In an era when many anti-Zionist Jews in North America are severing ties with Zionist relatives, New York-based artist Solomon Brager is determined to grapple with family instead — even to get under the skin of their kin. Brager’s new graphic memoir, Heavyweight, is fierce about its author’s immutable sense of belonging with and to the Levi family: four generations of German Jews who appear in a diagram of the family tree at the front of the book. Subtitled A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory, Brager’s comic is stuffed with tender archival excavations of their ancestors’ experiences. We follow the Levis as they variously live the high life in the Rhineland, make good marriages, punch Brownshirts, become refugees, get extorted or robbed of all their belongings, survive internment (or don’t), rescue one another, flee to Free France, traverse fascist Spain, buy their way onto a boat in Lisbon, and escape into assimilation in America.
These events are gripping, but there is no romanticization in the telling. This is what makes Heavyweight feel fresh: Brager’s courageous insistence on situating themself, genealogically, inside legacies of both victimization and of complicity with ongoing colonization, even as they love their kin. In so doing, they succeed in weaving a troubling yet compassionate narrative out of the threads of archival autobiography, cinematic black-on-white drawing, social history, and literary quotation, peppering the whole with plentiful queer self-teasing humor. Halfway through Heavyweight, a full-page panel shows a bespectacled Brager opening a window and dangling a pair of grubby-looking underpants in the air before getting interrupted by their mother: “What are you doing?” “What does it look like I’m doing, Mom? I’m airing our dirty laundry!”
Brager airs about a century and a half’s worth of it. As this playful, hysterically literalized metaphor implies, a key question at the heart of the project is the interrelation of fidelity and treachery: to kin, to identity, to whiteness. Heavyweight takes up feminist philosopher Alexis Shotwell’s call for anti-racist white settlers to confront their relationships with white supremacism through an ensemble of non-disavowal practices called “claiming bad kin.” In my own abolitionist approach to the care-scarcity system known as the family — as well as in my attempt at an anti-fascist historiography of what I’ve termed “enemy feminisms” — I have repeatedly taken up the question of “kinmaking” as a way of unsettling the micro-nationalism of “family values.” However, lines of enmity can run across the ties of kinship, and “claiming bad kin” can mean practicing full-throated antifascism vis-à-vis not merely “bad” but perhaps also genocidal relatives: people who bear mutant versions of our own historic inheritances and share our (metaphoric or actual) DNA. Race treason, from the position of whiteness, is, after all, “loyalty to humanity,” in the famous phrase of the insurrectionary abolitionist John Brown.
“What does it look like I’m doing, Mom? I’m airing our dirty laundry!”
Brager’s American relatives are coyly implied, in Heavyweight, to be Zionists. At public events, Brager has informally spoken about a flag outside their parents’ house in which the Israeli design merges into the U.S. one. While they are less explicit about the family Zionism in Heavyweight, Brager “claims” their family, enacting a tender kind of opposition — or treacherous loyalty. To complicate matters, Heavyweight’s anti-Zionist race treachery is tangled up in Brager’s departure from cisness. As a young adult, Sol became the ill-understood transmasculine child of parents who were very attached to “the idea of having four daughters.” Yet even as they disrupt the “four girls” mythology, Sol becomes the “keeper of the family history,” thanks to their nerdy archive-trawling efforts. This unofficial role becomes “a way to connect” with family — “but also,” Brager adds, “because my living family can be dicey, I turn to my dead one.”
Dead family — and trauma-deadened non-memory — is, I think, the “weight” symbolized in Heavyweight’s title. On one level, it’s a simple reference to a weight class in boxing, the amateur vocation of Solomon’s great-grandpa (or “Opa”) Erich Levi, the memoir’s central figure. Erich is the German heavyweight champion who later, in the United States, gave the sport up and became “Eric Leeds.” But what is heavier by far is the burden of survivor trauma, even as it coexists in some European Jews with complicity in other genocides. “I keep thinking,” says the cartoon of Sol, quietly, at the end of Heavyweight, “my family’s tragedy isn’t unique, only specific.”
