Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory

by Solomon J. Brager

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, 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.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Comics, Queer, Jewish

Kindle Edition

First published June 25, 2024

About the author

Solomon JB Brager is a cartoonist, writer, and teacher living in Lenapehoking, Brooklyn New York. Their first monograph, the graphic nonfiction work Heavyweight, is forthcoming from William Morrow, and they are a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artists Fellow. Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, and World War 3 Illustrated, the International Journal of Communication, The Holocaust in History and Memory, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, Art Forum, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. They are a founding editor of Pinko Magazine and publisher of the Doykeit zine series.

They hold a PhD from Rutgers University in Women’s and Gender Studies, and a B.A. in American Studies with a certificate in LGBT Studies from The University of Maryland College Park. They have taught history, gender studies, media studies, and other interdisciplinary humanities courses at Rutgers University Newark and New Brunswick, Ithaca College, Northwestern University, and Fieldston School.

Reviews

[Maia · Rating 4 out of 5]

After listening to this excellent interview with the author on the Gender Reveal podcast, I was very excited to pick up Solomon Brager's hefty nonfiction comic about family history, Jewish identity, the Holocaust, and empire. This is an incredibly well researched and thoughtful book. The author grew up with outsized family stories of a Jewish boxing champion great-grandfather from Essen who punched Nazis, and a great-grandmother who carried her children across countries and mountains to escape to the US. But these stories became much more complicated when the author started digging for receipts. One factor is the immense financial privilege of the family which already had bank accounts and significant savings in New York. Another factor is the layers of violence and empire that build up the power of the countries fighting on both sides of WWII. The author's quest to research the family story is a major thread in the story itself and I am absolutely awed by the amount of work that went into uncovering and shaping this story.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavyweight is a loaded word in this reflective graphic memoir about inherited intergenerational trauma. The author both plumbs the etymological depth of the word and employs its meanings in different ways. In most cases, *heavyweight* in the book refers to trauma, both lived, and also remembered in shadowy echoes passed down in genetic imprints. The title also refers quite simply to the author's weight, as well as the weight they carry in always having been different in their own family and in the greater society. Heavyweight even references the author's great grandfather, who had been a boxer. Brager takes up boxing as a way to connect to a predecessor they never knew, yet somehow can feel in their bones.

Issues of identity are paramount to the memoir. You don't know who you are until you know who you've been. That underlying subconscious sense of everything your ancestors endured, can end up filling you with ghosts, unless you can learn their stories and lend them more substance. 

Identity and acceptance are intertwined. Just as Jewish people have fought for acceptance and dignity since . . . well, forever, Brager seeks acceptance as a trans person with nonbinary pronouns. In both cases, it might seem easier to pretend to be someone else, but that kind of strategy can create dissociative disorders and psychic pain. Brager has wisely chosen therapy as a way to navigate it all. As they state: "In therapy, things have to rise to the surface so we can deal with them."

Survivors of the Holocaust did not want to talk about any of their memories, and hoped to shield their children from the unthinkable. By contrast, successive generations have been immersed in the knowledge and details of the Holocaust, usually without personal context. It is a huge heavy horror that hangs over them, and they are not often given the tools to process their feelings about it. In terms of psychological health, the pendulum has swung too far in either direction for both survivors and their descendants.

It is very important to the author to express that Jewish identity should not be synonymous with victimhood. No one should identify themselves by who hates them.

Brager has done extensive research for this memoir, which also contributed to their doctoral thesis. I learned so much I had never known before, even though I thought I knew a lot about the historical time period. The author explains concepts I have never seen connected before, though it's so obvious once it's pointed out: the Holocaust was foreshadowed by shocking European colonial practices in Africa. 

The details of Brager's research are equal parts horrifying and fascinating, and the author is savvy enough to realize that including details that we are unlikely to know is the best way to tell the story.

HEAVYWEIGHT provides extremely unsettling insights about greed, prejudice, class inequality, and the rise of Fascism. The latter is highlighted in particular, since the characteristics of nascent nationalistic authoritarianism follow a specific pattern that applies to anytime, anywhere. It reminds me of the stages of dying. Fascism is literally society at death's door. 

Brager has created a doorway into understanding who we are.

