these three women: Amy Kurzweil on family histories, graphic memoir, and de-romanticizing the holocaust

Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: a graphic memoir. She is a Fall 2021 Berlin Prize fellow with The American Academy in Berlin where she'll be working on her second graphic memoir, Artificial: a love story. She was a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere. Her cartooning has been nominated for a Reuben award. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Believer, Longreads, Literary Hub, Wired, Catapult, and many other places. Kurzweil has taught at Parsons, the New School for Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, and in New York City Public Schools.

On January 26th, 2023, Amy Kurzweil met with The Interlochen Review editors Abigail Conklin, Anna Graef, Leo Fishman Janowitz, and Mackerel Smith for a conversation about her graphic memoir Flying Couch.

ANNA GRAEF: What is it about the format of a graphic memoir, in particular, that made it the best choice for you to convey the vulnerable generational experiences you portrayed in Flying Couch?

AMY KURZWEIL: I think there are two things about graphic memoir that work well for memoir in particular. The first thing is just the nature of drawing—it’s an embodied act. Your emotional life is present in everything you put down on the page. So, in my line quality, I can get certain emotional resonances very directly, and, through drawing certain facial expressions I can really be bringing those emotions into my body as I’m writing about this experience. A big part of my memoir's impetus was trying to make my grandmother’s experiences more real. Drawing was a way that I made the experiences she had feel real. There was also a cathartic experience of taking those emotions into my body and then letting them go—drawing always has that capacity, to integrate emotion into your body.

The second thing about graphic memoir that I think is really unique is this opportunity to layer selves on top of each other on the page. For me, that felt like a very dynamic way to talk about my own life and to talk about the characters in my family in dynamic ways. For example, with myself, if I’m drawing and writing a scene from childhood, the character in the image might be me as a child and reflect that childlike perspective, but then the narrative voice is me as an adult and there's that constant tension between the two. That's just very natural in comics, that’s a given that you’re going to have that complexity. You can create complexity in prose but it’s not necessarily a given.

When thinking about the complexity of the characters in my family, and wanting to honor that, I used to also have different voices—of my grandmother, for example. My grandmother's character gets her own voice and her own font when she’s telling her story. And the way that she exists on the page, from my perspective, is a very different character. That ability of comics to show the multiplicity of selves through these different elements—the voice, the way the character looks, their dialogue—I think that all just worked really well for this particular story. Because I wanted to write about the way my grandmother's character appeared to me as one thing and then, in hearing her story and understanding her story more explicitly, she became something else.

The third thing was, because this is a multi-generational story about how certain things in our history trickle through the generations and are a part of all of us—that was easy to make explicit and make felt in drawings. People would often remark that my characters look the same, and that was partly a limitation of my drawing skill, but a very organic, natural way of representing to the reader that we are actually a part of the same force, these three women. There’s a scene at the end of the book where my character is looking in the mirror and I see my grandmother’s reflection—that was a way I was making explicit that choice that had happened naturally, that we are actually all reflections of this same family character, different expressions of that history. All of that just comes together naturally in comics. Those kinds of things just happen without you needing you to make some strange different choice. The medium brings all of that complexity to you, to your tool kit, right away.

ABIGAIL CONKLIN: Throughout the memoir, your “self" character speaks to her internal struggle to figure out how to tell your grandmother’s (Bubbe’s) story and, more generally, the story of your family, in a new and complete way. You talk about the struggle of different people’s input and opinions on your storytelling—both from your family, and the figments of your imagination. Can you talk more about your attempt to solve this problem in telling the story in a new light by incorporating the technique of braiding into the memoir?

AK: Yes, that does speak to what I was just saying, about the complexity of the form. I like that you used the word braiding, that is really what I was trying to do. Really the art of comics is the art of juxtaposition—putting things next to each other and seeing how they resonate. In class, we’re going to talk today about this dynamic in comics where the white space between things is really what brings the story to life. I discovered this was a form that really allows for the reader to animate the gaps between things. I was trying to think about that and use that technique—not only image by image, but scene by scene, and chapter by chapter, and in this branding that you’re talking about. There’s this thread from my life, and this thread from my grandmother’s life, and what are the moments I can put next to each other where that space resonates and evokes a sense of the larger story and the larger generational dynamic. I think the only thing I did to resolve that tension—of there’s this voice, and there’s this voice, and there’s this voice—was just finding the moments where they resonate, where they’re going to speak loudest when they’re next to each other.