Many people are indeed “terrified of the Holocaust losing its special, sacred, incomparable status,” or so our protagonist cartoon ruminates, pacing in circles around a room. “As though we need to diminish or obscure other historical crimes to properly remember this one … ” (at this point, the pacing figure is grimacing, massaging their neck), “… as though understanding the structures that produce violence undermines feeling the horror of it.” In order to understand the Third Reich, Brager draws on the Black radical tradition, quoting the contemporaneous comments of Ralph Bunche, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Aimé Césaire, who argued that there was no Nazi atrocity not previously practiced by European “civilizers” on colonized people around the world. Césaire famously refers to this as the “imperial boomerang” of fascistic violence. In this analysis, Auschwitz represents the “return” home to Europe of techniques first applied by colonizers to populations of color. Bourgeois Europeans, as such, had been Nazism’s accomplices prior to becoming its victims. They “absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.”
Yet a lot of popular education about Hitler’s genocide, by presenting it outside of history, purposively presents it as an irreducibly bewildering event without parallel or precedent. Brager was certainly educated in the school of Holocaust exceptionalism. At the age of 10, for reasons they don’t really recall, Sol drew a giant tattoo in Magic Marker on their arm that consisted of a picture of a cemetery and the words “6 million Jews” (underlined for emphasis). The young Sol identified strongly as someone whose people were genocided. They also originally believed that, as it happens, their whole family miraculously survived. It was only over the course of many emails to archivists, sifting records, and digging through boxes stashed in living relatives’ attics that Brager realized this wasn’t remotely the case. Several Levis had, in fact, been murdered. Some of the “dirty laundry” aired in Heavyweight, then, consists simply of this: the stories of people whose deaths were not included in the testimonies submitted by Erich’s wife, Ilse, to various memorial foundations.
Sol presents their fugitive forebears as contradictory, imperfect, and at times reprehensible, pointing, for example, to their perpetuation of anti-Roma racism even as they and Roma people faced down the same genocidaires. There is selflessness here — and there is survival — but all in all, there are no heroes. This all-too-rare flavor of family biography flows from the careful approach to Erich that Brager adopts. Heavyweight blends historicizing materialism with notes of fanciful “critical fabulation”: an approach to historiography developed by the scholar Saidiya Hartman, in which one uses storytelling to imagine presences in the archive where only absences were preserved. Thus, Erich/Eric and Brager — who never met in real life — speak at length in these pages as Heavyweight stages conversations that Erich openly mocks Sol for hallucinating. “When are you going to get your head out of books and fight, nerd?” the smoke-wreathed ghost taunts, exhaling fumes that make Sol cough (“paranormal allergies” … ).
Through Sol’s young eyes, once upon a time, Opa had seemed “larger than life” — a positively mythic figure of antifascist resistance. In 1923, you see, Erich co-founded a Jewish sports club called הכח (Hakoah: Hebrew for “the Strength”) in response to antisemitic violence in his city. On the other hand, as Sol discovers while researching Heavyweight, something ultimately feels missing from the courageous portrait that the great-grandchild had hoped to bring into focus. “I don’t want to begrudge Erich Levi his brief, ordinary life,” Brager writes toward the end of Heavyweight. “Let it be enough. And yet.”
I first encountered Brager’s work in 2021, when their comic “When Settler Becomes Native” appeared in Jewish Currents. The dual goal of the cartoon was to debunk “the claim of Jewish indigeneity in the land of Israel” — in other words, the claim that the Israeli state represents “a return of the land to “Indigenous Jews” — and to resist the erasure of the long Jewish tradition of doykeit (“here-ness,” a strand of anti-Zionism) from the collective consciousness in a context where anti-Zionism is increasingly equated in law with antisemitism. Likewise, in Heavyweight, Sol gently but firmly indicates why it is pro-Israel-ism — not anti-Zionism — that amounts to racism, being as it is a form of colonialism. Citing the human rights historian A. Dirk Moses, the memoir introduces the superficially positive-seeming concept of redemptive philosemitism, a phrase that designates the “Holocaust catechism” now officially inscribed by the modern state of Germany into its very foundations.
Starting from the principle that Germany’s crime was qualitatively worse and categorically more evil than any other atrocity in all of human history, Germany supposedly “redeems itself among the nations by loving Jews the MOST,” as Brager explains. “By Jews, they often mean Israel, not diaspora Jews.” Unsurprisingly, since the nineteenth century, the notion that Jewish people require a nation-state of their own — far away from Europeans — has been a lynchpin of antisemitic as well as Zionist thought, even as proponents condemn Jewish opposition to Jewish settler colonialism as antisemitic. Today, in the context of the genocidal reprisals for Gazans’ attack operation of October 7, anti-Zionist Jews, risking incarceration for their pro-Palestinian militancy in Germany, Britain, and the U.S., are committing race-treachery by rejecting the whiteness that usually shields Jews under redemptive philosemitism. As the “wrong kind of Jews,” these principled anti-fascists have been among the first to lose their jobs at U.S. universities in retaliation for their support for the Palestinian resistance.
