Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women's Graphic Narratives

By Victoria Aarons

An exploration of the work of Jewish women graphic novelists and the intricate Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place—that is, the emotional, geographical, and psychological spaces that women inhabit. Victoria Aarons argues that Jewish women graphic novelists are preoccupied with embodied memory: the way the body materializes memory. This monograph investigates how memory manifests in the drawn shape of the body as an expression of the weight of personal and collective histories. Aarons explores Jewish identity, diaspora, mourning, memory, and witness in the works of Sarah Lightman, Liana Finck, Anya Ulinich, Leela Corman, and more.
Memory Spaces begins by framing this research within contemporary discourse and reflects upon the choice to explore Jewish women graphic novelists specifically. In the chapters that follow, Aarons relates the nuanced issues of memory, transmission of trauma, Jewish cultural identity, and the gendered self to a series of meaningful and noteworthy graphic novels. Aarons’s insight, close readings, and integration of contemporary scholarship are conveyed clearly and concisely, creating a work that both captivates readers and contributes to scholarly discourse in Jewish studies, women’s literature, memory studies, and identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9780814349168

Victoria Aarons

Victoria Aarons is O. R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University and the author of A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham?: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction. She has published widely on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures and is a contributor to the two-volume compendium Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. Avinoam J. Patt is Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he is also director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization and administers the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2009) and co-editor with Michael Berkowitz of “We Are Here”: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2010). He has been a contributor to several projects at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is co-author of the recently published source volume Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938­–1940. Mark Shechner is professor emeritus at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He has published widely on American literature and American Jewish fiction and intellectual life and has done extensive book reviewing over the course of his career.

Book preview

Cover Page for Memory Spaces

Praise for Memory Spaces

This is a richly textured account of Jewish women graphic novelists who engender traumatic memories in the body. Victoria Aarons’s focus on the materiality of graphic narratives revisions the comic medium as a site of bodily exposure. She beautifully captures the anxieties of Jewish identity in graphic form.

—Ken Koltun-Fromm, author of Drawing on Religion: Reading and the Moral Imagination in Comics and Graphic Novels

Focusing on six Jewish comics artists across borders, Victoria Aarons adroitly demonstrates how those storytellers variously negotiate memory and identity through their dexterous interplay of text and image. With original insights and writerly aplomb, Aarons has crafted a must-read contribution to the literature on contemporary women graphic novelists.

—Samantha Baskind, distinguished professor of art history, Cleveland State University, and coeditor of The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches

"Victoria Aarons’s Memory Spaces breaks new ground in the study of graphic novels. Focusing on the work of six twenty-first-century Jewish women graphic novelists, the author brilliantly discusses the distinctive contribution of gendered writing, showing how each of the six writes in the shadow of various periods of the Jewish historical experience, utilizing visual culture to express what it means to be Jewish and a woman, to be shaped by and yet transcend the past. The relationship between memory and identity emerges with crystal clarity."

—Alan Berger, Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Holocaust Studies

Memory Spaces

Memory Spaces

Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’s Graphic Narratives

Victoria Aarons

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2023 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

ISBN 9780814349144 (paperback)

ISBN 9780814349151 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780814349168 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946486

On cover: Wilderness from We All Wish for Deadly Force © 2012 by Leela Corman. Used by permission of the artist. Cover design by Kristle Marshall.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Leonard and Harriette Simons Endowed Family Fund and the American Jewish History Publication Fund for the generous support of the publication of this volume.

Wayne State University Press rests on Waawiyaataanong, also referred to as Detroit, the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Three Fires Confederacy. These sovereign lands were granted by the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot Nations, in 1807, through the Treaty of Detroit. Wayne State University Press affirms Indigenous sovereignty and honors all tribes with a connection to Detroit. With our Native neighbors, the press works to advance educational equity and promote a better future for the earth and all people.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Wayne State University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Wayne State University Press

Leonard N. Simons Building

4809 Woodward Avenue

Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

In Memory

Lawrence D. Kimmel

(1936–2022)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Jewish Women Graphic Novelists? Why Now?

