As Solomon J. Brager implies in their new graphic memoir, Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory, Holocaust memoirs have been part of our global literary culture since the end of World War II. In many cases, they’re some peoples’ first and only detailed, first-hand accounts of living through the violence and horror of genocide, which often means the people reading these stories have a narrow understanding of not only the Holocaust itself but also of the occurrences and causes of genocide throughout the course of human history, including the genocide happening in Gaza today. Although Brager grew up hearing bits and pieces of their great-grandparents’ stories of living through the Holocaust that managed to squeak through their family’s silence around it, they also grew up with this limited scope of knowledge. But instead of being deterred by silence, they sought to both break through it and zoom out from the Holocaust entirely in order to fully comprehend how and why it happened in the first place.

Heavyweight’s title carries dual meaning. It’s named for Brager’s great-grandfather Erich, who was a boxing champion in Germany before Hitler rose to power, and the title also alludes to the weight of generational trauma and historical violence that many marginalized people are forced to carry with them. The book embodies Brager’s determination to undo that silence and reckon with the most grotesque and shameful aspects of their family history. In trying to get close to their family and the great-grandfather they never knew, Brager combs through archives, historical texts, writings on the Holocaust and Holocaust memoirs, and family documents, photos, and videos in order to reconstruct a narrative of what their family’s life was like before and after genocide. Through non-linear narrative and comic illustration that dips back and forth between the past and present, we’re taken along with them as they learn and restore the stories of their great-grandparents’ survival.

Their search assists them in piecing together an accounting of their great-grandparents’ lives they didn’t have previously: their great-grandparents’ privileged lives in Germany as children, how their great-grandparents met and fell in love, Erich’s involvement with a group of other athletes who fought Nazis, a possible run-in with Joseph Goebbels where Erich knocked him out cold, their grandfather’s birth and early childhood, the neighbors who aided their family in escaping Germany and the people who got in the way, their great-grandmother’s bravery in busting Erich out of an internment camp and their family’s subsequent journey to Spain through the Pyrenees, their family’s many attempts to get to the U.S., and the immensity of the losses their family suffered through it all. Although Brager is never able to recover every single piece of information to complete every story, they are able to compile a more three dimensional and dynamic picture that will challenge readers’ perceptions of how history is constructed and how we situate our identities within that history.

While much of the book is devoted to telling these stories and exploring Brager’s relationship to them, Brager doesn’t just stop there. Early on, Brager acknowledges their family’s story is just one small part of a much larger one, one that positions their family as both victims and complicit actors in historical injustices before, during, and after the Holocaust. Brager explains  — with the support of works by other scholars of genocide and “post”colonial historians and theorists — how the Holocaust is one atrocious part of a gruesome history of colonial occupation and genocide done by European powers for centuries. In the context of their own family, they draw a direct parallel between the Holocaust and Germany’s colonial rule in southwest Africa and the genocide of the Herrero and Nama people in Namibia, the race “science” and outright lies used to generate moral panic against Sengalese soldiers during the French occupation of the Rhineland after World War I, and the wealth of middle-class German Jewish families living in Germany during this time. These connections allow Brager to elucidate how empires operate: through the constant oppression, exploitation, and deaths of “others” and the active and inactive complicity of those who are part of that empire. Brager accurately explains how empires are built and sustained by never-ending cycles of violence where leaders pick and choose their victims according to what’s most convenient at any given moment. This work aids Brager in presenting a more thorough and complex realization of history and emphasizes the importance of knowing these intricacies in order to not only apprehend the barbarity of empire but also fight to end it.

Brager’s weaving of their family’s story and this historical and theoretical analysis works seamlessly throughout Heavyweight. Presenting an account of this particular history non-chronologically allows Brager to remind people how the ideas and beliefs that planned and executed colonial genocides throughout history and the Holocaust are the same ones that fueled the genocides of the later half of the 20th century and are fueling the genocide in Gaza right now. Their explorations foreground the fact that myopic understandings of the events of the Holocaust can’t help people understand how its context is situated within the long history of European nationalism, colonialism, racism, and empire-building and how a lack of knowledge regarding this context won’t aid us in preventing genocides from occurring in the future. Heavyweight prompts people to make these material connections between the past and present along with Brager while demonstrating how ill-equipped (and, often, unwilling) many people are to name themselves complicit in the cruelty and inhumanity of empire.

Brager’s work manages to do all of this while being gorgeously illustrated and hand-lettered, clearly and compellingly written, and even tremendously humorous at times. Heavyweight is a boundary-breaking, accessible, and meticulously researched — albeit emotionally difficult — book that could aid many peoples’ understandings of both the tragedies of the past and the savagery of our current moment. Realistically, one book can’t make someone take up the charge of fighting and resisting the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine or completely dismantle the grasp of the U.S. empire internationally, and it’s not as if Heavyweight attempts to do that. Brager’s efforts in Heavyweight are a welcome and creatively conceived addition to a litany of other works that are opening doors to help people get there.

Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory by Solomon J. Brager is out now.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!