When artist-illustrator Martin Lemelman was growing up in Brooklyn, his mother’s obsession with food was one of the ways he understood that his parents were Holocaust survivors, even though they seldom spoke about their pasts.
So it seems appropriate that a frozen chicken inaugurated the process that led Lemelman to create “Mendel’s Daughter,” a graphic memoir about his mother’s family, her life before the war, and her Holocaust experiences (Free Press, 240 pages, $19.95).
Lemelman explained this process Sunday to the about 90 people attending the Fifth Annual Spring Writers Festival of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Continuing Education. In addition to leading a workshop at the festival on the graphic book as a form, he gave the event’s final lecture, titled “The Art of Remembering.”
In 1989, his mother Gusta, nee Mendel, was living alone when she dropped that chicken and broke her foot. Her son was caring for her during her recovery and trying to find a way to prevent her from moving around and worsening the injury.
So he persuaded her to narrate the story of her life, and he videotaped her doing so – even though she at first wondered whether the camera would understand Yiddish.
Then he put the videotapes away for more than a decade. But in 2000, he turned 52, the same age his mother’s father, Menachem Mendel, was when the Nazis murdered him. And he had a dream in which his mother told him, “Your memories are not your own.”
‘Tell your story’
In this way began the process that led Lemelman to create the book. As he explained in his lecture, he composed it partly from his drawings, based on his mother’s stories, partly from her photographs, and partly from research.
The research included a visit to his mother’s native town, Germakivka in what is now Ukraine, where he found that her house still exists exactly as she described it.
Lemelman also knew from the start that he did not want to create a work like “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s famous graphic memoir of his father’s Holocaust experiences. Spiegelman drew “Maus” in a highly stylized fashion – with Jews having the heads of mice, the Nazis of cats, Americans of dogs, etc.
Instead, “I wanted realism,” Lemelman said. “I wanted to know about these specific people” and to have them “live where they lived.”
And he didn’t just want to know and tell the story of how his mother survived – how she and three of her six siblings hid in a forest, literally in holes in the ground, for about two years.
He also wanted to know about and to portray how the family lived before the war. In fact, he said that the first question he asked his mother was, “When you woke up in the morning, what did you see outside your bedroom window?”
This act of remembering, of learning about his parents’ lives, helped to alleviate the sense of isolation he felt as a child.
“It’s important to know where you came from. I didn’t know. It really does add to your life,” he said, encouraging audience members to learn about their past. “Whether you write a memoir or not, tell your story.”
In an interview with The Chronicle afterward, Lemelman, 57, said that he grew up Orthodox and attended a yeshiva in Brooklyn. In this environment, “it was anathema, being an artist… There was no art in my school.”
Nevertheless, by the time he was 13, “I began thinking about what I’d like to be when I grow up,” and he thought he would like a profession that “I wouldn’t have to retire from. And I thought it would be interesting to be an artist.”
Still, he didn’t pursue any training until he attended Brooklyn College, where he earned his undergraduate and Master of Fine Arts degrees. Since 1976, he has worked as a professional illustrator. He now is professor of communication design at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania.
Lemelman also expressed regret that he wasn’t able to hear his father’s story before his death in 1985. (His mother died in 2003.) He did know that his father came from a village north of his mother’s; that he escaped the Holocaust by serving in the Russian army; and that he met his mother in a displaced persons camp before they came to the United States in 1947.
“Mendel’s Daughter” is available from area bookstores or via the Web. For more information, visit mendelsdaughter.com.
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