Remember Us to Life by Joanna Rubin Dranger
'Remember Us to Life' by Joanna Rubin Dranger
Until realizing she was considered “other” in her society, Swedish artist-novelist Joanna Rubin Dranger thought little about her Jewish heritage. Her ancestors had lived in Poland-Lithuania and came to Sweden ahead of the Holocaust. Dranger’s parents spoke evasively of family history. She knew little of the Holocaust until her Aunt Susanne, a human rights activist, presented her with a copy of Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel, Maus.
Dranger’s Remember Us to Life is a graphic memoir—more memoir than graphic with paragraphs of text set against black and white line drawings. She recounts her efforts to uncover the family’s past as well as uncomfortable secrets within Sweden, neutral in World War II but with Nazi sympathizers in places of authority. “Antisemitism is like a rubber face, a flexible construct that can blame ‘Jews’ for just about anything,” she writes. Dranger also considers the danger of categorizing entire groups as homogenous—whether Jews, Muslims, Christians, Whites or Blacks. Take away: Don’t try to put people into neatly labelled boxes. They might not fit.
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