Unterzakhn

This historically informed and aesthetically compelling story follows twins Esther and Fanya as they grow from little girls on New York's Hester Street to womanhood. We first meet Fanya in 1909 as she races in confusion for the lady doctor to help a woman who has fallen bleeding in a shop. In years to come, Fanya becomes first the doctor's apprentice and ultimately her protegee as an abortionist and reproductive-rights activist. Esther, meanwhile, works for a woman who runs a local bordello. Across the years, the sisters share night-time conversations that show how each has acquired different knowledge-sets as well as value systems. Heavily inked cartoons beautifully depict period details and the Hester Street gossips as times evolve and show how the two sisters' similarities change into stark differences in appearance as they age. The text, salted with Yiddish, and the eloquently detailed images meld together to make this a good choice for readers who enjoyed Eleanor Widmer's Up from Orchard Street (2005) or Hubert and Kerascoet's Miss Don't Touch Me (2009).--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2010 Booklist

Set in New York City's Lower East Side in the early 20th century, this book follows the lives of two sisters, Fanya and Esther. The children of Russian Jewish immigrants, the girls take wildly divergent paths. Fanya goes to work for Bronia, a female doctor who quietly tries to dispense family planning material to her patients struggling to support the children they already have; Esther becomes a showgirl, after a stop in a brothel. Sex, then, is at the heart of both of their worlds, and Corman gracefully traces both young women's efforts to maintain control of their bodies in an unpredictable and at times violent world. Corman steeps her striking black and white artwork with period details, particularly in the clothes and the bustling street scenes. In a flashback scene set in Russia, especially, she echoes the swirling evocative style of Russian folk art. The sisters and their father are compelling, although some characters remain enigmas; a plot twist about the mother is hard to reconcile with the way the character is first introduced. Overall, though, the story of Fanya and Esther's struggles is beautifully drawn and hard to forget. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The graphic novel as feminist parable, concerning twin sisters who learn the brutal facts of life, set in New York in the early 1900s. Jewish daughters of a woman whose reputation makes her an object of scorn on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Esther and Fanya are identical twins and soul mates whose lives take very different turns. Yet they face a common problem in the world they're poised to enter, and "the root of the problem lies in the overly sexual nature of the human male...It's men's drives, you see, that keep Woman reproducing constantly, like a breed cow. Sexual slavery awaits the woman who allows a man to entrap her, either in marriage or in a quick and ugly gutter union." Such advice is given to Fanya by the female obstetrician she comes to assist in the frequent (but illegal) role as an abortionist. Meanwhile, Esther sees another side of man's sexual drives, when she falls under the wing of a woman whose burlesque theater serves as a tease for the prostitution business upstairs, with nubile Esther becoming an attraction in first the former, soon the latter and finally something closer to the legitimate theater. (The graphic novel's title is Yiddish for "Underthings.") Yet these lines between the worlds of conventional morality and common indecency blur, as the maturing Esther attracts numerous customers who want to take her away and make an honest woman out of her, yet she sees no gain in exchanging the sort of sexual transaction to which she's accustomed for a less lucrative and potentially more suffocating one. A climactic reunion leads to revelation for the sisters and the reader alike. Both a work of social realism and a fable with a moral.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.