Thank you to Goodreads Giveaways for providing a copy of this graphic novel for review.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This must have been a massive undertaking to create: it's meticulously researched and rivetingly told, with great care and detail going into every panel. Through the search for more info about their great-grandfather, a German Jewish boxing champion and Holocaust survivor, Brager tells an explicitly anti-Zionist family history steeped in the traumatic inheritances of the Holocaust while rejecting the singularity of Jewish victimhood. Haunted, inquisitive, probing -- Brager is a trained historian who brings years of archival and other research to vivid visual life -- this is a staggering work and a gripping read.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

This can be a pretty dark and intense read at times, but there is a lot in here and most of it is very good. In one sense Brager is determined to avoid all the Woody Allen-esque cliches relating to a white, middle-class American Jew and then proceeds to embrace every one of them, including frequent references to talks with her therapist.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing, and Brager asks many deep and difficult questions, raising all sorts of firecracker issues to do with guilt, identity, responsibility and racism etc. The lettering is really nicely done and I was a fan of the drawing too and overall this was a really good book and definitely worth the read!

[Estibaliz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too many ideas and not enough narrative, for what ends up being a quite confusing and uninteresting story about "family, Holocaust, Empire, and Memory"... but also about trauma and identity, with the author needing to figure out a lot more about themselves, their family and their whole purpose with this book, before they can come out with a really engaging tale.

Also, the art wasn't my cup of tea at all, so no wonder I can't go higher than the two stars, as reading this non fiction graphic novel felt quite often like a chore, more than an enjoyable task.

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author traces their experience researching their genealogy in this intense graphic memoir. Brager learns about how their formerly well-to-do European family was destroyed by the Holocaust--many were killed, while a few others were able to escape to lands unknown to them. What they learn causes them to reflect on a variety of topics, from their own personal experiences to the fraught history of the U.S. and its shameful history in its treatment of people designated as "the other."

[Hannah Garden]

This Brager kid is certainly one to watch. Difficult, dazzling, deep, dark, fearless work. I would like to know their astrology, personally, because wow. What an effort. This is very specifically the kind of labor I love.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

When it was good it was great and when it was the author talking to his therapist and being a dick to his boyfriend it was terrible. I can honestly say that it is a compelling and well illustrated Holocaust story, but the author really needed more therapy because parts of it are just an self-absorbed mess. What the family went through and the lengths Brager went to research it are really neat but sometimes it just seems like Brager is co-opting their stories to finger paint all over with his own mental health issues. And while the reasons why he's such a hot mess are hinted it (ie family not supporting them being trans), sometimes it feels profoundly disrespectful to dead to make their lives and struggles all about him.

There are two books in here, one an immaculately well researched history and one a contemporary journey of identity. The combination never quite works, mostly because the author is so insufferable, but when they are good, they are great.

[Jade · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Rather than asking - What would I do if I was in their place - we might ask: What am I doing, right now in the present, that mirrors these actions?"

Tämänkaltaista pohdintaa olisi voinut olla enemmänkin. Nyt tarinasta tuli täyteenahdettu ja poukkoileva olo, eikä merkitys ihan auennut.

[Akiva ꙮ · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Short review because I don't wanna forget to review, maybe more later!)

Really really really really really good and necessary. The connection between German colonial violence abroad and how it got brought home is just---I never have learned about that anywhere else, and it makes sense of a lot of things??

The star off is mostly because of some layout and formatting issues. On a handful of pages I couldn't figure out in what order to read the panels, or which words went with which panel, which is one of the most basic things an editor should be flagging. It's also not as high resolution as a frequent graphic novel reader would expect, and there was something a little weird about the margins, like this was a text book that happened to just have images on every page - I have to look back at it.

[Sam Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the pleasure of meeting Sol, and seeing their presentation with some of the research and context behind writing this book. Exhaustively researched and each page is dense and beautiful. Would recommend to anyone interested in history, or the introspective memoir genre of graphic novels.

