● Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel By Anya Ulinich Penguin Books, 362 pages, $18 If the title of Anya Ulinich’s graphic novel, “Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel,” sounds familiar, you are probably thinking of Bernard Malamud’s story “The Magic Barrel,” which concerns one Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student who, on the verge of ordination, must find a…
Although her mother hasn’t read her new book, Anya Ulinich already fears the worst. When Ulinich was in the early stages of writing the novel two years ago, her mother begged her to stop. “She hates the idea of this book,” Ulinich said. Ulinich’s novel, “Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel” isn’t a salacious memoir. It’s a…
When we read Matt Freedman’s harrowing and hilarious illustrated memoir “Relatively Indolent But Relentless,” we were struck by how it was unlike traditional memoirs. So, we passed a copy along to Liana Finck, the incredibly talented artist and author of ‘A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York.’ Finck’s response was both enthusiastic….
● A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York By Liana Finck Ecco, 128 pages, $17.99 The advice column known as “A Bintel Brief,” meaning “a bundle of letters,” was the brainchild of Abraham Cahan, the founder of the Forverts, the original Yiddish-language incarnation of this very publication. In 1906, when the paper…
● The Great War July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme By Joe Sacco W.W. Norton & Company, one 24-foot-long accordion-style page and a 16 page supplementary booklet, $35 Anyone with an interest in the state of Israel, its contradictions and compromises, and the sad history of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian…
In Israel — a country almost entirely bereft of homegrown graphic novels — Rutu Modan is a one-woman industry. Her new book, “The Property,” published in both Hebrew and English, follows Mica, a young Israeli woman on a trip to Warsaw with her grandmother Regina, ostensibly to track down and reclaim the property owned by…
The Property By Rutu Modan, translated by Jessica Cohen Drawn & Quarterly, 232 pages, $24.95 The past takes many forms in Rutu Modan’s graphic novel “The Property.” There is Regina, an elderly woman returning to Poland from Israel for the first time in over 60 years; overzealous re-enactors encountered by her granddaughter Mica on the…
Perhaps the most surprising detail about “Keeping My Hope,” a new, self-published graphic novel about the Holocaust, is its author: Christopher Huh is only 14 years old. The second most surprising detail is that he’s not even Jewish. He’s a second-generation Korean American from suburban Maryland who was only vaguely aware of the Holocaust before…
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