Inhalt: | "In the graphic novels and memoirs that form the basis of this study, the construction of individual identities and the mutating, mercurial shape of the self are situated in Jewishness, in a past, both remote and proximate, within which these comics artists locate, define, and defend the self, even if in contestation with some of the strictures and limitations embedded in such structures. The voices that we hear in these narratives are Jewish voices, which is to say, self-referential, ironic, combative, at the intersection of understatement and exaggerated self-parody, mixing modes of celebration and lamentation. The works of these Jewish women graphic novelists are preoccupied with the past, with personal histories and mythologies as well as with the larger narratives of Jewish history and tradition-extended and recursive moments of catastrophic loss and survival. As Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman point out, the Jewish graphic novel is a genre "uniquely suited to the quintessential narrative themes of the Jewish imagination: mobility, flight, adaptation, transformation, disguise, metamorphosis . . . and retells the Jewish story in new and exciting ways" (Baskind and Omer-Sherman xvii). The graphic narratives I examine here tell the Jewish story from a gendered perspective, one that problematizes notions of identity and self-representation against the itinerant punctuations of time and memory. In the works of the Jewish women graphic novelists that I discuss, the "themes of the Jewish imagination" are in conversation with individual and collective histories. These histories inform and contextualize the experiences these graphic novelists and their characters and alter-egos have of living in the world, engaging circumstances of their own making and events shaped by both the traumatic and fortuitous intrusions of chance and history. In these works, the graphic storytellers invoke voices of authority-the influence of the literary "fathers," biblical narratives and injunctions, Holocaust testimony-in conversation with their own contemporary, immediate, and proximate realities. Thus, read in sequence, these graphic novelists talk through their Jewish lives, visualizing and problematizing the worlds they inhabit and the futures they imagine"-- |