[Julie Grace Immink · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got lost somewhere halfway through

[Vanessa Gikas · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up - I know I'll be processing this one for a while. This was a very deep, very personal reflection on the ways trauma shapes memory over generations, the shifting meaning of history and its erasure, with an overarching emphasis on the wide-reaching web of empire, colonization, and genocide. I feel like the author was able to expose his family's place within these historical events without losing sight of the nuance of how colonial elitism, xenophobia, and racism at times brought his ancestors wealth (through Germany/Belgium/France's colonial control over parts of Africa and the theft of land and goods) only to make them targets and victims of violence and ethnic cleansing. I appreciated the author's small asides that depicted him swamped with research, processing with his partner/friends/family, and wrestling with his emotions and the weight of it all. The title (Heavyweight) was a great choice, and the way he tied his own reflective journey to his enigmatic great grandfather's family legacy brought in some interesting commentary on how we choose to remember events/people and how time shapes identity, as an individual and as a collective. There were a few direct references to the state of Israel and the way the zionist settler-colonial state is not only an extension of genocidal intent but part of a concerted effort to simultaneously redeem Germany/Europe for their role in ethnic cleansing while doubling-down on that xenophobic sentiment. It made me think about a scary potential future where Gaza is built over by Israel and then later covered with memorial stones for the countless martyrs, as if to redeem the apartheid state for their wrong-doing. There's a lot more to dive into and ponder here, but in general, I just want to emphasize that this book should be read by anyone who wants to reflect on their family roots and the way our varied histories brush up against (and often participate directly within) structures of power, greed, and violence.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mit einem Großvater, der Boxer war, als Aufhänger, wird in dieser Graphic Novel das Leben einiger jüdischen Familien (Vorfahren des Autors) präsentiert. Hier mit Fokus auf Kolonialismus und auch darauf, wie teuer es war, als Jude aus Nazideutschland ausreisen zu wollen/müssen. Ich hab wieder Neues gelernt.

[sylas]

I don’t think I care enough about boxing to get into this book. It’s not for me or my brain.

[Stefani · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was indeed heavy, but also really interesting. Very different from any graphic novel that I’ve read before. It’s nonfiction/memoir. Definitely check this one out!

[Ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story was great but i just need to except I’m not a graphic novel person

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

✨ Review ✨ Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory by Solomon J. Brager

Thanks to William Morrow for the gifted advanced copy/ies of this book!

I'm going to be teaching a Memorials and Memory history class this coming spring, and when I picked up this book, I suddenly knew that I wanted to make the class to center on graphic novels as a tool for understanding memory and memorials. So, perhaps, in the biggest compliment of all, this book inspired me!

This graphic novel has a lot of different threads running through it:
⭕️ the author's own identity as a trans person, a human grappling with their family history, and a writer trying to figure out how to get these complex ideas on page
⭕️ layers of their family history - from Erich, the Heavyweight boxer, that makes up the title, to grandparents, cousins, parents, aunts and uncles and on and on. They dig to trace their history as Jews around Europe and U.S. during WWII, but it also considers their history in the early 20th century and the power and wealth they amassed, and their family's legacy with their experiences after the war in the U.S.
⭕️ deeper reflections about history, memory, gender, family, race, capitalism, colonialism & settle colonialism, empire, and so much more

I think there are deeper threads through this too on Jewish identity and complicity in colonialism, and that's outside of my place to assess and reflect on. With that said, I appreciated these conversations and they way they made me think deeper about these topics.

I especially loved the final chapter that weaved together threads of colonialism, capitalism, and the paving over of history in the spaces that surround us. I also loved how it brings the writer and the historical research process onto the page, bringing in primary source analysis, oral histories, and more. Like Wake by Rebecca Hall, it makes this research process more transparent, and I so appreciate this as a teacher, a historian, and a reader.

This is a powerful read, and I've rated it five stars because of this impact. With that said, there are so many family members crossing over the pages of this book that even with a family tree, it's nearly impossible to keep track. I think I'd need to read this a couple of times to really grasp it all.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: graphic novel, memoir, family history
Reminds me of: Wake by Rebecca Hall
Pub Date: June 25, 2024

[Jay Tzvia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wept and wept reading this. Like Brager, I grew up with the ghostly presence and absence of the Nazi genocide, alongside the ongoing colonial land theft, enslavement and genocide in my white, American Jewish family’s life and legacy. The stories I inherited are unstable, haunted, and also serve as mirrors- past and future living and breathing inside of us. By generously sharing their process and interaction with their family’s story and context, Brager helped me reground in a deep commitment to never again for anyone. Their work invited me to remember this truth from a place of feeling, rather than intellect alone: the necessity of our joint struggle with other marginalized people now, here, where we are. This could not feel more relevant, in this time of horrific genocide by zionists towards Palestinians, and rhetoric justifying these shameful actions in the name of “Jewish safety”. Our resistance to Zionism is needed, and our legacy demands it.

