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A major theme in many of the comics in this monograph is the author/child working throughout and coming to terms with the events that their parents survived. The fourth chapter seeks to answer the question of how the trauma of the parents influences the personal identity of their children, drawing on works on Childhood and Transgenerational Trauma. It also considers the wider social and cultural implications of these identity crises. Finally, the focus shifts to the work of Joe Sacco, a comics journalist, whose work is intensely concerned with the question of journalistic distance and how one is meant to maintain objectivity in an artistic form that actively requires personal engagement.

Art Spiegelman places transgenerational trauma at the center of his autobiographical comics Maus, revealing how he attempts to understand his parents’ Holocaust experiences and to comprehend the effects of that legacy that has been passed on to him. He depicts the challenges of extracting a coherent story from his father and shaping it into his book, of attempting to comprehend the haunting absence left by his mother’s suicide and the destruction of her journals, and of trying to represent what has been deemed “unrepresentable.” This chapter presents a close reading of Maus, emphasizing Spiegelman’s cinematic style, use of telling detail, mastery of moving between past and present, use of text as image, strategic choices about when to reproduce photographs and when to draw them, and his multiple conclusions that emphasize the impossibility of closure.

This chapter discusses Peter Najarian’s illustrated memoirs, autobiographical narratives in book format that incorporate drawings, paintings, and photographs: Daughters of Memory, The Great American Loneliness, and The Artist and His Mother. The son of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Najarian filters the story of his Armenian American family and community through Western art and literature, depicting his legacy of transgenerational trauma. In his assemblage of texts and images, Najarian grapples with the complex issues of representation, memory, history, and subjectivity, forcing readers to look anew.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee is an experimental visual autobiography in which she thematizes her parents’ experience of the Japanese Occupation of Korea, their immigration to the United States, as well as her own sense of being in perpetual exile and grappling with the transgenerational trauma that threatens to overwhelm her. This chapter argues that Dictee’s cinematic style arises from Cha’s work in experimental film, correspondence art, and conceptual art. It depicts Cha as a disembodied female voice struggling to visualize embodied speech on the page, all the while offering a self-reflexive commentary on the autobiographical process and her struggle to find a suitable conclusion to her narrative of trauma. Finally, the chapter discusses Dictee’s serial conclusions and Cha’s endlessly deferred return. Rather than narrate a romantic, nostalgic return, Cha visually and textually performs its impossibility in the pages of Dictee

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Holocaust survivors were represented in Eretz Israeli documentary cinema. In the initial period from 1945 until the 1960s, documentaries, as was the case for other facets of Eretz-Israeli/Israeli culture, emphasized the Zionist lessons of the Holocaust and centered on the national collective transformation of Holocaust survivors from “ashes to renewal.” Documentaries produced in the 1960s and 1970s began dealing with the Jewish past in the diaspora and with the Holocaust itself in greater depth; by the late 1980s, they were exploring such issues as how survivors dealt with post-trauma and the transgenerational transfer of trauma to survivors’ children. This chapter focuses on the representation of second-generation Holocaust survivors in Israeli documentary cinema from the 1980s onwards.