So what is the difference between comic books and graphic novels anyway? Well, comic books, it seems, invariably get thrown out by mom after you’ve left home (along with the entire signed card set of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers championship team I’d have gladly passed on to my grandchildren, in due time).
Graphic novels, meanwhile, cost $19.95 and are not stored in a pile under your bed.
The term “graphic novel” always struck me as uppity and pretentious, but in some cases, the emphasis on the word “novel” is not unwarranted. “Mendel’s Daughter,” a Holocaust memoir penned by Martin Lemelman, is one such instance.
Lemelman is a capable artist and his panels are bright, uncluttered and creatively composed, but the most remarkable part of his work is the text.
The origin of the book is a set of videotapes Lemelman shot of his mother, Gusta, in 1989. That’s when, at long last, she told her harrowing Holocaust tale. Lemelman, wisely, opts not to bowdlerize the rough immigrant’s English of his mother and her tale is all the more compelling for it.
Gusta Lemelman’s parents, for example, are always “the Mother” and “the Father,” leading to sentences such as “My Mother, Malkah, is the sister from Chanah, the first wife of the Father. She don’t want to marry. They force her.”
(“The Father” is Mendel, by the way.)
Other homespun gems:
• “I never tell you we have a dog. Everyone in our town has a watchdog. People was breaking into the houses. He was black and white. We was calling him ‘Dog.'”
• “When you don’t have what to eat, you shouldn’t know from this, we would make such a smell. And this is how they catch us.”
“You shouldn’t know from this.” That’s just what a Polish Jew would say about such dark memories, and, especially for those of us who can hear the cadences of our own Polish Jewish relatives echoing in our ears, Lemelman’s tale draws us in ever more completely. And it is riveting.
He spends a long while — 53 large pages, in fact — dwelling on his mother’s life before the war. That humanizes the characters and certainly gives the readers a taste of all Gusta is going to lose.
But, as Chekov quipped how the audience knows the gun hanging on the wall in the first act of a play will be fired in the third, we know all too well what is going to happen to Dog, the Mother and the Father; it isn’t a gun hanging on the wall but an entire S.S. Panzer Corps. The agony of that foreknowledge makes the 53 pages feel a little superfluous at times.
Lemelman is a veteran illustrator, though it appears “Mendel’s Daughter” is his first foray into comic books. And at times that shows. Over the course of 224 pages, he has his share of herky-jerky or awkward-looking figures. That goes doubly so with the angry, helmeted Nazis who terrorize Gusta and her family. Lemelman’s sneering, shouting soldiers appear to have no upper lips or chins, which gives them an unintentional resemblance to the old Jim Carrey character Fire Marshall Bill.
On the other hand, Lemelman’s liberal use of surviving family photos reveals what a talented portrait artist he is. It also makes for creative page layouts as he often mixes photos and pencil art within the same panels.
Lemelman also likes to shift backward and forward in time, Billy Pilgrim-like, as the elderly Gusta or her brother Isia insert themselves into the storyline. When the survivors recall the dead — dead family they have now far outlived — that makes for some of the most evocative moments in this book.
I won’t reveal the sad and beautiful coda of Lemelman’s tale, but I will never forget it, and it will be the first thing on my mind the next time I am required to weep upon a moment’s notice.
It’s a fitting end to a powerful novel, a stirring memoir for Gusta’s own grandchildren and everyone else’s.
“Mendel’s Daughter: A Memoir,” by Martin Lemelman (224 pages, Simon & Schuster, $19.95).