In reading, I experienced the rage and bitterness that the colonial genocides and land theft by Europeans throughout the world, alongside the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe, have never before been connected in the ways this author offers in my life and esp not in my American, zionist Jewish upbringing. This book felt like such a powerful antidote to an exceptionalizing of Jewish suffering in Europe in ways that can serve as colonial tools to further oppress, erase and marginalize. Our lives as Jews are no more or less valuable than any other life. It is clear that tropes of Jewish singular victimhood are perilous. This book asks hard questions about the ways we were and continue to be complicit in ongoing colonial violence, while rooting in complexity and resistance.

I wonder how Brager’s descendants (in an expansive definition) may look back at this work in their own grapplings with legacy.

I recommend this book for anyone coming into anti-Zionism in this political moment in 2024, and for those who have been engaged in anti-colonial struggles for a long time.

And I should say- I’m trans too and loved the way their trans-ness and relationship interacted with the story, including Pony the dog!

Blessings to your teachers and their teachers, Solomon! Schkoyach!

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A saga of the author’s (largely) Jewish European family throughout the years leading up to WWII and beyond, this book is thoroughly researched, through family records, oral histories, bits of home movies, and bureaucratic records.

The stories are chilling and discomfiting. The author offers different perspectives on the horrors of the Holocaust as well as background history of the German colonial extermination of the Herero people in Southwest Africa. Blame for colonial evils is also ascribed to the French, the Portuguese, and other countries — including the United States, which was complicit in toppling regimes in the Belgian Congo and appropriating indigenous lands here at home.

The many threads of the family members’ stories are a little difficult to follow, but a family tree is provided, and the material is richly footnoted. The drawings reflect a great deal of work, with cultural and architectural details that lend authenticity to the text.

The title refers to an ancestor who was a boxer in the early part of the 20th century in Germany. Boxing strategy becomes a metaphor for the strength and decisiveness needed during the fraught years of the Weimar and Nazi eras.

A wealth of information, history, and revealing anecdotes makes Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust an important read.

[Lena Barsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an unbelievably powerful achievement and a masterwork of what the graphic novel form can be. I’m pretty speechless to be honest. HEAVYWEIGHT is a deep, intensely-researched meditation on trauma and empire and the ways in which violence reproduces itself in order to keep certain power structures in place. I came away from this novel with a full syllabus — and I’m saying this as someone who thought they were already really educated in terms of Holocaust literature and the complex ties that European Jews have to violence and oppression. My god, talk about rewiring my brain cells. I’m so grateful to Brager for his extremely thorough work here. It was clearly all-consuming and painful for him and I’m just blown away.

[Vicky Osterweil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, drawn and considered, an incredible memoir as well as a beautiful powerful grappling with the long intertwined histories of the Holocaust, American settler colonialism, and the long European domination of the world.

[Lily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well researched and well-done, I am sure making this was quite an undertaking. Thoughtful about questioning legacy and thinking more deeply about colonial backdrops and class as a factor in how people can escape fascism or not.

[Veronica Romanelli · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought I was gonna love this book but was so disappointed :( it was a bit dense for me, and I didn’t absorb all of the family history because of that. I found myself confused and unable to follow the story.

[Hal Schrieve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sol Brager is like Alison Bechdel if Bechdel 1) was Jewish and trans and 2) wedded all that artistic workaholism, literary cross-references, and interest in unearthing the layers of a family or culture's past ...to a grounded, materialist understanding of systematic harm and a concern with ending cycles of displacement, genocide and cyclical trauma.

