Historian Solomon J. Brager explores their place within a complex ancestry in the vulnerably illuminating debut memoir, Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory. Choosing a graphic format suggests a literal piecing together of personal, familial, and global histories. The title's function is (at least) two-fold: the titular heavyweight is Brager's great-grandfather Erich Levi, a German boxing champion and Holocaust survivor; three generations later, Brager assumes the heavy weight of telling Erich's story and, consequently, their own as Erich's transgender descendent.
Brager's personal excavation began with a graduate school paper about "larger than life" Erich, whose prewar fighting career included a win against Joseph Goebbels. But "without archival evidence," the Sisyphean process of tracking Erich's experiences--from Germany to Belgium, marriage to fatherhood, imprisonment to escape, limbo in Portugal and finally U.S. immigration--becomes its own narrative of Brager interviewing extended family, accessing attic treasures and mementos, and buying government records. Unearthing their personal past forces Brager to bear witness to complicity in Europe's genocidal abuses in colonized Africa, anti-Black and anti-Romani racist propaganda, and the friction between diverse Jewish communities. No event stands alone.
Brager compiles their multigenerational testimony--"full of holes and heroic deeds"--in borderless, free-form antipanels, reflecting a fluidity to the emerging discoveries, and discrepancies. The black-and-whiteness of the pages emphasizes an unadorned bluntness. Carrying the heavy weight of inherited memories and associated trauma has been a long, difficult ordeal for Brager; perhaps this extraordinary memoir might further lighten the burden by sharing it with the waiting world. --Terry Hong