Glasnost Kids

Résumé du livre

"Glasnost Kids: How Soviet Child Refugees and Other Schmoes in Our Thirties are Saving/Killing the Jewish People" is a nonfiction graphic novel in the tradition of Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel. It is an ethnography of post-Soviet emigres in the US and Israel who came as children and are now in their thirties. Simultaneously, it is a memoir of the author's American-Jewish childhood in a nondescript midwestern town that was rocked by an influx of Jewish families fleeing the collapsing USSR. My research question is one of identity: Do the former child immigrants identify as Jewish culturally, religiously, or neither? How much do they identify with their current countries of citizenship (US and Israel)? What choices have they made in their adult lives to affiliate with their possible identity categories (Russian, American/Israeli, Jewish, White etc.)? As I ask these questions in interviews excerpted and illustrated throughout the volume, I turn the same questions on myself, as a native-born American Jew who emigrated to Israel, then reemigrated to Canada, and married a Buddhist Japanese-Canadian. As I try to make my peers define their identities, I repeatedly fail to reconcile mine. In rhetorical interjections throughout the narrative, I argue that these struggles and cognitive dissonances can stand in for what the majority of post-Cold-War Jews around the world are grappling with. In these interjections, I utilize the work of sociologists such as Edison Trickett, iii Dina Siegel and Larissa Remennick, political writers Natan Sharansky and Peter Beinart, and cultural theorists Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin. I see myself in dialogue with nonfiction sequential artists who came before me, including the socialist historian-cartoonist Larry Gonick; Bryan Talbot's digressive, collagistic local history "Alice in Sunderland;" and Sonny Liew's multi-genre postmodern revisionist history of Singapore, "The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye." Like Liew and Talbot, I draw storylines in pastiches of different artists, adding another layer to the oral histories. Artists I reference include Maurice Sendak, Jaime Hernandez, Hilary Knight, Marc Chagall, Will Eisner, Dr. Seuss, Ai Yazawa, the Russian Primitivist School, Ezra Jack Keats, Chuck Jones, Ilya Repin, and Vaughn Bode.