There's a moment when my mom and I go back to Germany, which is where my mother was born. And, we have this experience of just being contemporary mother and daughter in Germany dealing with these very banal, regular, mother-daughter tensions—of, “I want to get away from you, but I want to be close to you, and I’m trying to make my own life, and you’re trying to pull me into your concerns.” And that scene of us visiting my mother’s origins, which are complex and have some drama inflected in them, in this much more comfortable life situation where we’re staying in a nice hotel, my mother feels like she’s come a long way from her origins. That story—the next story that you get from my grandmother, is her story of coming to Germany and leaving Poland and finding her way to the first step in her liberation from the war. I found this place in the world, this country, where the generations were having experiences in that place, but in very different points in time, and in very different movements towards or away from traumatic experiences. When you see that the generations are passing each other in space in these ways, it [suggests] the larger resonance of the story and how expansive it is, and how these tensions of the past linger in the present but they take on very different resonances depending on what's happening around you. It's that art of juxtaposition in order to find the moments where you’re really taking in all of that complexity.

AC: When formatting the memoir you broke it into seven chapters that center around a certain theme that's usually reflected in the chapter name. Were these chapters naturally written or, in revision, were the stories grouped intentionally into these sections?

AK: The way that I wrote the book was in sections like this, so this is how it came out. And the way that I started writing the book was through small prose pieces, nonfiction pieces. Actually, for a class I took in college called Creative Nonfiction, there were various prompts that got me writing scenes from my life. I wrote about going to Israel for the first time, and I wrote about Sunday school when I was a kid and I wrote about hanging out with my mother and grandmother and taking a walk in Cranbrook gardens; I had these little scenes that I’d written about in prose. They were very different than they turned out in the book, but they made clear that there were certain concepts and stories that went together and had certain meanings to me. And that was where I was working out the thematic and conceptual arc of those little chapters. So then, when I adapted into comics, I couldn’t disentangle those little chapters of my life. And then it was about finding the chapters that resonated in an interesting way with parts of my grandmother's story.

The only thing that did come out in one piece, that then got broken up, was my grandmother's narrative. That was something I had as this document that was very fragmented and all over the place. She’d start talking about my grandfather, and then she’d start talking about her mother, and then she’d start talking about her grandmother, and [her story] would just jump around. It had this emotional logic to it, when something had a certain emotional register she’d jump to something else with that same emotional register, it was not chronological. I’m sure that’s typical, when people are telling stories of their life, but especially intense, traumatic, stories. So that was a big task, of ordering her story in a way that it could have some chronology to it, but keep that sense of the emotional arcs. So that was something that existed as a whole piece, and then I had to chunk it and insert it into the other chapters.

And then, at some point, it occurred to me that all the chapters had something to do with home. That was not something that was clear to me at first, but that was a later thing that I realized. Everything is moving away from this childhood home. So we start with the childhood home, then we think about the family home, and then we’re thinking about larger concepts of home identity, identifying with Jewish culture. It’s a complicated question about your relationship to your supposed homeland, nationally. And then moving towards, well what does a more liberated adult sense of home and sense of identity look like? That was a natural progression for the chapters to take, but I didn’t realize it until the end, and then I was like, “Oh! the chapter titles are going to reflect this thing that’s happening naturally.”

AC: You spoke to this a little bit last night in your masterclass, but throughout the memoir, there’s a certain collaging effect, the merging of drawings, text, drawn maps, and photographs. What was the decision process for deciding the level of realism dedicated to the different aspects of your memoir?

AK: I would say, there are two main styles in the book: the cartoonist’s style and the realistic style. In the next book I’m working on there are three styles: a realistic style, a cartoonist’s style, and then a stark contrast black and white style. I’m trying to distinguish between imagination and documentation. There’s this tension between what we have documentation of and what we don’t, and we want to privilege what we have documentation of and say, “This really happened.” But there's all kinds of stuff that really happened that we can’t prove, that we can’t document. That’s the theme I’m interested in generally, so when I had a photograph of something, I wanted to draw it very realistically and I would do this tracing technique, where you trace a little bit, then you draw from just looking closely. I’ve gotten a lot better at doing that.

The photographs in my next book are much better than the ones from Flying Couch. But I like the way that makes the document suddenly feel like an object, rather than something you’re immersing yourself in. It’s interesting to me that when something is more real you actually distance yourself from it. So the realistic technique makes things feel like objects. This is no longer a space for the reader to put their own consciousness, this is a space for the reader to be like, “Oh! This happened, and the things I’m projecting onto it might be my own self.” It’s an uncanny moment, definitely. Are you guys familiar with the Uncanny Valley? Yeah, it’s like, things that look real, but they’re not real enough, and they have this sudden shaking up of your understanding of what you’re looking at. I think those moments are important, just, because I want people to project themselves onto my family’s story, and see themselves in it, but I don’t want them to forget that it’s real and that it happened to somebody else. And so I think that trying to create those moments of uncanniness, it’s important to do, but not too much.

