Mapping transgenerational memory of the Shoah in third generation graphic narratives: on Amy Kurzweil's Flying Couch (2016)

ABSTRACT

My article examines Amy Kurzweil's debut graphic memoir, Flying Couch [(2016). New York: Catapult/Black Balloon] and considers how the Holocaust narrative at the core of this graphic narrative is negotiated by the three generations of the Kurzweil family: the artist's grandmother who was a World War II survivor who escaped the Warsaw ghetto by disguising herself as a gentile, her mother – a survivor's child who became a psychotherapist in the U.S., and Amy herself, coming of age as a third-generation artist in Brooklyn. I argue that Kurzweil's multiple images of her Shoah surviving grandmother and the different ways of positioning Bubbe in time and space, and in relation to herself and her mother, highlight an ethical, future-oriented use of mediating forms of Holocaust memories for third-generation artists. I propose that, in this case, the Holocaust is no longer singled out as the paradigmatic event impacting the identity of the third-generation granddaughter of a Shoah survivor, as is the case with the second generation. In Kurzweil's narrative, this traumatic memory will figure out later as just one aspect of Jewish identity alongside other events of displacement and conflict, affecting the artist's development and constructing the third-generation's transcultural memory of the Holocaust.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Dana Mihăilescu is an Associate Professor of English/American Studies, at the University of Bucharest, where she earned her doctorate in 2010 for the thesis Ethical Dilemmas and Reconfigurations of Identity in Early Twentieth Century Eastern European Jewish American Narratives. Her main research interests include Jewish American Studies, Holocaust (survivor) testimonies, trauma and witnessing, ethics and memory. She has published articles on these topics in international journals of specialty such as French Cultural Studies, Rethinking History, American Imago, Studies in Comics, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, East European Jewish Affairs. Her most recent book-length publication is an authored volume on Regimes of Vulnerability in Jewish American Media and Literature (2015). For further details see: https://www.academia.edu/2197160/CV_dana_mihailescu.

Notes

1. Such works include Charlotte Salomon's 1941–1943 autobiographical series of paintings Life? Or Theatre?; Horst Rosenthal's 1940–1942 graphic booklet Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp about the Gurs internment camp; Alfred Kantor's drawings initially made in Terezin and Auschwitz, destroyed and reconstructed in 1945 in a displaced persons’ camp in Bavaria, published in 1971 as The Book of Alfred Kantor; Paladij Osinka's 1946 booklet Auschwitz. Album of a Political Prisoner, etc.

2. In a podcast interview with Dr Sam Farahmand for DrDoctor on the creation of GutterFACE, Kurzweil actually admits drawing inspiration for the series from Spiegelman's Maus and from Matt Groening's Life in Hell (1977–2012). See “GutterFACE w/Dr. Amy Kurzweil.” https://drdoctordrdoctor.com/drdoctorpodcast/ (2015) [00.58.00-1.01.00].

3. In his full-length 1997 book about the second generation, Children of Job. American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (New York: State University of New York Press), Berger exemplifies these claims with textual-only literary works by Thomas Friedmann, Barbara Finckelstein, Melvin J. Bukiet, J. J. Steinfeld and Thane Rosenbaum, as well as with the visual work of Art Spiegelman.

4. Berger bases his claims about the third generation on an analysis of textual-only narratives by Daniel Mendelsohn, Joseph Skibell and Jonathan Safran Foer.

5. See the transcribed subchapters: “Hospitalized”, “Death of Sister”, “Sexual Advances”, http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/interview.php?D=fenster&section=11.

6. Kurzweil's representation of the Jewish child's wartime experiences as complex and fraught with tension runs counter to the much narrower, politically-minded representations of Jewish children in contemporary visual culture and commemorative projects on the Shoah. For a discussion of how visual representations of Jewish children have been used in the remembrance of the Holocaust in Poland, see Stańczyk (2014).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, UEFISCDI [grant PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0091], Transcultural Networks in Narratives about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.