Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory

✍ Scribed by Victoria Aarons

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 252
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In Holocaust Graphic Narratives, Victoria Aarons demonstrates the range and fluidity of this richly figured genre. Employing memory as her controlling trope, Aarons analyzes the work of the graphic novelists and illustrators, making clear how they extend the traumatic narrative of the Holocaust into the present and, in doing so, give voice to survival in the wake of unrecoverable loss. In recreating moments of traumatic rupture, dislocation, and disequilibrium, these graphic narratives contribute to the evolving field of Holocaust representation and establish a new canon of visual memory. The intergenerational dialogue established by Aarons’ reading of these narratives speaks to the on-going obligation to bear witness to the Holocaust. Examined together, these intergenerational works bridge the erosions created by time and distance. As a genre of witnessing, these graphic stories, in retracing the traumatic tracks of memory, inscribe the weight of history on generations that follow.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction: Visual Testimonies of Memory
1 The Performance of Memory: Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own, a Child Survivor’s (Auto)Biographical Memoir
2 Memory Frames: Mendel’s Daughter, a Second-Generation Perspective
3 “Replacing Absence with Memory” Bernice Eisenstein’s Graphic Memoir I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
4 Flying Couch: A Third-Generation Tapestry of Memory
5 Yossel: April 19, 1943: Possible Histories
6 Visual Landscapes of Memory: Fracturing Time and Space
Epilogue: An Inheritance of Memory
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author