In the after­word to this graph­ic nov­el, author Neal Shus­ter­man admits that the prospect of incor­po­rat­ing fan­ta­sy into a sto­ry about the Holo­caust caused him dis­com­fort, but the result is a lit­er­ary and moral chal­lenge worth confronting. 

Inter­weav­ing his­to­ry and Jew­ish folk­lore, Courage to Dream chron­i­cles the brav­ery of Jews as well as those who took great risks to pro­tect them. At the same time, both the author and illus­tra­tor con­vey how even excep­tion­al human traits were not suf­fi­cient to save many lives. If Moses’s staff had enabled a Jew­ish boy in Den­mark to part the Øre­sund (Sound) between his coun­try and Swe­den, the ulti­mate­ly suc­cess­ful escape of Dan­ish Jews would have had an added dimen­sion. In the coun­terex­am­ple of Auschwitz, if the golem had mate­ri­al­ized could he have defied death when human agency was vir­tu­al­ly help­less? Por­traits and brief biogra­phies of key fig­ures ear­ly in the book estab­lish the his­tor­i­cal roots as dis­tinct from fan­tas­tic spec­u­la­tion. Shus­ter­man pro­vides many sta­tis­tics, tak­ing care not to min­i­mize the extent of the ter­ror. In Martínez’s illus­tra­tion, pho­tos of Jews and their res­cuers appear encased in ele­gant bronze frames, empha­siz­ing their dig­ni­ty, as well as the doc­u­men­tary evi­dence of their actions.

Depart­ing from Jew­ish folk­lore, the seg­ment on par­ti­sans, includ­ing the Biel­s­ki broth­ers, rein­ter­prets the Slav­ic leg­end of Baba Yaga, a witch-like elder­ly woman who is some­times mali­cious. Here, her preda­to­ry behav­ior is con­trast­ed to the incom­pa­ra­bly greater evil of the Nazis, and she sub­verts their attempts at destruc­tion. The ambi­gu­i­ty of her motives serves to high­light the sur­pris­ing respons­es of peo­ple to the Holo­caust, from denial to will­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion, along with attempts at self-preser­va­tion. The most con­tro­ver­sial set­ting for these choic­es is Auschwitz, a place which has become syn­ony­mous with extreme cru­el­ty. The fig­ures in these scenes are down­trod­den, but also styl­ized. Even­tu­al­ly, the pur­pose of this artis­tic choice comes into focus, as one phys­i­cal­ly pow­er­ful inmate car­ries the body of an exe­cut­ed Jew over his shoul­ders. That improb­a­bly strong char­ac­ter is the Golem, sav­ing lives and seek­ing revenge. Even the golem, how­ev­er, can­not reverse history.

Final­ly, the book con­cludes with a con­tem­po­rary sto­ry, fea­tur­ing a mys­te­ri­ous gift from an elder­ly Holo­caust sur­vivor to her grand­daugh­ter. The pic­tures are qui­et and sub­dued, with fright­en­ing action sequences replaced by the inner con­flicts of an ado­les­cent cop­ing with con­fu­sion. The dual­i­ty of the book becomes explic­it in the girl’s sud­den abil­i­ty to live in two sep­a­rate worlds. In the sec­ond one, accessed through her grandmother’s gift, she comes to know descen­dants of those who did not sur­vive. These new rel­a­tives make the real­i­ty of loss con­crete. Each Jew mur­dered, if she or he had lived out his life, would have been the par­ent and grand­par­ent of new gen­er­a­tions. The pur­pose of imag­in­ing alter­na­tive real­i­ties in which Jews are not vic­tims is to cre­ate an ele­gy, sound a warn­ing, and pre­serve a lega­cy of those who perished.