When Israelis Rutu Modan and Yirmi Pinkus started publishing graphic novels, their decision to work in English was seen as snobbish and unpatriotic — even anti-Zionist.
Rutu Modan’s new graphic novel traces a woman’s journey to Poland with her grandmother to reclaim family property from before the Holocaust.
On its face, Rutu Modan’s ‘The Property’ is about a Jewish woman returning to Poland for the first time since the Holocaust. But there’s much more beneath the surface.
The past year has seen a bumper crop of Jewish-themed graphic novels, with subjects ranging from the recent history of the Middle East (Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza”) to the ancient mythology of the Middle East (R. Crumb’s “Genesis”) to the poets of the Beat Generation (Harvey Pekar and Ed Piskor’s “The Beats”).