Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
Shofar; an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
38,1 (2020) 38-75
Keywords:
Lemelman, Martin.
;
Lemelman, Martin.
;
Graphic novels History and criticism
;
Holocaust survivors in literature
;
Holocaust survivors
;
Holocaust survivors Family relationships
;
Memory in literature
Abstract:
This paper examines two graphic memoirs by Martin Lemelman that bring together contrasting points of view about the Holocaust and Jewish identity: Mendel's Daughter (2006) focuses on the Holocaust from the perspective of the author's mother, a Holocaust survivor, as passed down to the son born after the end of World War II; its follow-up, Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood (2010), continues the story of Lemelman's family through the author's Brooklyn boyhood, referencing the role of the Holocaust in his early years. My paper probes the memories and struggles specific to each generation from Lemelman's family in relation to one's assumed identity during and after World War II, in Eastern Europe and the United States. I am particularly interested in examining how the entanglements of transcultural, transmedial, and transgenerational memories of the Holocaust give rise to an ethical engagement with World War II and images of spaces where genocide happened. In this sense, I will compare the parallel images of Poland during World War II (now Ukraine) from Mendel's Daughter and those of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s from Two Cents Plain in which various generations' perspectives clash or coalesce, bringing forth an ethical commitment to the remembrance of war and life in its aftermath via permanent alertness and vigilance to the development of sociopolitical structures in various locales.
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