To be continued in a new country that promises even more culture shock for the family—and hopefully as much potency as the...
Further episodes in the author’s boyhood as illuminated through this highly praised, multivolume graphic memoir.
As the blond-haired son of a French mother and a Syrian Muslim father, Sattouf (The Arab of the Future, Volume 2, 2016, etc.) recounts his years of being shuttled between their homelands and finding ridicule as a foreigner in each. Here, the author is 7 and living in Syria, where the other children call him “Frenchy” and taunt him to speak that gibberish language. He also had occasion to reveal his uncircumcised penis, which was unlike those of the other boys and even his father, a self-proclaimed “Modern Muslim.” Educated in France to be a university professor, his father brought his family back to Syria in the face of discrimination against Arabs, trying to find benefactors who would help him achieve a standard of living that would please his wife. But there was little that pleased her; she hated living in Syria and missed her homeland. “You French women, you always want everything right away,” Sattouf heard his father tell his mother amid their constant quarreling. “Syrian women don’t question their husbands. They do what they’re told and that’s it.” Unlike the devout surrounding them, their household didn’t have much faith in the god of any religion, a skepticism shared by the author, who continued to believe in a Santa Claus who delivered less consistently in Syria than he had in France. Eventually, he fell deeply under the spell of Conan the Barbarian, procured from the video store, and observed his first Ramadan. It appeared that nothing could rescue this family from cultural deadlock, but then everything clicked: Sattouf’s father made a crucial connection, his mother became pregnant and returned with the author to France to await the birth, and, when they returned, the father told them of a new job and new adventures, which we will see in the fourth volume.
To be continued in a new country that promises even more culture shock for the family—and hopefully as much potency as the first volume.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-353-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book...
Memory comes alive in this compelling amalgam of drawing, narrative and archival photography.
A prolific illustrator of children’s books and an artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and other magazines, the author made a major leap into memoir with Mendel’s Daughter (2006), his debut in the genre. Where that well-reviewed volume focused on the Holocaust from the perspective of his mother, this follow-up continues the story of Lemelman’s family through the author’s Brooklyn boyhood. Though there’s an innocence to his tales of working at his father’s candy store—squashing cockroaches, playing pranks and exploring the worlds of the streets (“There was always something going on at the Market…Life was everywhere”)—this was not an idyllic childhood, nor is it rendered sentimentally. After immigrating to America following World War II, Lemelman’s parents turned family life into an ongoing battle as they balanced the nonstop demands of a neighborhood shop with the challenges of raising two rambunctious sons. “Deh Tateh” had served in the Soviet army after surviving the Holocaust, complained incessantly about life in America and barely hid his alcoholism. “Der Mameh” refused to back down to her husband, insisted she was more of a help in the store than he thought she was and left her son feeling deprived. The author and his brother Bernard became both allies and antagonists within the family dynamic. It all comes to vivid life through the artist’s drawing and through a narrative that conjures the voices of his dead parents to complement the author’s perspective, which retains a childlike spirit. The family chronicle unfolds against the backdrop of a tumultuous era—the assassination of a president, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and, perhaps most significant for the family, the changing demographics of a neighborhood that initially brought new waves of customers but saw a rise of anti-Semitism that drove so many families and businesses from what had long been their home.
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book that is both a celebration and an affirmation of life.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-004-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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