By Linda H. Davis / Special to the BJV

If there’s a secret to drawing the Holocaust without overwhelming the reader, Amy Kurzweil seems to have found it. In two award-winning graphic memoirs, the 2016 Flying Couch, and Artificial, a self-described “work of memory and imagination” published in 2023, this “New Yorker” cartoonist chronicles her family’s Holocaust legacy.

Following a presentation to a small but captivated audience at the Lenox Library on August 15, Amy Kurzweil spoke to The BJV about her work.

A highly cerebral artist, Amy began Flying Couch when she was a student at Stanford. First came the words, then the drawing, amounting to a biographical journey of 7 years. Along the way, she earned an MFA in fiction writing. She also learned to draw. Told by a reader of an early version of the book that her drawing wasn’t good enough, she did it over again.

It’s this kind of resolve that characterizes the close-knit Kurzweil family at the center of these books. They are a family of overachievers. Amy’s mother, Sonya, is a German-born psychologist with Freud and Jung pillows on her couch. A woman without a homeland, she spent the first two years of her life in a displaced person’s camp. Amy’s father, Ray, an inventor, futurist, and author, appeared on the popular TV show “I’ve Got a Secret” at age 17. His secret was a computer he had programmed “to read Bach, Brahms” and other composers.

Talent saved Amy’s paternal grandfather when “an American benefactor” who’d heard him conduct a choral concert in 1937 got him to the United States in the nick of time, in 1938.

Blonde hair saved Amy’s larger-than-life maternal grandmother, Bubbe, who wears diamond earrings and pants from Marshall’s. “Bring me some vater please – you know I survived from HITLER!” she tells a waitress. 

Winding her way through both both books is Amy herself, a brainy, self-described “hypochondriacal” child “of strange preoccupations.”

Part of the secret in drawing the Holocaust is technique. Though most contemporary cartoonists work digitally, 37-year-old Amy works on graph paper with pen, pencil, and watercolor, with only a minimum of digital. She thinks something is lost in the all-digital approach. Working in the old-fashioned way “slows you down,” she says. She tells her history with a layering of styles – cartoon art, realistic drawing, and both handwritten and typed text. Though this matryoshka-like approach to storytelling can overwhelm --there’s so much going on – it allows the teller to balance the horror without overwhelming the reader.

“They used to take snow and put a rock in it and throw it at the Jew,” says Bubbe, of life in Germany when Hitler came to power. But in the displaced person’s camp, her young daughter, Sonya, plays shoelessly and joyously in the snow. When Bubbe becomes ill with typhus and is confined to a horse stable, mice crawl “all over” her. But the mice are drawn almost innocently, cartoon style. 

Drawing the Holocaust, said Amy Kurzweil, is about perspective, about trying to understand and imagine something so alien to one’s own experience. She was careful not to go too far: “You can tolerate looking at a piece of burnt clothing,” she told me.

Like all good biographers, Amy was bound by an ethical code. She felt protective, for instance, of her paternal grandfather, who died young and “rarely talked about Vienna, about being Jewish, about what he’d lost.” And Amy, who never knew him, didn’t have his consent. Though she knew Bubbe, she felt freer writing about her because her grandmother had already given an interview about the Holocaust.

Our duty as students of history is to do enough, so we don’t repeat history, Amy told me.

She did it bearably.

“Humor is mortar,” Amy writes in Flying Couch. “It binds the bridge between the real and the unimaginable.”

Linda H. Davis is the author of three biographies, including Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. She lives in Pittsfield with her husband, Chuck Yanikoski.