by Solomon J. Brager
William Morrow & Company
6/24/2024, paperback
SKU: 9780063205956
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.
Reviews:
"Narrated in shades of gray, Brager's graphic memoir offers a sensitive and incisive personal history about the intersecting legacies of oppression and colonial violence." -- New York Times
"An intense, brilliantly conceived graphic memoir announcing the arrival of a new talent to watch." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Rendered with loving elegance, Heavyweight is an exquisite project of excavation and memory-work, an act of compassionate and pinpoint scholarship. Brager zooms in and out of history seamlessly, weighing their own reckoning with ancestry and trauma, and provides us, as a result, with a hefty testimony to the power of comics to act as witness to generations of lived experience." -- Bishakh Som, author of Apsara Engine and Spellbound
"Heavyweight is a moving graphic memoir that intertwines family history with the author's struggle for understanding, uncovering more questions than answers...This is an impressive layering of complicated insights and personal discovery, and Brager deftly uses comics to explore these complex ideas." -- Jennifer Camper, cartoonist and director of the Queers & Comics Conferences
"[An] introspective visual memoir... 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." -- Booklist
About the Author:
Solomon J. Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, ArtForum, World War III Illustrated, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. They hold a PhD from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and teach as adjunct faculty in history, media, and gender studies.