1. To Hear My Own Voice: Diasporic Self-Reinvention in Sarah Lightman’s The Book of Sarah

2. Temporal and Spatial Intersections: Liana Finck’s A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York

3. Hybrid Identities in Anya Ulinich’s Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel

4. Mourning and Memory in Leela Corman’s We All Wish for Deadly Force

5. Visual Tropes of Witnessing in Second- and Third-Generation Holocaust Graphic Memoirs

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

I am grateful, as always, for the support of Trinity University and the many productive conversations I had with colleagues and students as I worked on this book. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the generous help of my colleagues in the Art and Communication Departments, Elizabeth Ward and Patrick Keating, for taking time away from their own endeavors to look at some of the complex images with which I was working. In concert, they provided me with an enormously helpful framework and language for opening up the intricacies of these images. I remain ever grateful to Benjamin Harris, my colleague and research librarian extraordinaire, who can locate a source and provide bibliographic information with most impressive dispatch. I always rely on my colleague Alan Astro, Professor of French, for his help with Hebrew and Yiddish. I would also like to acknowledge Ren Rader, cartoonist and the recipient of an undergraduate summer Mellon Fellowship, who was a pleasure to work with when I was beginning this project. Ren’s knowledge and obvious love of comics helped inform my thinking about and approach to several of the images in this book. Further, I would like to thank my friend and colleague Phyllis Lassner, professor emerita at Northwestern University and former editor of the Cultural Expressions of World War II Series at Northwestern University Press, for her close and sensitive reading of Chapter 5. Phyllis’s own work on rhetorical figures and moments of haunting in film contributed to my thinking about ghostly revenants as material embodiments of memory in post-Holocaust writing.

It is always a pleasure to speak with Deb Shostak on matters of art and narrative, as it is to engage in ongoing supportive conversations with my friends and colleagues Holli Levitsky, Hilene Flanzbaum, Sharon Oster, and Margarete Feinstein, all from whom I have learned so much. I also want to thank Alan L. Berger for his continuous encouragement over all these many years. His support of my work, especially as I embark on new directions, is invaluable to me, and I have come to count on his encouragement and friendship in ways that really matter.

I am enormously grateful for the gracious support of Leela Corman, Bernice Eisenstein, Amy Kurzweil, Sarah Lightman, and Emily Steinberg, artists, cartoonists, and graphic novelists, for whom I have such appreciation and whose sensitive and inspiring work I admire tremendously. Their work has important implications for both Jewish and Holocaust literary and artistic expression. Moreover, their work has taken my own scholarship in directions I never would have anticipated. I deeply appreciate, too, their graciousness in granting me permission to reprint some of their stunning and haunting images, images to which I return time and again in both my research and teaching. Leela Corman was tremendously generous in granting permission to use an image from We All Wish for Deadly Force on the cover of the book.

From the very start, Kathy Wildfong and Annie Martin, former editors-in-chief at Wayne State University Press, were greatly encouraging and supportive of this project, and I would like to recognize not only their support of my work but also the impressive collection of books that they have published in Jewish studies at the press. My heartfelt thanks to Marie Sweetman, current Senior Acquisitions Editor, and the production and editorial staff at Wayne State University Press for their advice, assistance, and conscientious shepherding of this book through the various stages of production. I am very appreciative of Mimi Braverman’s close editorial reading of my manuscript. I would also like to thank Stephanie Velasquez, Academic Office Manager in the Department of English at Trinity University, for her help with reproducing images and for handling so many of the logistical departmental matters, thus making it easier for faculty in the department to get our work done. Many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript, whose comments and suggestions I found very helpful. Simply put, they got what I was trying to say.

Finally and as always, to Willis, Aaron, and Gabriel Salomon, who unequivocally and indispensably believe in the importance of my work—this book is for you.

Introduction

Why Jewish Women Graphic Novelists? Why Now?

There was no escaping it: I was a Jewish woman.

