Victory Parade
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
AN NPR, WASHINGTON POST, GUARDIAN, AND PW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The author of the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Unterzakhn now gives us a heart-wrenching, phantasmagorical tale of love, loss, and trauma both personal and global, set during World War II in Brooklyn, New York, and in the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.
One of a group of women working as welders in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Rose Arensberg has fallen in love with a disabled veteran while awaiting the return of her husband, Sam, a soldier in the American army serving in Europe. As we follow the bittersweet, heartbreaking stories of Rose and her fellow Rosie-the-Riveters, we're immersed in the day-to-day challenges of life on the home front as seen through the eyes of these resilient women, as well as through the eyes of Eleanor, Rose’s impressionable young daughter, and Ruth, the German Jewish refugee Rose has taken into their home.
Ruth’s desperate attempt to exorcise the nightmare of growing up in pre-war Nazi Germany takes her into the world of professional women wrestlers—with devastating consequences. And Sam’s encounters with the horrors of a liberated concentration camp follow him home to Brooklyn in the form of terrifying flashbacks that will leave him scarred forever.
Victory Parade paints a deeply affecting portrait of how individuals and civilizations process mass trauma. Magnificently drawn by Leela Corman, it’s an Expressionist journey through the battlefields of the human heart and the mass graves of genocide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Corman (Unterzakhn) weaves mythic resonance into a spiky, tragicomic tale of two Jewish women holding down the Brooklyn home front during WWII. While Rose's stoic husband fights overseas, she works at a factory to support their young daughter, Eleanor—and off hours slips into a bittersweet tryst with a wounded veteran. Meanwhile, Ruth, a German refugee orphan in her early adulthood who has been taken in by Rose, is haunted by flashbacks and has trouble keeping a job, until she's given a chance to channel her rage as a lady wrestler. (She has "the look of one who has good reason to smash something," the manager who discovers her notes approvingly.) Though Ruth, already discriminated against for her accent, is less than thrilled to be recast as "Ruthless Ruby, the Killer Kraut," she gets some of the best lines in Corman's snappy dialogue, which mixes in Yiddish throughout: "When I hear that someone's died, I get a little jealous," she whispers as she hugs her heaving opponents in the ring. "I gotta tell ya... I hate the sound of my own heart beating." Corman's liquid, painterly art blends historical realism with fairy tale themes and pregnant imagery: waking dreams of water and dismembered body parts, a mermaid covered in ocean trash, panels based on the work of Nazi-banned "degenerate" artists like Otto Dix, and transcendent sequences that depict the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp and other haunted moments of WWII. The finest work yet from an always formidable artist, this is a revelatory meditation on the cost of survival.
