Family, History, Memory: Notes on Some Jewish Graphic Novels

Why dig into the past—communal, familial—particularly when it is likely to yield dark, horrible truths? What’s the connection between visual storytelling, especially in the form of comics, and the piecing together of events from long ago? In this talk, Tahneer Oksman will discuss four graphic memoirs (or, in other words, non-fiction graphic novels): Rutu Modan’s The Property, Nora Krug’s Belonging, Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, and Miriam Katin’s Letting It Go. Despite their differing plots and perspectives, these visual works all powerfully evoke some of the most important, related questions about the Holocaust and other 20th and 21st century atrocities. Ultimately, these texts investigate what it means to adequately, and ethically, address the past, including untold, and unseen, histories.