Art has always been a huge part of my writ­ing process; as a child in Johan­nes­burg, South Africa, I drew or paint­ed con­stant­ly, along with a lot of read­ing and a pas­sion for cre­at­ing sto­ries. When­ev­er I had thoughts or feel­ings that lan­guage couldn’t express, or that I need­ed to process, art was there, help­ing me work my way through it. I was lucky to have a fan­tas­tic art and Eng­lish teacher in ele­men­tary school (who I’m still in touch with today), and I attend­ed an incred­i­ble after school art pro­gram which taught me so much about con­fi­dence and artis­tic fear­less­ness that remains foun­da­tion­al to my work today. 

In col­lege I pur­sued these dual artis­tic inter­ests, study­ing Visu­al Arts and Cre­ative Writ­ing; I used my skills to sto­ry­board and under­stand my char­ac­ters’ facial expres­sions and body lan­guage. I nev­er con­sid­ered telling a sto­ry entire­ly this way until I start­ed writ­ing Vidal. 

Vidal is a graph­ic nov­el that fol­lows a Sephardic Jew­ish artist from Tiberias who trav­els across the world to France to pur­sue his dreams. He gets trapped there when World War II begins. With his nat­ur­al opti­mism and resilience, he man­ages to escape the Vel D’Hiv raids, joins the resis­tance where his Ara­bic becomes sur­pris­ing­ly use­ful, and even­tu­al­ly is caught and sent to Auschwitz. 

When pro­tag­o­nist Vidal describes his city of Tiberias in terms of vis­cer­al expe­ri­ences and the envi­ron­ment, I want­ed the read­er to see it and feel it, just as I did when my Suv­ta and her sib­lings talked about grow­ing up there to feel the weight of the humid­i­ty, the dust in the air, the scents of jas­mine, corian­der, and almonds. 

Work­ing in a new medi­um can be both exhil­a­rat­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing. I was thrilled to final­ly feel like I was allowed to focus on this tan­gi­ble art. Paint­ing has an imme­di­a­cy and an expres­sive­ness that’s always felt irre­sistible to me; full of rich tex­tures, yet to be dis­cov­ered com­bi­na­tions of images, and so much poten­tial. At the same time, despite how many graph­ic nov­els I’d read and loved over the years, I felt unsure of how exact­ly to pro­ceed until I returned to my Suvta’s bril­liant, vibrant sto­ries about her childhood. 

My Suv­ta Shu­lamit was an incred­i­ble sto­ry­teller, sen­si­tive to nuance, emo­tion, and sen­so­ry details. I learned so much about pac­ing and descrip­tion from her.

Many of the details in the open­ing sec­tion of Vidal are based on her sto­ries. For exam­ple, my Suvta’s descrip­tions of adven­tures with her best friend, Esther Mal­ka, and her old­er broth­er, Avn­er, who she was clos­est to, fea­ture here. One such sto­ry includ­ed an out­ing boat­ing on the Kin­neret, when she described the heat as so intense that they had to sleep on the roof of their house and side­walks so hot they could fry eggs on them if they acci­den­tal­ly dropped them. I could see it all in bright col­ors, and I want­ed more than any­thing to cap­ture it visually. 

My grandmother’s fam­i­ly (the Illouz fam­i­ly, lat­er angli­cized to Illos in South Africa), were Moroc­can Jews who had lived in Tiberias for five gen­er­a­tions. They were from Fez, in Moroc­co and grew up speak­ing both Hebrew and Ara­bic. In Vidal, the fic­tion­al Ben Sous­san fam­i­ly share these par­al­lels from my own fam­i­ly his­to­ry. And the house that I cre­at­ed for them on Mamou­nia Street is based off of my family’s own abode there, which is still owned by one of my great-uncles today.

My family’s syn­a­gogue in Israel was Beit Knes­set Hasign­or and housed the graves of famous rab­bis, includ­ing the Ram­bam and Rab­bi Meir Baal Haness, all things my fam­i­ly was very proud of. 