—Amy Kurzweil, Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir

In a recent essay suggestively titled How Jewish Is a ‘Jewish’ Comic? Ken Koltun-Fromm, while acknowledging the disparate and idiosyncratic modes of expression that characterize Jewish comics narratives, posits that the Jewish graphic novel in particular reflects a performance of and is a witness to the struggles of identity (Koltun-Fromm, How Jewish, 40). Although Jewish comics writing encompasses fictional works as well as autobiographical comics narratives and memoirs, and all of the hybrid configurations of this fluid, expansive genre, anxieties of identity shape the broad generic category of Jewish graphic novels. These anxieties materialize in the visual interactions between text and image, a visual-verbal sparring of performative registers and codes of symbolic behavior. As Tahneer Oksman suggests of the genre, The medium can open up relational considerations of identity by visualizing the manifold, entangled layers that inform a person’s sense of self (Oksman, How Come Boys, 222). Since the publication of Will Eisner’s influential work of sequential art, A Contract with God (1978), Jewish graphic narratives have enacted, through combined visual and textual effects, the possibilities for Jewish self-fashioning against the tensions, predicaments, and contingencies of contemporary life. Zachary Levine, in situating Jewish cartoonists and comics narratives in a tradition of Jewish cultural production, suggests that such works have offered generations an invitation and a blueprint for describing the individual’s experience of being Jewish, as well as a way for successive generations of Jewish writers and artists to grapple with . . . ideas of Jewish culture, Jewishness, and the relevance of Jewish historical experience in contemporary life (Levine, 25). In the works of contemporary Jewish women cartoonists and graphic novelists, the focus of this book, the practices and discourses of Jewish history, ritual, myth, memory, and imagination provide a framework for contextualizing, shaping, interrogating, and exposing identities. The visual medium materially extends the making of and reckoning with identity, with the jumble of contending identities that participate in assemblages of selves. These texts embody the performance of self in and through a material thing, as Koltun-Fromm puts it (Koltun-Fromm, Material Culture, 52). As Evelyn Tauben suggests, Jewish women who turn to comic art as their medium . . . create highly personal work where their own identities, their self-image and the details of their lives are central to a larger conversation about the Jewish experience, an experience that measures individual perceptions of self and place (Tauben, 72). The women cartoonists in this book respond to the historical and proximate backdrop of a Jewish sensibility and felt cultural ethos. This sensibility and ethos are multiplied by two factors. One is the decades-long progressive opening up of the primarily male-centered tradition of Jewish writing to Jewish women writers. The other is the expanded opportunities for expression in the visual-verbal genre of comics and graphic novels. These two factors form the background for representations of alienation, memory, and reenactments of loss.

Historically, the field of Jewish comics has been dominated by male cartoonists. As Dana Mihăilescu notes, underground comics of the 1960s in the United States were predominantly produced by male comics artists. As she argues, While these comics were fundamental for the widespread and long-lasting success of this genre, they gained their fame at the expense of women’s representation (Mihăilescu, Shot in the Heart, 351). As pioneering cartoonist Trina Robbins put it, the underground comics movement well into the 1970s was a boys’ club (Gotthardt). Even though Jewish women comics artists such as Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Sharon Rudahl were instrumental figures in the commix movement of the early 1970s in the United States, until recently, far less attention had been directed toward women cartoonists than male comics artists, who in large measure defined the field until the early decades of the twenty-first century. Although an appreciation of the impact of women cartoonists on the genre may be shifting, as Oksman points out in her study of American Jewish women graphic memoirists, the notable lack of attention paid to Jewish women cartoonists reflects attitudes toward Jewish women’s statuses as an often ignored, misrepresented, or underrepresented minority in an already misunderstood medium. Thus the work produced by Jewish women has often been underplayed or ignored in both academic and mainstream comics criticism (Oksman, How Come Boys, 4).

