An Inspired, Inspiring, Powerful Work.
I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
Bernice Eisenstein
McClelland & Stewart, 187 pp., $32.99
reviewed by Allan Gould
Graphic novels have become extremely popular in today's society. Although they echo the comics of our youth (Superman; MAD, etc.) they are essentially serious books of drawings often on meaningful themes such as A History of Violence, (turned into a masterful film by Canada's David Cronenberg) or MAUS, with cats as Nazis and Jews as mice, (which won the Pulitzer Prize). But nothing would have prepared me for the brilliance, beauty and striking originality of Toronto-born illustrator Bernice Eisenstein's I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors.
There must be some 50 partial-page drawings in this brief book, and one stunning chapter consisting of full-paged cartoons in the middle. But the remarkable cover gives its theme away: its title is drawn in a horror movie fashion, and below it, we see the author as a child, casting a frightening shadow of her two parents behind her. The meaning is clear: being born to parents who were told by the world You Must Die! casts a dark emotional and spiritual shadow over any child born to them. We are fortunate that at least one of those hundreds of thousands of children of survivors' children from the Holocaust was as gifted as Ms. Eisenstein, who has the artistic (and yes, poetic and intellectual) genius and honesty to capture their life-long dilemma.
Like any intelligent novel (this is non-fiction all the way), there is a beautiful symmetry to I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors: it begins with the death of the author's father, and ends, many dozens of heartfelt and often very witty drawings and pages of quality prose later, with the circumcision of the author's son. Life goes on exactly the opposite of what Hitler and his evil henchmen had wished for European Jewry.
Do not allow Ms. Eisenstein's deeply moving drawings to put you off, and assume that this memoir is frivolous; it is anything but. She lays out her theme in the first few pages: “While my father was alive, I searched to find his face among those documented photographs of survivors of Auschwitz actually photos from any camp would do. I thought that if I could see him staring out through barbed wire, I would then know how to remember him, know what he was made to become, and then possibly know what he might have been. All my life, I have looked for more in order to fill in the parts of my father that had gone missing....”
It's probably true that we ALL search for our parents' youths and lives: who were this man and woman who met one another, married, and mated like millions of couples before them, so that we might be born? But being the child of Holocaust survivors adds so much more weight to this search: "There is no Holocaust Anonymous to go to, she writes; “. . .no audience to stand before and state, Hello, everyone. I am addicted to the Holocaust. Today is my first day of being clean and I don't need the Holocaust anymore to feel like a worthy person.”
What's so admirable, even thrilling about this masterpiece is that the author carefully avoids all clichés about survivors (and their families); all sentimentality is eschewed as well: “Is it funny enough, is it sad enough?” she writes, about a third-way through. “Am I too whiny, too angry, too petulant? Boo hoo, poor little survivors' child. . . . You see, I have this problem-- growing up in the household of my parents was not tragic, but their past was. My life was not cursed, theirs was. They were born under an unfavourable star and forced to sew it onto their clothing. Yet here I am, some Jewish Sisyphus, pushing history and memory uphill, wondering what I'm supposed to be, and what I really feel like is a rebellious child, wanting to stand before my parents and say, Here, take it, it's yours, I don't want it.” That's extraordinary writing; breathtakingly beautiful; heartbreakingly honest. And nearly the entire book is at that high level of artistry.
There are studies of Yiddish and its power, lovely memories of Kensington Market in Toronto (and countless other of Toronto's landmarks, which will entice many a Toronto Jewish, even Gentile, reader), and often uproarious cartoons which suddenly fill the reader's eyes with well-earned tears: on page 61, we see a drawing of the author as a child on a very frustrated-looking Santa's lap, thinking in a caption, “So, Santa, here's what I want: a dreydl that plays music when it spins. Have my parents stop arguing so much. . . . Santa, bring them all back. And if you can't do that, then make one snowfall turn into ash.” Wow.
I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is truly a great work of art, enriched (and not lessened) by the haunting beauty of its many cartoons. This book will now sit proudly in the Holocaust section of my library next to Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Emil Fackenheim, Raul Hilberg, and so many others. (It is a subject I have taught and am obsessed with, but then, what Jew is not obsessed with the subject?) Bravo to McClelland & Stewart; bravo to Bernice Eisenstein. This is a book for the ages.
Allan Gould is a Toronto-based author and journalist who has been both a student of Kolel and an occasional teacher there over the past decade-plus.