As Brager has said, Holocaust family memoir graphic novels are now a generation old, and new ones will always be engaging with the kinds of stories and texts to have happened before them-- in Maus and others, these kinds of memoirs may be the primary way many people have learned about the Holocaust or engaged in their own family's trauma after generations of survivors reticent to talk details omitted essential information that might allow their descendants to piece things together or understand the events. At Brager's launch event with Leela Corman, whose own Jewish, boxing-related WWII graphic novel Victory Parade also was released this year, the two authors talked about how the Holocaust can become a story of tragedy-- one more bad thing in a series of bad things to happen to the Jews. On Tuck Woodstock's Gender Reveal podcast, Sol Brager says that's certainly one theory of history, but it doesn't get you anywhere in terms of preventing future genocides, or reckoning with the harm that Jews, many-times victims, can also inflict on others. The Holocaust's many casualties, Brager insists accurately, are NOT actually a unique historic trauma but one horrific, enormous episode in a series of European colonial genocides which can only be understood in the context of German empire, race theory and complicity from many actors. As Brager descends through agonizing concentric circles of family documents, graves, home videos from the 1930s, and information about cousins omitted from the family story and homes now turned into German highways, they also focus on their family's dry-goods-merchant wealth in the 1920s and 30s and where it originated: the colonies Germany maintained in Africa, where colonial extraction economies and brutal labor conditions produced revolts, the suppression of which produced genocides-- including the skull-piles of the killing fields of the Herero and Namaqua genocides in German South West Africa. Assimilated German Jewish middle-class people could comfortably ignore this violence in the same way that abortion activist Margaret Sanger could cheerfully vacation in Italy despite its rising fascism-- and Germans could ignore the violence done to Jewish neighbors. Empire built a scaffolding of violence and complicity in violence that was essential to its extraction economy and territorial expansion, that could alter its targets depending on political expediency and who was easy to dispose of; without understanding this, we will never make sense of the senseless violence of empire.

This book is dense, smart, and intense to read, alternating between contemporary interviews, recorded interviews from family members now dead, and primary research into the gaps of the story--IE, did Sol's great-granddad really punch Goebbels in a street brawl in the 1930s, as family legend holds? (answer: Goebbels was in the same town during the moment when he punched a Nazi and then had to flee in the night...but there's no proof for sure). Brager's hand-lettering looks like a font but isn't; their paintings of family home videos and the watercolor faces of children who did not survive the 1940s illuminate moments of archives that have been buried or interrupted for decades. Throughout the narrative, these kinds of documents serve to remind us both how foreign the national, racial and social aspects of the 30s and 40s are to us today, but also how startlingly modern, contemporary-seeming and familiar. The contingency of history really stands out. The family documents are sometimes dredged from attics and sometimes obtained at personal expense from the German or Belgian governments, which still charge survivors' families money to access records of people the state murdered.

The Kirkus review of this book foregrounds Brager's transness, which I don't think is really a major part of this work-- it's just mentioned to explain particular family dynamics, such as Brager's parents' car's license plate still reading "4GIRLS" as a reference to daughters that only 3/4 exist, or a grandparent referring to Sol by a former name. I do like the images of Charles, Sol's partner, appearing in moments of questioning the construction of the narrative; the gay trans present at Jones Beach, reflecting on the past now buried and untended on Long Island.

Essential and important, obsessively scholarly but also readable. I did almost miss a plane reading this book at the gate-- all of boarding happened and I did not look up or notice.

[Lisa Vegan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this but struggled to read it and didn’t love it. Parts were brilliant but I think the author tried to put too much into this book. This material should have been made into three books, not just one. One book on their family history, one book as their memoir and a third book about the history & philosophy & psychology of how people treat those they consider the “other” would have been better, in my opinion.

The black & white drawings and frequent quotes from various people made the story harder for me to read. The information presented was great but the manner in which it was told made it hard for me to take in everything. Every once in a while there was a page or a few pages of illustrations that I loved but a lot of them made the book confusing to read for me. Both the illustrations and text were powerful & brilliant AND confusing & sort of a mess. The quotes by others were pertinent and educational and they did fit with the narrative but for me most of them ruined the flow. Telling their family history/family’s story and using authors, historians, psychoanalysts, and a lot of conjecture, by necessity, had me frustrated. Their gender identity was an important part of the story and for the most part I enjoyed those passages. Despite the provided pictorial family tree I still got confused about who everyone was, the author included.

