Liana Finck

I grew up in Miami in the 1970s, when the southwestern suburbs were still heavily Jewish. But you don’t have to have a familiarity with Jews and the Old Country to love this slender book.

Liana Finck has crafted a beautiful book recording the heartfelt letters sent to The Forward, the Yiddish newspaper that introduced Jewish immigrants to their new homeland. Editor Abraham Cahan played Dear Abby long before Pauline Friedman Phillips (Dear Abby’s real name) was even born. Lovelorn show more ex-husbands, young emigres torn between the new world of work and the expectation of marriage, desperate shop clerks and many, many more turned to Cahan so that he advise them in the absence of the family they’d left in the Old Country. Even those with family here realized that a new land required new ways of doing things. Some of the letters are amusing; some are heart-rending; nearly all are universal. And Finck’s drawings, albeit modern, somehow add the perfect touch to this portrait of a most remarkable man. I wish I knew enough of the Kaddish to recite it for Cahan on the anniversary of his death, Aug. 31.

Thank you, Liana Finck, for this labor of love! show less

My only prior experience with graphic novels was with Dennis Cooper’s rather vulgar Horror Hospital Unplugged, so despite knowing about a number of critically acclaimed works like Maus, Fun Home and Persepolis, I still carried around a bit of a prejudice that they're mostly like the underground comix of my youth. Ralph Bakshi and Robert Crumb being two of the more well-known purveyors of a genre deemed “adult” simply because they were filled with naked women and rampant drug use. More show more juvenile than adult, if you ask me. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by Liana Finck’s tender and melancholy memoir, Passing for Human. It’s the story of a young woman who feels like a misfit in the world and her attempts to understand the origins of these feelings of “otherness” and whether to deny or embrace them.

Initially Finck focuses on her mother’s background for clues, but switches to her father because he seems more comfortable letting his freak flag fly. Ultimately, however, this is a woman’s story. We see how both Finck and her mother before her, in their desire to seem less threatening and more conventional, suppress the things that make them unique, smothering their own artistic essence in order to be accepted by men. I’m familiar with Finck’s work as a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine and her unabashedly primitive style lends itself to a woman reaching back into her past and seeing the world through the eyes of a child.

This book really sneaks up on you. The ending is quite moving – both sad and hopeful at once. I was surprised that a graphic novel could have such power. During this new age of resurgent feminism, I think Passing for Human is timely and relevant. show less

This is the perfect companion piece to the original A Bintel Brief (Yiddish - A Bunch of Letters), a collection of advice letters from the Jewish Daily Forward (Forvets) from the early 1900s through WWII. Most of the submissions were heartbreaking sagas of poverty and misery, and yet the regal salutations from most were "Dear Esteemed Editor". Abraham Cahan, an editor worthy of all that praise and more, originated the advice column to fill in the back page of the newspaper. I believe that show more Ann Landers and Dear Abby, Jewish women, were inspired by Cahan's responses. He was a freethinker, not religious, but had a healthy respect for old and new country culture.

Liana Finck has done a fine graphic novel illustrating some of the letters and envisioning herself being visited by the body and spirit of Abraham Cahan. She is a fine artist, interpreter and storyteller herself! My only quarrel is with the tiny lettering in the Cahan appearances - very hard for a person needing reading glasses to decipher.

Do yourself a favor, willya, and read the original AND this very unique take on an American treasure. show less

I've never related to anything more in my life. I feel like Liana gets me more than most humans on Earth. She's tuned into herself in a highly perceptive way and knows how to get that down, however painfully, acutely, on paper, and it's amusing, hilarious, sad, funny, hopeful, everything.