Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

Har­vey Pekar’s final mem­oir, fea­tur­ing JT Wald­man, will be avail­able in July from Hill & Wang:

Har­vey Pekar’s moth­er was a Zion­ist by way of pol­i­tics. His father was a Zion­ist by way of faith. Whether hand­ing out com­mu­nist pam­phlets, attend­ing Zion­ist pic­nics, or going to dai­ly Hebrew class­es, Pekar grew up a staunch sup­port­er of the Jew­ish state. But he was also an auto­di­dact from the moment he could read, and as he grew up he con­front­ed more and more ques­tions his par­ents couldn’t answer. Not the Israel My Par­ents Promised Me inter­weaves Pekar’s grad­ual dis­af­fec­tion with the mod­ern state of Israel with a com­pre­hen­sive his­to­ry of the Jews, from bib­li­cal times to the present. Told over the course of a sin­gle day in Cleve­land, Ohio, the graph­ic nov­el fol­lows Pekar and the book’s illus­tra­tor, JT Wald­man, as they wres­tle with the mytholo­gies and real­i­ties sur­round­ing the Jew­ish home­land. Not the Israel My Par­ents Promised Me is a graph­ic mem­oir from the man who defined the genre.