The Hazy Holocaust
Book Review: I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

Ashira Greene

I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors
Bernice Eisenstein
Riverhead Hardcover, 2006
192 pages


Bernice Eisenstein’s new graphic novel, I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, creates a new portrait: a family of survivors who do not bond over their collective survival, but instead awkwardly coexist in the aftermath of severe trauma. I anticipated meeting the angry father, the unstable mother, and the shy child, but Eisenstein’s book caught me by surprise with her treatment of these familiar personas.

Marketed as a graphic novel, I was a Child of Holocaust Survivors seems more like an illustrated book. Whereas graphic novels are comprised of graphic cell sequences, the images in illustrated books bolster the story but do not replace the necessity of the text.

Eisenstein opens enticingly: “The Holocaust is a drug and I have entered an opium den.” An opium den could mean many things: a smoky bar bordering on a brothel, a hallucinated world, or intense fatigue. Here, though, she’s referring to the narrative tapestry of the Eisenstein family. The tapestry is woven as a series of vignettes and anecdotes seeking to express the narrator’s relationship with her family. A sense of alienation pervades the piece; the narrator jumps from her childhood to her adult life, and though the relationships she presents remain constant, they do not manage to convey a cohesive picture to the reader.

Despite the intriguing premise of immersion in the author’s family, the book reads like a ghost wandering through the rooms of a house, without a particular end-location in mind. Eisenstein drops the reader into a kind of antechamber where she sits next to various members of the author’s family, gambling, pacing, and interacting with the reader through a series of disjointed memories. The characters fade in and out, and while the method seems to reflect the disconnection Eisenstein's families felt during the war, the family is presented too vaguely to feel real. Ultimately, the reader can empathize all too well with the protagonist—as she was searching for her past, we are grasping for a story.

Ashira Greene is a senior English major at Wellesley College. Her favorite moment of the past year was drinking tea out of a bohemian crystal teacup in Singapore.