own upbringing. Kavaloski cogently shows how Eisenstein adapts both kitsch aesthetics and the work of artists from the 1930s and ’40s in telling her story.
Chapter four puts several of Leela Corman’s autobiographical comics from the 2010s with Julia Alekseyeva’s Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (2017). Alekseyeva’s memoir alternates between a narrative of her great-grandmother Lola’s life and one of the author’s own coming-of-age. Lola’s personal writings evince a desire to resist the moral inequities of Stalinist regime on Jewish people. Corman’s “The Blood Road” (2018) recounts her discomfort traveling to Buchenwald concentration camp on the road built by prisoners. This leads Corman to question the morality of American infrastructure that was built by enslaved or exploited laborers. Similarly, Alekseyeva’s grandmother’s social activism inspires her own.
Destabilization is a central theme of Graphic War. It shows, repeatedly, how the visual-verbal medium of comics troubles what one is taught. In telling their own narratives, these female artists present alternatives to the received boundaries and configurations of both temporal space and personal identity.
Brian Hillman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
