Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory; Solomon J. Brager

USD 11.76

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 Nora Krug, Rutu Modan, and Leela Corman, Heavyweight will contribute to the collective work of Holocaust studies and the chronicle of woven human stories. June 25 2024 About the Author Solomon JB Brager is a cartoonist, writer, and teacher living in Lenapehoking, Brooklyn New York. Their first monograph, the graphic nonfiction work Heavyweight, is forthcoming from William Morrow, and they are a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artists Fellow. Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, and World War 3 Illustrated, the International Journal of Communication, The Holocaust in History and Memory, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, Art Forum, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. They are a founding editor of Pinko Magazine and publisher of the Doykeit zine series.They hold a PhD from Rutgers University in Women’s and Gender Studies, and a B.A. in American Studies with a certificate in LGBT Studies from The University of Maryland College Park. They have taught history, gender studies, media studies, and other interdisciplinary humanities courses at Rutgers University Newark and New Brunswick, Ithaca College, Northwestern University, and Fieldston School.