Irmina
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
In the mid-1930s, Irmina, an ambitious young German, moves to London. At a cocktail party, she meets Howard Green, one of the first black students at Oxford, who, like Irmina, is working towards an independent existence. However, their relationship comes to an abrupt end when Irmina, constrained by the political situation in Hitler’s Germany, is forced to return home. As war approaches and her contact with Howard is broken, it becomes clear to Irmina that prosperity will only be possible through the betrayal of her ideals.
In the award-winning IRMINA, Barbara Yelin presents a troubling drama about the tension between integrity and social advancement. Based on a true story, this moving and perceptive graphic novel perfectly conjures the oppressive atmosphere of wartime Germany, reflecting with compassion and intelligence on the complicity that results from the choice, conscious or otherwise, to look away.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Inspired by a true story, this evocative chronicle of a young German woman's experiences in London as WWII looms reads like an aged relative's intimate scrapbook. Young Irmina toils in her training as a transcriptionist while experiencing alienation as a foreigner, an experience she shares with Howard, one of the first black students at Oxford. The pair bond over their shared outsider status, and affection blossoms but the romance dies as circumstances force Irmina to return to Germany. Once Hitler's war machine kicks into high gear, she faces the reality of life under the Nazis: food and fuel shortages, restrictions on career opportunities for women, and the rising tide of anti-Semitism. German cartoonist Yelin, making her English-language debut, blends sketchy pencil lines and moody watercolor tones, creating an engrossing, candid reminiscence of an individual's promise crushed by the bleak times she had the misfortune of being born into.