The privileging of male cartoonists and graphic artists is not limited to the American comics industry or to comics artists specifically. In her introduction to Graphic Details, a collection that grew out of the first international touring exhibition of confessional comics by Jewish women artists, British Jewish artist and graphic novelist Sarah Lightman (whose graphic memoir is the focus of Chapter 1) notes the conspicuous imbalance of representation in galleries and exhibitions that display the work of comics artists (Lightman, Preface, 3). Lightman recalls a conversation that took place at a conference venue as late as 2012 when she was asked by a member of the audience whether there were "really any Jewish women comics artists (Lightman, Preface, 2). The lack of recognition and visibility of Jewish women cartoonists is surprising, given the substantive production of comics art by Jewish women, especially in the past quarter-century. In the years surrounding the turn of the new millennium, in particular, women’s comics writing has flourished, especially but by no means exclusively in the United States. As comics theorist Hillary L. Chute points out, While a few decades ago comics by women about their lives had to be published underground, today they are taking over the conversation about literature and the self" (Chute, Graphic Women, 26). In part, this cultural and literary shift is a response to the extensive production of comics narratives since the turn of the twenty-first century, a phenomenon that crosses geographic, ethnic, and gendered borders. I suspect, too, that this proliferation and reception of the genre is a response to the increasingly predominant visual culture of our times. The early decades of the twenty-first century notably have seen a bourgeoning of graphic narratives by women cartoonists, an outpouring of creative energy that has only gained momentum and recognition both in the general reading public and in the academy.

Furthermore, in terms of the focus of this book, the current production of comics narratives by Jewish women arguably forms part of the extension and evolution of Jewish women’s literary expression, particularly since the end of World War II, a period that was largely defined by Jewish male authors, especially in the United States (a discussion I take up in more detail in Chapter 3). The range and scale of book-length graphic narratives published by Jewish women in the first two decades of the twenty-first century alone, as well as shorter pieces posted on websites and included in collections of comics writing, suggest the rich field of production by women cartoonists and graphic novelists who continue to experiment with an array of innovative rhetorical structures and thematic conceits for imagining women’s voices in the medium of comics. I would like to point to just some of the works published in English by Jewish women who have contributed to the growing field of contemporary comics writing in recent years. These women have helped define a space for Jewish women’s comics. Their work, although varying in kind and thematic content, engages with a mutating and multiple sense of Jewishness: Julia Alekseyeva’s Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (2017); Orli Auslander’s I Feel Bad: All Day. Every Day. About Everything (2017); Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant (2014); Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn (2012); Vanessa Davis’s Make Me a Woman (2010); Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2007); Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017); Liana Finck’s Passing for Human (2018) and Let There Be Light (2022); Sarah Glidden’s Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (2016); Carol Isaacs’s The Wolf of Baghdad: Memoir of a Lost Homeland (2020); Miriam Katin’s Letting It Go (2013); Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir (2007); Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir (2016); Miss Lasko-Gross’s A Mess of Everything (2009); Sarah Lazarovic’s A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy (2014); Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (2012); Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik! An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008); Sarah Lightman’s The Book of Sarah (2019); Rutu Modan’s Tunnels (2021); Phoebe Potts’s Good Eggs: A Memoir (2010); Trina Robbins’s Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer (2011); Sharon Rudahl’s A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman (2007); Ariel Schrag’s Part of It (2018); Anya Ulinich’s Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (2014); and Lauren Weinstein’s Girl Stories (2006).

What should be immediately apparent from this list are my obvious omissions, the many names and titles I have reluctantly left out in deference to the scope of my introductory remarks. I have included primarily those comics artists who have published long-form graphic narratives, both well-known literary figures and others relatively new to the field. I have also limited my list of cartoonists and texts to a sample of the work published since the opening decade of the twenty-first century in order to highlight the currency and immediacy of women’s comics production. I also want to foreground those texts that represent the diversity of work by Jewish women graphic novelists and memoirists publishing in English and primarily but not exclusively in the United States since the turn of the twenty-first century. One of the striking aspects of this list is the number of book-length graphic narratives published in the 2010s, particularly since 2015 or so. Notable, too, is the range and hybridity of subgenres that make up the overarching genre of graphic novels included in this representative list: autobiography, memoir, biography, fiction, epistolary, and visual diaries—blended categories in the hybrid forms of graphic narrative. These works challenge disciplinary borders and boundaries. Characteristically, in these texts, modes and genres merge playfully and ironically, a choreography that reflects the complexity of experience and self-expression that is given material, visual shape in these works.

