Miriam Katin. We are on Our Own: A Memoir

World Literature Today, March-April, 2007 by Rita D. Jacobs

Miriam Katin. We Are On Our Own: A Memoir. Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2006. 122 7 unnumbered pages, ill. Can$24.95/US$19.95. ISBN 1-896597-20-3

FOR MANY WHO were reared on flimsy, newsprint comic books as a means to while away rainy Saturday afternoons, the appearance of Art Spiegelman's Maus I a little over twenty years ago was a revelation. In the years since, and especially recently, many sophisticated and literary graphic novels have been published, and with We Are On Our Own, her first work, Miriam Katin has entered the top tier of graphic novelists.

Subtitled A Memoir, Katin's stirring work deftly goes to the heart of one family's Holocaust experience, and yet along the way this becomes a universal tale of parenthood, persecution, loss, and redemption. Set in Budapest and the Hungarian countryside, the story begins in 1944 when the Jewish population of Hungary was being denied simple rights, such as owning a dog. As the tale of the fleeing mother and child unfolds, Katin's elegant and nuanced gray drawings evoke both children's-book illustrations and fine-art drawings. She expertly establishes narrative through simple panels and then swiftly moves it along or creates energy by breaking out of the frame; in so doing, she indicates the precariousness of order in our lives.

The story of Lisa and her mother, Esther, who risks everything to save herself and her child while her husband is at war, follows a path known to many familiar with Holocaust tales: escape, concealment, impoverishment, violence, and, luckily, some few kindnesses along the way. Every such story is the same yet singular, and Katin's characters are emphatically well drawn, in both meanings of the word. As she raises a major issue for survivors and their children--can faith in God survive such an ordeal?--she also creates a poignant mother-daughter relationship in the face of almost indescribable hardship and travail. And since such ordeals do not fade from memory even with happy endings, Katin brings the reader into the vibrant present by using color to illustrate the mostly serene adult circumstances of Lisa with her own child.

The glory of the graphic novel lies with its ability to move quickly via image and to provide irony and comment without language. Katin excels at these juxtapositions. For example, at one point Esther and Lisa are racing through the night in frigid, snowy weather, struggling to stay together and to save their lives. This harrowing gray page is set adjacent to a blaze of autumnal panels where the adult Lisa and her child are playing at hide and seek. Lisa's past haunts every such moment.

We Are On Our Own provides great satisfaction both visually and emotionally, as it beckons the reader back for another and then another look. What is even more gratifying is that every reexamination provides new pleasures.

Rita D. Jacobs

Montclair State University