Review by Booklist Review
A writer struggles to reconcile their Jewish identity with survivor's guilt within the context of a mysterious great-grandparent's past in this introspective visual memoir. Solomon Brager has listened to Oma Ilse and her family stories of ex-husband and former boxer Erich Levi's rabble-rousing ways and heroic exploits during the Nazis' reign of terror. The deeper Brager reaches into Erich's past, the more questions they have about the intersectionality of historical artifacts and ethical responsibility, of those who avert their gaze unless touched by exigent circumstances. A slow, emotional buildup develops when Brager's haunting and mesmerizing scavenger hunt through the annals of memory reveals the ugly cracks in humanity's desperate attempts at survival. Initially, art serves a secondary function to a narrative grounded in theoreticals. As their families seek safe passage through Nazi Europe, Brager's washed images, blurred lines, and shifting foci mirror their interrupted lives, personal things lost, and the silent reckoning whose impact continues to reverberate with future generations. Brager writes, "I need to understand that we can both be victimized and be complicit in violence."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pinko cartoonist Brager's eye-opening graphic memoir debut recounts their wealthy Jewish family's escape from Nazi Germany. The heavyweight of the title refers to Brager's great-grandfather, boxing champion Erich Levi, as well as the collective weight of history. Brager grows up with a standardized narrative of the Holocaust, but comes to understand that Germany's genocidal colonial exploits in Africa benefited their family and served as a training ground for German violence. Throughout the narrative, Erich remains a cypher; much of the detail comes from his wife Ilse's Shoah Foundation testimony. A combination of money, strategy, luck, and a few kind soldiers enabled their respective families to make their way through Europe and eventually reach the U.S. Quoting Primo Levi and such radical Black scholars as Ralph Bunche, Brager notes that a tenet of fascism is to rob victims of their innocence. "A lot of people are scared of the Holocaust losing its special, sacred, incomparable status," Brager writes, "as though we need to diminish or obscure other historical crimes to properly remember." By contrast, Brager compels readers to look at atrocities in the world around them. Brager is trans and queer; some of the more lighthearted scenes show their partner supporting their research and at times trying to pull them back from the depths of obsession. Stylized portraits of Brager's relatives are interspersed with more realistic, moody replications of photographs. This brilliant and incisive work takes stock of the intermingled horror, humor, and pathos of history. Agent: Aemilia Philips, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A cartoonist and writer reflects on intergenerational trauma and its relationship to modern colonial violence. Family stories about heroic escapes during the Holocaust mesmerized Brager almost as much as those about their great-grandfather Erich, mythologized as the man who beat Joseph Goebbels in a boxing match. However, as Brager shows, those stories--along with the unarticulated events that led to the formation of their transgender identity--also haunted the author. Unable to speak directly about the trauma surrounding their transition, Brager wrote about family Holocaust stories instead, which graduate school history professors rejected as too personal. In this debut, the author uses their formidable skills as an artist to transform that research journey into a unique comic book--style narrative that interweaves tales of their inherited past with their own imperfect recollections. Grounding the narrative in work by psychiatrists, historians, and Holocaust survivors like Primo Levi, Brager achieves not only critical distance from their own work, but also the ability to see how other legacies of oppression subtly intersected both the Holocaust and their own life. In considering a gold bracelet inherited from their mother, for example, Brager was able to visualize their connections to the original owner, their great-grandmother, Ilse, and the bracelet's giver, Erich, and link a historical artifact to a real event--in this case, Ilse's escape from Germany. Brager shows readers how the bracelet, made in French colonial Morocco, functions as evidence of the subtle, unquestioned ways that colonial violence could embed itself in the histories of other oppressed people. As the author probes the many ways in which cultures intersect, they challenge readers to make deeper, more complex connections among self, family, and the many histories in which the self necessarily--but sometimes unknowingly--participates. An intense, brilliantly conceived graphic memoir announcing the arrival of a new talent to watch. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