The comics form is both fluid and hybrid. The intersections and layering of images and words and the mosaic of visual-verbal constructions specific to graphic novels create the conditions for complex self-formation and self-presentation, foregrounding the particularities of identity and the artifices of self-representation. As Charles Hatfield suggests, Comic art is characterized by plurality, instability, and tension, a texture that sculpts and complicates the visual dimensions of the negotiations of self-construction (Hatfield, 66). The flexibility, plasticity, and shape-shifting possibilities of the medium provide the framework for an ongoing conversation among the many selves that constitute identity. The comics form—its fluid temporalities and spatiality, its rhetorical gestures, and its fluidity of borders—creates a space for the performance of multiple selves. Contemporary comics narratives by Jewish women graphic artists tend to be very personal confessional works that situate the self amid the antagonisms, nemeses, and confusions of domestic life. Structures of identity are linked to memory, as we will see in the works I examine here. In other words, the shape of the self is formed and embodied—emboldened, even—in both collective and individual sites of memory. As Claire Gorrara suggests, In an age of mass communication and information flow, comic books and graphic novels have emerged as vehicles of memory that privilege the individual, deeply personal and haptic task of recrafting the past in pictures and words (Gorrara, 575). By visually negotiating the past, comics narratives make tangible the felt somatic presence of memory, the way that memory is both inscribed on and expressed in the body. As Oksman puts it, It is this very remembering, this ability to be moved by stories from the past, that suggests the potential for artistry and transformation (Oksman, How Come Boys, 225). In comics narratives time engages with space. In confronting the past in both personal and collective histories, the graphic storytellers whose works I discuss rearrange and displace space and time to represent moments of continuity and change in the lives of their confessional subjects.

The comics form thus produces a layering of temporalities that rupture temporal and spatial borders, producing chronologies that perform the complexities of self-formation and self-representation. As comics theorist and cartoonist Scott McCloud notes, the individual comics panels and the spaces or pauses (the gutters) that separate the images [create] the illusion of time and motion, of moving across time (McCloud, 94). In comics, time and space are one and the same; time is perceived spatially and thus their defining characteristics merge so completely, the distinction often vanishes (McCloud, 100, 102). Such tensions and negotiations between time and space enable the fusions and collisions of otherwise discrete temporal moments. It is through such spatial negotiations that comics narratives extend the possibilities for tracing time across landscapes. The spatial layout of the comics page enables the comics artist to represent and the reader-viewer to visualize not only the past at various temporal moments but also, as Gorrara suggests, "how we remember the past" (Gorrara, 577; italics mine). In the medium of graphic narratives, memory is projected onto the space of the comics page, suggestive of the ways that remembering is an active process of making sense of experience. In comics we read memory across time.

Memory necessarily confronts identity. As Oksman puts it, memory measures the changing self over time (Oksman, How Come Boys, 10). Remembering is also a means of self-reckoning through self-exposure. There is a difference, of course, between remembering and memory. Remembering is an active process of wresting the fragmented moments of the past and shaping them into a textual and visual narrative, whereas memory is a form of symbolic representation of an event or experience. Remembering is the active, awakened form of memory. Graphic memoirs in particular might be thought of as an idiom of remembrance. The vernacular of comics narratives, the language and syntax of comics (borders and frames, gutters separating experience), spatialize memory, engendering and locating memory on the page, thus enabling, as Gorrara points out, the genre-specific negotiations of history and memory (Gorrara, 577). As a form that relies on space to represent time, as Chute suggests, comics narratives can situate the self in space, that is, in relation to place and to the reconstructed past (Chute, Comics as Literature, 456). The form itself creates the conditions for the construction of multiple representations of selves as they move across time and space simultaneously in adjacent or overlapping borders on the same or contiguous pages.