LEO FISHMAN JANOWITZ: Have there been projections that people told you that you found particularly frustrating, or have people more connected with it in a productive way?

AK: I think people connect with it in ways that are meaningful to me, you know they have an immigrant story, or they have a story of an enemy, or they have a mental health story. And those are meaningful, but there is sometimes this feeling that I get where people are using characters from my life—particularly my mother character— for their own purposes. You can tell that people are leaning into aspects of my mother’s character that are more useful for their own relationship with their mother. I’ll hear judgments of the character, in that way. Because people have such complicated relationships with their mothers, and I also think there’s less of [my mother] than the other characters, so there’s actually more room for people to fill her in in a way that suits their own needs.

LFJ: There’s been, in recent months, a scary attitude towards educators, with the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill, and the Tennessee School Boards’ decision to ban Maus from schools because it’s “too graphic.” And you’re a teacher, so you definitely have a unique perspective on this. Can you just talk a bit about the importance of these stories?

AK: Well, I’ll speak to the influence of Maus on Flying Couch first. I remember I read Maus and I was like, “I’m writing Flying Couch.” It was very direct. I don’t think that’s true for most books, where you can be like, “This is the book that made me write this book.” But I think that’s true for a lot of graphic writers because it’s a relatively new art form. There are these iconic books that artists can point to and say, “This is the book that sent me on my journey.” I read Maus when I was in college for the first time, but I’d grown up with it, it was on my bookshelf, and I remember the swastika on the cover, and the graphic nature of the book was a part of its power, a part of its identity. And then when I finally read it, it was different than I thought. It was so human, and so personal. I thought more that it was going to focus more on the history of the Holocaust, about all these important things that happened that are important to know about that period of history. But it was really just about the artist and his father, and the thing that stood out to me the most about Maus was the humanizing of history. Which is ironic because they’re mouse characters, but that’s the power of comics— it's like the unreality of the piece that makes it more real. The moments where Art Speigleman and his father are having relatable human tension in between his story of what happened to him in the war, that's what makes people able to understand that this is a real thing that happened to real people. I think it’s such an important part of our education that gets lost, the humanizing. You hear about all these things from the past, and they just sound so fake, but then when you can connect them to real characters having the kinds of struggles that you have, having petty fights with their parents, it’s like, oh, this is a real thing.

So I wanted to write something that was taking the aspect of Maus that I related to, and making my book more of that. Because with the stories from Auschwitz and the stories [with] harder details that happened in the war, I mean that’s important, but for me as a reader, I felt there was a lot of that in the world, and I was lucky to grow up in a time where there was lots of documentation, especially about the camps. We’re very obsessed with the concentration camps, but the reality of the Holocaust was so much more complicated than just the final solution. We get a bit obsessed with the viscerality and horror of that particular aspect of the war. But there's a lot of other interesting and important aspects to that period of history. I wanted to speak to some of the stuff about history that I didn’t feel was as well explored.

To speak to the book-banning stuff, I don’t know what else to say about it other than I think maybe the way we could try to reframe the conversation about the timing of when we engage with these things. Rather than saying, “This book is banned, it’s too graphic,” we could have a conversation about what age is appropriate to engage with these themes. Even Art Spiegelman has said things like, “Children shouldn’t be reading my book.” So there’s obviously some conversation to be had about when people should be engaging with these themes, and I think we should just calmly discuss that rather than making it a political fight.

LFJ: You said something about de-Hollywoodifying the Holocaust. I remember, in your reading/presentation you showed this passport from Germany and it had a stamp with the swastika and the Iron Eagle, but it just seemed like a passport. There's something so bureaucratic about TSA and travel documents that it really grounded me in the reality of it. It made it really human and tangible.

AK: Especially in my next book I learned [about this] in understanding my grandfather's experience—he got out of Austria in a lucky way, you could say, in 1938. The amount of bureaucracy that people had to deal with, living under Nazi rule, was the number one form of oppression. You had to have a paper to say that you didn't own a dog; you had to bind it in this particular way. There were all these laws and all of this paperwork you had to do in order to exist. We don't always focus on that aspect of history. On my father's side of the family, they were obsessed with saving all of these documents, because they were imprinted with this feeling of like, oh, I don't have the right form and something terrible is going to happen to me.

