A moving and provocative graphic memoir exploring inherited
trauma, family history, and the ever-shifting understanding of our
own identities, for readers of Gender Queer and I Was Their American
Dream.
Solomon
Brager grew up with accounts of their great-grandparents’ escape
from Nazi Germany, told over and over until their understanding of
self was bound up with the heroic details of their ancestors’
exploits. Their great-grandmother related how her husband, a boxing
champion, thrashed Joseph Goebbels and cleared beer halls of Nazis
with his fists, how she broke him out of an internment camp and
carried their children over the Pyrenees mountains. But that story
was never the whole picture; zooming out, everything becomes more
complicated.
Alongside
the Levis’ propulsive journey across Europe and to the United
States, Brager distills fascinating research about the Holocaust and
connected periods of colonial history. Heavyweight
asks us to consider how the patterns of history emerge and
reverberate, not as a simple chain of events but in haunting layers.
Confronting the specters of violence as both historian and
descendent, this book is an exploration of family mythology,
intergenerational memory, and the mark the past makes on the present.
In
conversation with works by Rebecca Hall, Nora Krug, Rutu Modan, and
Leela Corman, Heavyweight
will contribute to the collective work of Holocaust studies and the
chronicle of woven human stories.