In the graphic novels and memoirs that form the basis of this study, the construction of individual identities and the mutating mercurial shape of the self are situated in Jewishness, in a past, both remote and proximate, within which these comics artists locate, define, and defend the self, even if it conflicts with some of the strictures and limitations embedded in such structures. The voices that we hear in these narratives are Jewish voices, which is to say, self-referential, ironic, combative, at the intersection of understatement and exaggerated self-parody, mixing modes of celebration and lamentation. The works of these Jewish women graphic novelists are preoccupied with the past, with personal histories and mythologies, and the larger narratives of Jewish history and tradition—extended and recursive moments of catastrophic loss and survival. As Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman point out, the Jewish graphic novel is a genre uniquely suited to the quintessential narrative themes of the Jewish imagination: mobility, flight, adaptation, transformation, disguise, metamorphosis . . . and retells the Jewish story in new and exciting ways (Baskind and Omer-Sherman, xvii). The graphic narratives I examine here tell the Jewish story from a gendered perspective, one that problematizes notions of identity and self-representation against the itinerant punctuations of time and memory. In the works of the Jewish women graphic novelists that I discuss, the themes of the Jewish imagination are in conversation with individual and collective histories. These histories inform and contextualize the experiences that these graphic novelists and their characters and alter egos have of living in the world, of engaging with circumstances of their own making and events shaped by both the traumatic and fortuitous intrusions of chance and history. In these works the graphic storytellers invoke voices of authority—the influence of the literary fathers, biblical narratives and injunctions, Holocaust testimony—in conversation with their own contemporary, immediate, and proximate realities. Thus, read in sequence, these graphic novelists talk through their Jewish lives, visualizing and problematizing the worlds they inhabit and the futures they imagine.

For this study I have selected six contemporary Jewish women comics artists whose work engages the past through the demands and instabilities of the present as a way of imagining and negotiating the future. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson suggest, The past is not a static repository of experience but always engaged from a present moment, itself ever-changing and, I would add, self-referential (Smith and Watson, 9). The shape of the past provides a context for self-expression, ego struggle and formation, and possibilities of reinvention. In these texts, the past—personal, collective, imagined, historical, and immediate—is a measure of identity and a blueprint for constructing a self. As Oksman points out, Revisiting and revising the past in the present is a way for Jewish women to create spaces in which to dwell (Oksman, How Come Boys, 230). Jewishness is reconstructed in these texts; it is negotiated through visual and textual clues to conform and respond to the demands of the contemporary landscape. Time is visualized and spatialized in the comics form, and thus the present is witnessed in relation to the past; past and present are overlaid in transferential moments of creative and dialectical exchange. The conventions of the graphic novel lend themselves to visually representing memory and temporal and spatial crossings and intersections, to centering and decentering the past on the page, and to visually embodying the individual in the spaces of memory, real or imagined. As Gorrara notes, The formal properties of the graphic novel accentuate the act of re-telling the past as a multifaceted endeavor. The combination of word and image and the complementary nature of the two modes of expression demonstrate how meaningful stories of the past are always a composite affair. They require a combination of elements (written and visual) to represent the densely layered nature of lived experience (Gorrara, 577). Set against the backdrop of a Jewish cultural ethos informed by history and memory, the six women comics artists studied here create gendered spaces of memory and identity through the tactile, visual form of comics. They stage anxieties, preoccupations, and vulnerabilities against the backdrop of landscapes of embodied memory. After all, as Oksman puts it, space is a way of understanding the world and [one’s] relationships to it (Oksman, How Come Boys, 10). In the works of these Jewish women comics artists, spaces of memory and identity are etched into the pages, visual maps that represent a way of looking, of seeing and being seen (Oksman, How Come Boys, 14). Inserting oneself on the page, in place, is