Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory

by Solomon J. Brager

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063205956
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/25/2024
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	201,443
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.72(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/15/2024

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)

Publishers Weekly

"An intense, brilliantly conceived graphic memoir announcing the arrival of a new talent to watch.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[An] eye-opening graphic memoir debut… Brager compels readers to look at atrocities in the world around them… This brilliant and incisive work takes stock of the intermingled horror, humor, and pathos of history.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Really profound and alive...beautifully drawn, painted, and felt.” — Tom Hart, New York Times #1 bestselling graphic novelist, author of Rosalie Lightning

"Filled with equal parts tragedy, humor, and inter-generational anxiety, Heavyweight is a Holocaust memoir for the grandchildren. From the global to the personal, history expands and contracts under Brager's pen. I couldn't put it down." — Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto

"Heavyweight raises the bar of what we can expect from nonfiction comics.”  — Sara Lautman, The New Yorker cartoonist

“I learned so much from Heavyweight. As Sol presents their family’s story, I felt like I was sharing in their process of discovery, exploring the nuances of memory, research, trauma, and, yes, boxing. Sol’s beautiful, hand-drawn and painted comics weave together sweeping historical narrative with family stories of resistance and escape. Heavyweight is nonfiction comics at its best.”  — Dan Nott, artist and author of Hidden Systems

“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

From the Publisher

★ 2024-04-20
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.

Kirkus Reviews