2 days ago
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘Remember Us to Life' Review: Family Ties Erased By Time
Growing up in Stockholm, the illustrator Joanna Rubin Dranger was faintly aware that her maternal grandfather, David, had family members who had 'disappeared' in Poland during the Holocaust. But such things weren't spoken about during her mother's childhood, and David, who'd emigrated to Sweden as a teenager, had died before Ms. Rubin Dranger was born.
The graphic memoir 'Remember Us to Life' is Ms. Rubin Dranger's soulful account of her effort to learn what happened to David's lost relatives. She traces other branches of her family tree as well, including a distant cousin who pulled off a nail-biting escape from Nazi-occupied Norway to the United States. The book opens with a brief chapter on the suicide of the author's adored Aunt Susanne, her mother's sister, a stark reminder of the effects of trauma on subsequent generations.
Ms. Rubin Dranger's black-and-white drawings, spare yet richly expressive, are interspersed with family photographs and archival materials, including newspaper articles and political cartoons. Many of the photos had been locked away in attics for decades, unearthed by relatives assisting the author with her project. They depict David's parents and siblings fashionably dressed and laughing, and their effect on Ms. Rubin Dranger is profound. 'It is the very modernity of the pictures that floods me over and over with the incomprehensibility of it all,' she writes. Only David and his brother Chaim, who fled to Palestine, survived; letters between the two capture their mounting desperation and despair when they stop receiving replies from their family in Poland.
Throughout the memoir, the author grapples with her place in Sweden, which, despite its official neutrality, allowed Nazi Germany to transport soldiers and weapons across its borders for most of the war. In 2018, while Ms. Rubin Dranger was working on the book, neo-Nazis marched through a Stockholm neighborhood. Later, a swastika was spray-painted on her house. 'The world seems to be turning the wrong way,' she observes.