Through­out my writ­ing and paint­ing process, I often con­sult­ed my great-aunt, Yocheved. Yocheved is my grandmother’s old­er sis­ter and her mem­o­ry is astound­ing. She is able to recall in detail all the schools that exist­ed in Tiberias in the ear­ly to mid 1900s, the names of her neigh­bors, the food her mom made (includ­ing excel­lent Ma’arud, Dafi­na, and cous­cous rolled by hand, as men­tioned in Vidal), the slang phras­es they used in both Hebrew and Ara­bic, among so many oth­er aspects of her child­hood and life. I want­ed to pre­serve all the Moroc­can Sephardic food, fam­i­ly sto­ries, and reli­gious rit­u­als as she had expe­ri­enced them and con­veyed to me.

I learned that the term Chouaflouz is Judeo-Ara­bic, a lin­guis­tic com­bi­na­tion of Ara­bic, Hebrew, and even a lit­tle French that was spe­cif­ic to Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties of North Africa. It was fas­ci­nat­ing to real­ize that. It came up again when I tried to find the Ara­bic trans­la­tion for a bless­ing my great-grand­par­ents and even some­times my Suv­ta used when they were grow­ing up. As I includ­ed oth­er bless­ings and phras­es that I was famil­iar with hear­ing I would come across this sit­u­a­tion again and again. At the end of the sto­ry, when Vidal is reunit­ed with his daugh­ters, he uses the phrase Sma Allah Alei­ki, may God be Upon You, a phrase both of my great-grand­par­ents blessed us with. 

The tit­u­lar char­ac­ter of Vidal is very much a cre­ation of mine but his per­son­al­i­ty was based on my great-uncle, Avn­er, who my Suv­ta was very close to. 

As I was cre­at­ing this graph­ic nov­el, I was reflect­ing deeply on my family’s jour­ney to South Africa. My great-grand­fa­ther trav­elled there for work, and was stuck in South Africa when World War II broke out. No one could have pre­dict­ed the length and reach of the war, or where Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties might remain safe. For exam­ple, my great-grandfather’s fam­i­ly briefly moved to Greece under the Ottomans, and, in time, were able to return to Tiberias. The thought of them stay­ing in Greece, and the way it would have altered my fam­i­ly his­to­ry (and pos­si­bly even my own exis­tence), is haunting. 

My great-grand­moth­er Sari­na was left alone for years with six chil­dren in Tiberias and then in Jaf­fa. She was excep­tion­al­ly strong and resource­ful and I tried to cap­ture that in Vidal’s moth­er through her cook­ing, sewing, and cre­ative inge­nu­ity, and in her com­pas­sion and abil­i­ty to have clear-eyed insights. 

The fam­i­ly would lat­er join him in Johan­nes­burg. Begin­ning in the 1970s, near­ly all of my fam­i­ly mem­bers returned to Israel. My fam­i­ly who lives there now are eighth and ninth generation.

As I wrote and paint­ed Vidal, I want­ed to high­light so many aspects of my family’s sto­ry: the longevi­ty of Moroc­can Jew­ish iden­ti­ty; the rela­tion­ships between cousins whose cul­tures and his­to­ries are so sim­i­lar; and the king of Moroc­co, who want­ed to pro­tect his Jew­ish cit­i­zens in France dur­ing World War II, as did the rec­tor of the Great Mosque of Paris. Through Vidal, I hope to con­vey what anti­semitism looked like dur­ing this time, and in par­tic­u­lar the insid­i­ous nature of prej­u­dice and dis­crim­i­na­tion that her­ald­ed the begin­ning of the Holocaust.. 

Per­haps most of all, I want­ed to share the beau­ty of my family’s sto­ry, the Sephardic cus­toms, the famil­ial close­ness, and the resilience and strength that’s in all of our DNA.