In this innovative memoir, Bernice Eisenstein combines her skills as a writer and illustrator to distill her memories of growing up in the 1950s in the shadow of the Holocaust. Drawing on the harrowing experiences of her parents-both of them Holocaust survivors-and the fragmented stories of other family members lost in the war, she explores the impact of their legacy on her own life. A groundbreaking exploration of personal history in the tradition of Art piegelman's Maus, I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is a searingly honest and deeply moving work that speaks to the universality of memory and loss.
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I've had this book on my shelf for a couple of years but didn't pick it up to read until it was mentioned by name in Alison Pick's memoir Between Gods. Since I was reading Pick's book for a book club, I wanted to read Eisenstein's next to it and see what kind of fruitful comparisons I could make.
Although Eisenstein's book is a memoir and includes drawings, it is not a graphic novel in the sense that Maus or Persepolis or Stitches is. It uses illustrations to highlight particular moments in the text to great effect. For me, though, the story she tells of how growing up with survivor parents shaped the way she saw the world and was allowed to be in the world was fascinating. The themes will be familiar to anyone who has studied second-generation Holocaust fiction but Eisenstein's depiction of her Yiddish-speaking community in Toronto is lovely.
