Heavyweight

A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory

A moving and provocative graphic memoir exploring inherited trauma, family history, and the ever-shifting understanding of our own identities, for readers of Gender Queer and I Was Their American Dream.

Solomon Brager grew up with accounts of their great-grandparents’ escape from Nazi Germany, told over and over until their understanding of self was bound up with the heroic details of their ancestors’ exploits. Their great-grandmother related how her husband, a boxing champion, thrashed Joseph Goebbels and cleared beer halls of Nazis with his fists in a stunning act of anti-fascist history, how she broke him out of an internment camp and carried their children over the Pyrenees mountains. But that story was never the whole picture; zooming out, everything becomes more complicated.

Alongside the Levis’ propulsive journey across Europe and to the United States, Brager distills fascinating research about the Holocaust and connected periods of colonial history. Heavyweight asks us to consider how the patterns of history emerge and reverberate, not as a simple chain of events but in haunting layers. Confronting the specters of violence as both historian and descendent, this book is an exploration of family mythology, intergenerational memory, and the mark the past makes on the present.

In conversation with works by Rebecca Hall, Nora Krug, Rutu Modan, and Leela Corman, Heavyweight will contribute to the collective work of Holocaust studies and the chronicle of woven human stories.

This meticulously researched work of Jewish history unpacks that legacy—layer by complicated layer.

• Family Mythology: Uncover the true story behind the legend of a great-grandfather, a Jewish boxing champion who fought Nazis with his bare fists, and the great-grandmother who broke him out of an internment camp.
• Inherited Trauma: Follow the author’s journey as they confront how the specters of violence and survival have reverberated through generations to shape their own identity.
• Holocaust and Colonialism: Delve into the surprising and haunting historical patterns that connect Nazi Germany with other periods of colonial violence.
• A Moving Graphic Memoir: Experience this powerful narrative through stunning black-and-white illustrations that bring the past into the present with scholarly rigor and profound empathy.

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