Drawing From Memory: From Archive to Graphic Memoir

How can the descendants of Holocaust survivors reckon with generational trauma through art? How does each generation’s relationship with tragedy change over time, in shifting social and political conditions? Art Spiegelman’s Maus, originally published in 1986, was a groundbreaking work in regards to comics to express the tragedy and generational trauma of the Holocaust. Today, third- and fourth-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors in the United States reckon not only with the generational trauma, but with their positionality in complex and uncertain political times. With much of the Holocaust’s generation no longer around, scholars, authors, and interested family members rely on archives to piece together stories.

Graphic memoirist Ari Richter, who researched his graphic family saga Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz in the Leo Baeck Institute Archives, grapples with these challenges through his artistic and literary exploration of his family history. In “Drawing From Memory,” Professor Amy Hungerford of Columbia University will engage in conversation with Richter about bringing the archive into the graphic novel.

This panel is a part of the Jewish Comics Experience, an all-day event at the Center for Jewish History. This event will be held in person at the Center for Jewish History. If you cannot attend the live event, it will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

About the Panelists

Ari Richter is a visual artist, cartoonist and Professor at LaGuardia Community College in the City University of New York. He is the author of Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma & Inheritance (Fantagraphics Books, 2024). Richter is the recipient of recent fellowships from the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, as well as a fully public education from grade school to graduate school. The grandson of Holocaust survivors and son of therapists, he lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.

Amy Hungerford, the Ruth Fulton Benedict Professor of English and Comparative Literature, currently serves as Dean and Executive Vice President of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. She is responsible for a full-time research and teaching faculty of 900 across the Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences, as well as the collective mission of the five graduate and undergraduate schools within Arts and Sciences. A scholar of American literature, her first two monographs—The Holocaust of Texts and Postmodern Belief—explore literary engagements with genocide and with religion in the 20th century. Her most recent book, Making Literature Now, examines how social networks shape contemporary writers’ creative choices and the choices we make about reading.