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seedwa 's review for:
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
by Nora Krug
challenging
dark
emotional
This one is tough to review and gave me mixed feelings.
On the one hand, it’s an extremely difficult and important subject matter to tackle and I felt like the graphic novel format was the perfect choice. I didn’t totally love the illustration style and sometimes the illustrations breaking the text was frustrating, but some pages really were beautiful and the way photographs and scans were utilised was great.
It was the content I struggled with. The writing style was simple in a way that felt suitably direct and realistic, so I generally enjoyed its frankness throughout the first half. However in the second half my mood began to shift a bit and I felt a bit grated by the book. The emphasis on guilt and shame ends up becoming a pivoting point to view interactions with Jewish people as a way to absolve that guilt, and the author seeks to run from her familial past rather than to confront it. I was really irked in general by the way Jewish people were written, but especially ringing the man in Florida and commenting after that he had vouched for her the same way his father had vouched for her grandfather but.. he didn’t?? He just gave a few words of comfort?
The desire for her grandfather to have been ‘one of the good ones’ so badly would have been forgivable had there been more reflection overall. I don’t think anyone would like to think they descended from people who supported terrible genocides. But there needed to be growth around that for it come across as anything other than skirting the truth of history. I wish there had been a final chapter or two that extended the narrative to how she settled into the information learned. I also wish the Holocaust and the Jewish people in the book were more than just a plot device to the authors character development - an ironic streak of racist stereotyping in a book which confronts racist history.
On the one hand, it’s an extremely difficult and important subject matter to tackle and I felt like the graphic novel format was the perfect choice. I didn’t totally love the illustration style and sometimes the illustrations breaking the text was frustrating, but some pages really were beautiful and the way photographs and scans were utilised was great.
It was the content I struggled with. The writing style was simple in a way that felt suitably direct and realistic, so I generally enjoyed its frankness throughout the first half. However in the second half my mood began to shift a bit and I felt a bit grated by the book. The emphasis on guilt and shame ends up becoming a pivoting point to view interactions with Jewish people as a way to absolve that guilt, and the author seeks to run from her familial past rather than to confront it. I was really irked in general by the way Jewish people were written, but especially
The desire for her grandfather to have been ‘one of the good ones’ so badly would have been forgivable had there been more reflection overall. I don’t think anyone would like to think they descended from people who supported terrible genocides. But there needed to be growth around that for it come across as anything other than skirting the truth of history. I wish there had been a final chapter or two that extended the narrative to how she settled into the information learned. I also wish the Holocaust and the Jewish people in the book were more than just a plot device to the authors character development - an ironic streak of racist stereotyping in a book which confronts racist history.