I’d also like to speak to your observation about the stamp on the passport. There's something very strange that starts to happen when you're looking at all these old documents that all have the swastikas on them. You get transported into this time where that symbol meant something different—it didn't necessarily mean this specter of horror and evil. It just meant something bureaucratic, like the authorities have stamped this and this is official. It's interesting to see the evolution of that symbol and how it started to take on this larger-than-life quality.

LFJ: There was this moment in the book preview when your grandmother says, “Why would anyone care about what I have to say,” and you talk about your family saving all these documents for no reason. Were they surprised that these stories had an audience like this, that people want to hear their stories?

AK: Yes, definitely. My grandmother, that process for her started in the ‘90s. So you can imagine, she had these experiences as a teenager and then starting in the 1950s she just became an American person trying to assimilate, and raised a family and lived a Midwestern regular life with this weird story quietly in the background. And then in the ‘90s, when she was in her sixties, there was this sudden interest in that period of history in a significant Hollywood-ified way, but also academics were interested. There was a canonization of that period of history.

I think that was especially surprising for my grandmother because it was very common for people to just never talk about it. I think that children of survivors were affected by that silence. That had a particular effect on them to know that their parents were very traumatized, but they didn't quite get the details and they didn't get to talk about it openly. It would be hard even if people were talking about it openly, but I think the silence was especially disorienting. And so kind of all of a sudden, in the ‘90s, at least for my family, there was this outpouring of stories from my grandmother and my grandfather. My bubbe’s husband was not like that. He didn't really talk as much about what happened to him. And I think it was very validating for my grandmother to have people interested in what she went through. That's not everybody's perspective, but my grandmother is a performer. She likes to have an audience. I think it was cathartic and meaningful for her. She's like an artist who never had an art form.

Have you guys read Sula by Toni Morrison? There's this great theme of the artists without an art form that can result in anything. My grandmother found her audience when people started being interested. The first iteration of that was this historian who recorded her whole story. Then it was everyone she would encounter, she would just be telling her story, so when I took an interest, she'd already experienced some of that, but I think it was especially validating for her that somebody in her family was canonizing the story. We did some events together when my book first came out, and she got to be a star and dress up cute and come up on stage with me, and it was a really great thing.

For my mother, it's more complicated. My mother feels invested in the historical significance of writing about this, but she feels there's more complexity with not having control over her own representation, even though I've given her lots of opportunities to edit everything that I read about her. She's invested in the historical project for sure. At this point, Jews who are affected by this history want people to hear these stories. There's an interesting sort of anxiety people who come from traumatic backgrounds have about how much airtime they get for their own story compared to all the other traumas of the world that also need to be told. But what does that mean that there's so much horror in the world —how do you decide what gets airtime? I think that's a really complicated question that I don't have the answer to.

MACKEREL SMITH: Can you talk about your experience as a teacher in New York and how that contributed to your process of developing Flying Couch and how it made you reflect on your own experiences and childhood?

AK: I moved to New York after college, and worked in public schools, mostly as a dance teacher, and I was working in communities that had a lot of immigrant kids, a lot of Black kids, and a lot of the schools I worked in were really struggling in terms of their resources, and in terms of the situation of the students. Students would be hungry; students would be pregnant in eighth grade. But I had this interesting opportunity to teach them something not academic. Usually, it was dance, but sometimes it would be drawing. I taught this comic class in the Bronx and it was hard to get a lot done because I would only be in the class for an hour and the students were so wound up from all the other pressures that were on them.

But artistic things would happen. There was a lot of creative energy and I was in a position to really feel successful because I was an arts teacher. And I think that middle school students in a city under a lot of pressure need to experience artistic release and artistic expression. I felt really positive about that experience, and it certainly made me aware of the privilege of my own childhood educational experience—my classes were so much smaller, my teachers so much less stressed out, and the physical spaces where I went to school were cleaner. These public schools in New York City, they're these huge, looming buildings and you have one boombox and it doesn't work, all that kind of stuff. So that was definitely eye-opening in terms of opportunity.

But it also felt like there was a lot of commonality in American experience in terms of my own family history. And it's a very diverse array of family experiences, families coming from all different places. Everybody in America has this experience of intergenerational exchange, taking something into the contemporary era, and trying to reconcile their parents and their grandparents and their homeland with this melting pot and trying to figure out how to navigate that. Working in a really diverse city made me realize I was a part of America like that. My American story was very representative in a lot of ways. And it made me realize the arts are the place to explore all of that.

LFJ: I don’t know If you've done a lot of school visits, but do you get that same rewarding feeling from talking about your book?

AK: Definitely. Young people who are engaged in the arts, they're thinking about where they come from in a way that most people aren't. In a corporate context, nobody talks about history, their family, their identity—everybody's just a cog in a machine ready to deliver the thing. I think artists are always engaged with themselves as full entities connected to history. I love having an opportunity to engage with people who think that way.

