Remember Us to Life

by Annemarie Jutel

Content Advisory: This graphic memoir includes a death by suicide. The crisis Lifeline number in the U.S. and Canada is 988, in the U.K. it’s 999; and for elsewhere go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines .

Anyone who has done genealogical research will admire the work of Joanna Rubin Dranger in Remember Us to Life.  It’s a detailed and carefully drawn story of the author’s Ashkenazi family:  refugees from some of the most decimated Jewish communities in Europe.  In contrast to the spidery outlines of a family tree, her graphic memoir provides deeply textured imagery, historical documents and characterizations of key family members.

The book starts with the story of Rubin Dranger’s beloved aunt, Suzanne, born in Stockholm Sweden just months before the end of the Second World War.  Suzanne, who Rubin Dranger reports “looks just like me as adult” had tried to find out more about her Jewish family, a task that the author picks up in the present work.  Both carried a darkness that they didn’t understand and that Rubin Dranger tries to dispel in this comprehensive family and social history.

The family had been quiet about the past, so unbearable were the facts: a family slaughtered during the Holocaust; children, mothers, fathers and sons lost to the Nazis.  Remember Us to Life is a reconstruction of that silent past.  From pogrom to Shoah, and post-war recovery, she assembles a complex, and very complete account of her family and the social context of war and of genocide.  Each chapter takes on a different family member (or family group) and their stories in the context of European antisemitism:  from early twentieth century pogroms and the Holocaust to Rubin Dranger’s own school girl reclaiming of her Jewish identity in a Christian-dominant society.

As a genealogist myself, this book inspires me to do more than my spindly record of who begat whom, with boxes of accompanying primary sources that no one is ever going to read.  The careful drawing and detailed presentation of primary sources is a valuable means for preserving what the Māori call the whakapapa, the etymology of which is to “make layers”, or to reveal the ancestral foundations upon which one makes one’s way in the world.  For so many Jewish families, these layers are a blur with impressions and no detail.  While Pacific Island children learn the many layers of their ancestry by oral tradition, Rubin Dranger presents us with a graphic whakapapa: an effective and convincing medium for cementing the family history.

The artwork is impressive, yet variable in style.  From exquisitely precise, and photo-referenced work to—and what I prefer by far—naïve and simple line drawings which tell us more about the author-as-artist, the story is visually complete.  But it is drawings in the style of her self-portrait, made of seven simple lines, that let the reader in.  Those simpler drawings allow the reader imagine their own family story in relation to a story of Rubin Dranger’s.  I can see my own Jewish ancestors in hers, imagine their stories, and ponder the parallels and differences.  Yet, her clear personal style of bold lines and little hands take a back seat to the photo-like drawings.  More accurate perhaps, and useful in the service of the graphic genealogy, but less to the service of comics.

Rubin Dranger makes effective use of primary sources, incorporating photographs and visual representation of the historical material she has used to draw the book.

Remember Us to Life, p. 180.  A juxtaposition of two styles

Throughout the book, we suffer with the author in this third-generation discovery of the experience of the Holocaust but also connect over the banal fears and joys that make a family.

Editor’s note: Remember Us to Life was the first graphic novel to win the Nordic Council Literature Prize (2023).

Annemarie Jutel is a sociologist and graphic story teller.  Her books include Putting a Name to It:  Diagnosis in Contemporary Society, and The Tear Bottle: A Graphic Story of Love and Things.