I’m kicking myself for promptly retuning the book because there was an insightful quote about the Holocaust and whether or not to see it as a unique event. It was great. I might have to borrow the book again just to find it. I checked the quotes for this book and so far there are only two. They’re both good: “Buddy, you've barely scratched the surface.” and “The way we treat the dead tells us a lot about our regard for the living.” but there are many other quotes in the book that resonated with me more, including the Holocaust one.

I think many cogent points are made and the subject is important. I thought I’d love this book. It’s painful for me to give it less than 4 stars. I liked it but can’t say I loved it or even really liked much of it, so 3 stars it is. That said, I’m glad that I read it (unlike most books I rate lower than 4 stars) and I would recommend it to readers interested in the subject matter. Maybe most readers would not find it as challenging to follow as I did.

One thing was made glaringly apparent. Then, as now, having money makes a difference of whether or not one can get out of a dangerous situation. The author’s family was wealthy and that contributed greatly to their survival.

I appreciated the touches of humor because the subject matter is heavy.

At the front of the book is a pictorial family tree. The titles of the parts of the book are: The Levi Family; Trauma Time Travel; Unburied; The Knockout; Et Es Wie Et Es; Stumbling Stones; The Good Life; Lost Sunday; Escapes; Pearls and Gold; Transatlantic Falangists; Hoarders; Afterlives, Which is to Say, Ghosts.

[Bonnie Morse · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was really a 2.5 star book for me, but not quite good enough to round up. I felt like the author tried to address too many topics without being able to explore any of them satisfactorily. The book is all about asking questions but Brager doesn't find many answers. While I understand that the absences are a big part of the story, maybe even the whole point, it made for a really frustrating read.

The title refers to the author's great-grandfather, one of the subjects of their research, having been a boxer in his youth. But the boxing subplot feels jammed in, unrelated to the politics or the family history, and every time it comes up I'm confused about where it came from. I was really excited about the possibilities in the intersection of queerness and Holocaust survival, but while both of those things were in the story, they weren't really related to each other, just as boxing wasn't related to either subject. The worst part of the book for me are the sections where Brager argues with--and occasionally boxes--the invented ghost of their great-grandfather, whom they never met and whose thoughts they don't know. In six months I'll see this title on my spreadsheet and not remember why a family memoir of the Holocaust is called Heavyweight.

I also didn't really care for the art, which would have helped if it had been--I don't know. More interesting? Art is subjective and this just didn't do anything for me.

The summary compares it to Gender Queer and I Was Their American Dream, but other than the author being transmasculine I saw literally no resemblance between Heavyweight and either of those books. It's only peripherally about gender issues/queerness--Brager brings it up only to brush it off as "another story" or something to be discussed at another time, and, ultimately, as an attack from the unknown boxing ghost ancestor--and they are definitely not a first generation American bearing the weight of immigrant parents' hopes and expectations. So I don't know what the publisher was going for, unless it was just to trick readers with a fake comparison to popular books. Which did work, it's why I read it. I'm just really glad I went to the library instead of the bookstore.

In short, I'd suggest reading either (or both) of them instead and look elsewhere for a Holocaust memoir.

[Hilmg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Family: intergenerational trauma, late stage capitalism p 234) & “conspiracy of silence” (p 6) (Primo Levi, who turns the mirror back on ourselves), boxing & “in-born capabilities,” 4 girls on license plate, family interviews & archives, Oma’s days of the week bracelets & proximity to water,the phenomenon of reinterpretation by Paul Ricoeur,

