Heavyweight is a moving and provocative graphic memoir from nonbinary cartoonist Solomon Brager, exploring inherited trauma, family history, and the ever-shifting understanding of our own cultural and gender identities, for readers of Gender Queer, Maus, and Alison Bechdel.
Solomon 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.
Particularly relevant in our current cultural moment, Heavyweight is sure to generate profound conversations about colonialism and how the patterns of history emerge and reverberate, not as a simple chain of events but in haunting layers.
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Nonfiction
Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory
- From the Publisher
September 1, 2023
Discussion Questions
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