AC: After reading Flying Couch, it appears that you are very interested in how language sounds and feels on the page. Your grandmother, Bubbe, for example, is written with a strong accent that was physically written into the novel. What was your thought process when writing that aspect of your grandmother into your memoir? And why was that aspect of Bubbe’s character so important for the reader to understand?

AK: This is speaking to that multi-layered aspect of comics. I had my grandmother's voice with misspellings and the accent in my handwriting. Handwriting represents, oh, this is my perspective, this is how I hear her voice because I don't speak that way. I mean, the question of whether or not you speak with an accent is an interesting one because it's all relative, right? I sound like I have an accent probably to some people. But my grandmother, she's othered, you know, she walks around with this voice that people who grew up speaking English hear her sounding differently. She doesn't sound that way to herself, you know?

So I wanted to represent my perspective that there's this gap between the way I speak and the way she speaks, which I think is the common immigrant family experience. But then in her own telling of her story in the more authoritative typewriter font, when she's talking about her experiences in the past, there aren't misspellings, and the difference from the kind of standard English is more subtle. [This is meant] to communicate the sense that she sounds different to herself than she does other people than she sounds to me, and make it clear to people that there is this subjectivity and variety in how people communicate.

AG: Since we were talking about the gap between you and your Bubbe, how would you describe the difference in translating your own memories onto the page versus your family's?

AK: That's important. There is this range between memory and imagination, which is blurry. Our memory faculty is very related to our imaginative faculty. I remember reading a paper once that was making the point that the reason memory exists is because we need this ability to model future experiences. So part of what your memory is doing is imagining what happened, but also, what could have happened, because if there's a tiger and it attacks, you need to also imagine that it might have attacked you and what you would do. So our minds have that slipperiness between memory and imagination. That's why we misremember so much.

So I wanted to keep this similar style, drawing-wise, for the way that I drew my own memories, which are reconstructions, they're not faithful, like this exactly happened. There's an imaginative quality in all of my own memories. And in my grandmother's memories, I wanted to have some similarity in the way that I was drawing, but also some key differences so that you understood how far I was from those experiences. They were still happening in that same memory/imaginative part of my mind, but I had less access to the details, so the way that I would signal that was through these perspective shifts, or the weird framing techniques that I talked about last night. I don't know what any of my grandmother's family members look like, so I wanted to communicate that to the reader by having their faces obscured every time I drew them.

So, there are intentionally awkward drawing angles on my grandmother's remembered stories, where we just see things from above, or sometimes you see things from the ground. And that was a way of representing this kind of separateness, I have from the story that I'm far away from it, and I'm looking down on it, but then all of a sudden I'm emotionally on the ground with it. And that intensity was part of what I was trying to represent with my relationship to that history, whereas, for my own memories, it was more in the same style, where we're in that cartoonish rhythm.

LFJ: We talked a little bit about Artificial, and we kind of still want to know a little bit more. Can you speak to that and any other future projects?

AK: The next book is about my father and his father. My father has this project where he is collecting all of the writing from his father, and I helped by collecting the writing and helping transcribe it, and he entered that body of text into this algorithm that understands natural language. So, if you write a question or a sentence, it understands what you've written, and then it will search into all the texts that it has, the words that it knows, and deliver you an answer. So, it's in my grandfather's voice. It's different from these generative chatbots but it's in the same genre of technology that we're encountering today with ChatGPT three and stuff like that.

My father is somebody who really believes in technology as a transcendent expression of spirit that's going to deliver us into a really utopian world and resurrect the dead and all those sort of ideas that are kind of extreme. My father is somewhat of an evangelist about these ideas that technology is going to save humanity, as opposed to people who might think technology is going to destroy humanity. So this technology is like a signpost on the way to even more dramatic merging of human and machine. My book is engaged with this particular technology, and the process of helping my father create it. That's the thread line of the book. Then there are stories from my own life, some memories and imaginings of my grandfather's life. Less than in Flying Couch with my grandmother—I have much less access to my grandfather and the history of what he actually experienced in Europe, because he was not somebody who wanted to share that part of himself. So that’s a tension in the book—we have all this documentation of his, but what's missing is pretty interesting. He never wanted to talk about the things that he may have experienced in Vienna when he was escaping the Nazis. So, that's a theme—we've documented some things, and some things are not documented, and how do we reconcile that gap? And what does this relationship to the past mean for me as a person? So it's also a memoir, where you see me grow up and have a relationship and try to live the next chapter of my adult life.