Once Upon a Time in France
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
2019 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award-GOLD Winner for Graphic Novels & Comics Based on a true story, Once Upon a Time in France follows the life of Joseph Joanovici, a Romanian Jew who immigrated to France in the 1920s and became one of the richest men in Europe as a scrap-metal magnate. For some, he was a villain. For others, a hero. As Germany occupies France, Mr. Joseph thinks his influence can keep his family safe, but he soon finds that the only way to stay one step ahead of the Nazis is to keep his friends close and his enemies closer. Though he plays both sides of the fence as a Nazi collaborator and French resistant, a tangled web of interests forms around him that proves it will take a lot more than money to pay for the survival of his family. An international bestseller with over 1 million copies sold, the French series Once Upon a Time in France, collected here in one omnibus edition, has won the BDGest'Arts Best Scenario Award, BDGest'Arts Album of the Year, and Angoulême International Comics Festival Best Series Award, among many others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The true story of Joseph Joanovici, an illiterate Romanian Jewish refugee turned millionaire who collaborated with the Nazis, is given a rollicking cinematic treatment in this graphic novel from Nury (The Death of Stalin). Continuing his focus on unusual corners of history, Nury winds everything from the French Resistance to post-Dreyfuss anti-Semitism and the ethics of war profiteering into this busy and freely fictionalized narrative. First seen as a child hiding from a Cossack pogrom in 1905, Joanovici later appears in 1947 Paris, being chased by domestic intelligence. The time-hopping narrative flickers back to the '30s, when Joanovici is a hustling wheeler-dealer making his fortune as a scrap-metal magnate; then to the middle of the war, when he does business with the Nazis in order to survive. Joanovici also works with the Resistance and saves Jews from the camps. But in a cruel twist, after the war he is reviled as a collaborator and hunted by an obsessed judge. The polished, noirish art provides a high dramatic sheen, but Nury's overly knotted plotting requires too much untangling. His critique of postwar hypocrisy is dulled by a flat characterization of Joanovici, whose bravery comes across as mere stubbornness. Despite a somewhat shallow take on motivations, Nury vividly illustrates how wartime leaves both victims and victimizers with dirty hands. (Sept.)
