Post-Soviet great-granddaughter: (auto)biographical intergenerational narrative in the graphic novel Soviet Daughter by Julia Alekseyeva Cover Image

Poradziecka prawnuczka: (auto)biograficzna narracja międzypokoleniowa w powieści graficznej Soviet Daughter Julii Alekseyevej
Post-Soviet great-granddaughter: (auto)biographical intergenerational narrative in the graphic novel Soviet Daughter by Julia Alekseyeva

Author(s): Karolina Krasuska
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Jewish studies, Media studies, Communication studies, Sociology, Recent History (1900 till today), Special Historiographies:, History of Judaism, Sociology of Culture, Interwar Period (1920 - 1939), WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), History of Communism, History of the Holocaust, Migration Studies, Identity of Collectives
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego
Keywords: memory; generation; graphic novel; Holocaust; Soviet Russia; communism

Summary/Abstract: The article analyzes the graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (2017), a literary text that belongs to a dynamically developing post-Soviet Jewish American writing, as a transgenerational (auto)biographical narrative of a great grandmother and a great granddaughter. The titular “Soviet daughter” refers primarily to the great grandmother and her political genealogy; yet because of the shared migration trajectory, ideological affinities, and the construction of the text itself, it can be also read as describing the leftist great granddaughter. The novel focuses on the flight survivors who lived through the war in the Soviet hinterland; moreover, because of the genealogical distance of it protagonists, it allows us for “adoptive witnessing” of the Soviet Russia, as well as the great grandmother’s communist past. In this way, the texts displaces American literary memory of the Holocaust that here intersects with the memory of the (pre-war) communism.

  • Issue Year: 14/2020
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 217-233
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: Polish