Amy Kurzweil

This is an interesting graphic memoir that I actually got for my daughter a few years ago, but when she moved recently she confessed that she never read it, and likely never would, so I repossessed it. Having read it, I suppose there is stuff there that would appeal to her -- the same stuff I thought she might like when I originally bought it -- but there is also stuff that she probably wouldn't care about. Amy Kurzweil is an artist and a writer, and this memoir details not just her show more experience growing up with anxiety, but also her relationship with her psychologist mother, and her Holocaust survivor grandmother. It is definitely a rumination on three generations of Jewish women, their struggles and their triumphs. Do they always get along? No. Do they respect one another? Usually. In those ways, they are no different than any other family -- loving and criticizing each other in equal measure, as only families can. I think I found the grandmother's story the most interesting -- and indeed, most of the book is about Amy documenting those stories. She managed to avoid the concentration camps in Hitler's Europe, instead surviving by passing as a Catholic (her Aryan looks helped with that), living in a series of homes and farms. It also describes her life after the war, which we don't hear about a lot -- people scraping to survive in squalid conditions that did not ease for many years, particularly in eastern Europe, which was ravaged by the war in more ways than one. But, Bubbe emerged from that experience a feisty, no-nonsense woman who continues to show the pluck that probably helped her survive. Anyway, this is an evocative story about the lives of Jewish women over almost a century. I'm glad I rescued it from my daughter's recycling pile! show less

This memoir focuses on the author’s grandmother and mother, both complicated, fascinating women who hover over Amy and give her no peace, as much as she adores and depends on them. Bubbe is a Holocaust survivor, and her story alone could fill a book (and probably should have). Sonya is an academic and a therapist, with strange obsessions of her own and is seemingly the only parent involved in Amy’s upbringing. And Amy is seemingly conflicted by everything - she's a child hypochondriac, a show more Jew who questions Israel's role in Palestine, and she shrugs off her Stanford education. I'm not sure of what makes this graphic novel less endearing than it should be. It could be the omissions - Amy is a dance teacher, though there's barely no mention of how she trained and teaches. She's also the daughter of globally recognized technologist Ray Kurzweil and makes no mention of him in her childhood memories. The only clue about her romantic life is a crush on a high school classmate. As Alison Bechdel wrote one book about her father and one book about her mother, and then a book about herself, perhaps Amy should have done the same. What’s here is good (the writing far better than the art) but there’s just not enough of the author in it.

Quote: “The women in my family have certain stories to tell. Why does it feel like I’m not the protagonist of my own life?” show less

Too sloppy, unstructured and all over the place for my taste, both in story and art. Just when I'd start to get interested in a section it would abruptly end and the story would go flying off in a whole different direction, never to return, leaving me unsatisfied. I don't feel the stories of the grandmother, mother and daughter were interwoven well enough to gel into a singular work. I'd have preferred separate volumes about the daughter and grandmother with stronger focus on each. (The show more mother sort of falls through the cracks and didn't leave much of an impression on me.) show less

I enjoyed parts of this more than others. The grandmother's stories and personality pop off the page. Amy and her mother are less defined. The artwork sometimes feels directionless. I liked the big "maps" the author includes, of the house, the hometown, the transit map of New York, the chutes and ladders game. I liked the part about exploring Jewishness. Some things I wanted more of, like her realization that life is not the Hero's Journey.