lebensraum theory: we need to conquer land to live comfortably
turn of the century colonial German genocide of Majo Majo, Herero & Nama people
Robin DG Kelly: radica Black intellectuals …understood fascism not as some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected right-wing turn, but a logical development of western civilization itself…imperialism gave birth to fascism.” (See also Ralph Bunche & Aimé Césaire)
Antisemites & WWI census
Weaponizing yt women
NAACP’s “Returning Soldiers”
Swastikas in 1933
Eugenists like Margaret Sanger & Mussolini & the creepy museum displays & human zoos, including Sarah Baartman
Persecution of Roma & Sinti people before nazism
Forced sterilization & concentration camps
Great grampa Erich may have been mentioned by Goebbels & May have been the 35th most wanted man in all of Germany
Other relatives deported (from Belgium, etc), research leads to postcards with smoldering synagogue after Kristalnacht pogrom & memorial stones embedded in front ancestral building
Italy attacks Ethiopia 1936 & fxcking K Leopoldo of Belgium, Swiss bank is shady, bombardments & charges of foreign collaborators & escape with gold on the stuffed bear thru France, Spain & Portugal to New York, exploited refugees on monopolized cruises (Navemar Horror ship: 1,120 people on a cargo ship built to carry 15 crew members)
Levi’s change name to Leeds in 1941, able to assimilate as yt while Japanese internment & terminations on indigenous sovereignty
Contemporary attempts to reclaim European property reveals it’s lost to back taxes & used for urban redevelopment, not unlike where the author lives in Flatbush Brooklyn (African burial ground on Lenape land” As Hannah Black says, “real estate is a tool of ethnic cleansing” & Nick Estes says challenge colonialism now
Finding other artifacts & the west’s collecting craze
“Hey! I survived. I punched Nazis!”


“I keep thinking - my family’s tragedy isn’t unique, only specific.”

[Steph (starrysteph) · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5 ⭐) Heavyweight is a memoir, an exploration of family trauma & how our identities can shift from victims of hatred to upholders of colonial violence, and a diligently researched historical legacy.

Solomon Brager is fascinated by the story of their great-grandfather, a boxing champion - and the various threads of their family who both escaped and died in Nazi Germany. They’re wondering about what they carry in their own body and mind, and what it means when you contextualize the Holocaust among larger historical patterns.

So they decide to find out as much as they can, and deliver a hauntingly beautiful portrait of family mythology. We bounce between Brager’s modern day discoveries and commentary, conversations with their grandfather and recorded conversations with their great-grandmother, reimaginings of family stories & piercing together lore from documents, and beyond.

It’s a new type of reflection on the Shoah, and while this is definitely a personal story (and Brager’s family is absolutely fascinating), it offers challenges and guiding questions to every reader, Jewish or not.

The organization (both of the throughline and the placement of artwork and panels and text on each page) was a little bit hard to follow at times, and sometimes I had to retrace a few sentences and flip back and forth to the opening family tree to truly understand what was happening.

I appreciated the vulnerability and the humor, and the strong anti-Zionist commentary. And the research was truly impressive (coming from someone who has struggled to find threads on so many of my ancestors). However, it often felt like we hopped from topic to topic without truly diving deep and chewing on the uneasy questions this memoir asks.

“We can both be victimized and be complicit in violence."

CW: murder (parent/child), death, antisemitism, racism, slurs, violence, genocide, transphobia, queerphobia, classism, colonization, deportation, grief, terminal illness, war

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(I received a free copy of this book; this is my honest review.)

[Peter Hollo · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible, unique book.
Brager re-tells the Shoah through the incomplete stories of his grandparents - mostly his oma, as his grandfather remains an enigma, having died young (albeit surviving Nazi Germany and coming to the USA).
His grandfather was a boxer, known for punching Nazis - something that antifascists like to advocate today - and so part of this story is a reflection of masculinity, Jewish masculinity.
This topic is of course central to Zionism's redefinition of the Jewish Man as heroic, tough and warlike - a definition that's explicitly in contrast to those weak Jewish victims who suffered and were exterminated in the Holocaust.
Brager doesn't focus on Israel at all in this story, but the mainstreaming of Zionism in diaspora Jewish communities is something that comes up, as are the genocides closer to home in the US.
And of course masculinity is a pertninent topic for the transmasculine author.

I think what's most remarkable about this book is how Brager combines deep scholarship (there are seventeen pages of citations and notes at the back of the book), the use and deconstruction of historical research, with a very personal, emotive story, and tells it as a graphic novel.

My only quibble is that, because the panels are both borderless and of variable size, it's sometimes hard to know whether the words belong to the panel above or below until you've read them once, which occasionally interrupts the flow.
A very minor irritation in a compelling, creative work that does something new with the descendents-of-Holocaust-survivors narrative.
Highly recommended.