Heavyweight does not name the Levi/Leeds family’s overall Zionism explicitly, but again, it doesn’t need to. “I’ve always felt my family didn’t ‘get’ me,” Brager vouchsafes, admitting that they’ve always kept their distance as a kind of “preemptive strike against their judgment.” From this place of self-imposed exile, Heavyweight charts a palpable yearning to have something bequeathed, passed down, transmitted from beyond the grave — something, specifically, from a Holocaust survivor who punched Nazis. Such bequeathals surely feel important at a time when a fascist colonial Lebensraum project is systematically annihilating a captive, racialized population once again — only this time in the name of a Jewish ethnostate. Erich’s commitments, nonetheless, are never quite “cracked” for the reader. If anything, the one whose spectacles get cracked at the end of this book’s long journey of inquiry is Solomon.
A cigarette-smoking boxer from the Ruhr Valley industrial hub of Essen, Erich was born in 1905, growing up amid what Sol’s Oma called “total luxury” as a thoroughly “bourgeois child of the German Empire.” During the year of his birth, German colonial forces were in the midst of annihilating the Herero and Nama peoples in German South West Africa (today, Namibia): as Brager notes, “after the murders of tens of thousands of people, colonial subjugation went on, unabated. Horrors after horrors.” A postcard was available for Germans to purchase at this time, depicting soldiers packing the skulls of murdered Herero into crates to be sent to collectors in Europe and the U.S. A majority of German Jews supported colonial ventures, sometimes actively participating in them as part of their bid for assimilation, Brager notes. But “in the end, that didn’t protect them.” The cartoon version of Sol looks at an illustration of the postcard and wonders about “the relationship of my very German ancestors to the crimes of the empire that they were citizens of.” To what extent, Sol wants to know, “was every German complicit? These are questions we usually ask about other Germans, other crimes.”
The private family form really returned with a vengeance.
As an amateur boxer at a time when boxing was “a perfect fascist sport” (complicated by the fact that so many stars were Black, Romani, or Jews), Herr Levi kept a scrapbook about his views on knockouts, sparring, and the so-called “crude” or “Jewish school” of boxing, a document that would be ferreted out and pored over, decades later, by his amateur boxer of a great-grandchild. Harassed by the Nazis in Essen, the heavyweight had to flee in 1924 to Antwerp, where he and his wife Ilse would eventually have a second wedding — plus honeymoon — allowing them to bring a large shipment of household property to that country.
In May 1940, Germany invaded Belgium. Erich, along with all his male relatives, was jailed as an alien German, only to end up in an internment camp, Saint-Cyprien, on the southern coast of France. Ilse and the other women tried to reach Calais (for England) by car, only to be robbed of everything they had by the French authorities and forced into a refugee holding camp in Ambleteuse before escaping — with their small children — on foot under bombardment. Even more incredible ordeals ensued for the family here, involving a commandeered Red Cross van, a nun disguise, forged papers, sick kids, underground railroad guides, police interrogations, nocturnal hikes over the Pyrenees, visa applications denied, and the kindness of strangers (which usually does not come free). A story needs a protagonist of some kind. Yet the very act of narrating a “family” narrative, in Brager’s hands, crackles under the tension of its innate exclusions.
Upon finally finding refuge in New York in 1941, the Levi family “ended,” in Brager’s words, when the travelers changed their name to Leeds. At the same time, this was the point when the private family form — the bourgeois householding life they had so enjoyed in Antwerp — really returned with a vengeance. Sol’s Oma and Opa “set about leaving the past behind and becoming Americans,” acquiring a house on Long Island and raising Grandma Gaby and Grandpa Andy. Sol finds a photograph of Andy “playing Indian.” Ilse set up a souvenir shop, and Erich sold “one-cup coffee systems,” entre autres. The newly minted “Leeds” family was able to “melt” into whiteness in their adoptive country, even as racial segregation continued, Japanese Americans were interned in camps, and tribal termination policies ruthlessly dismantled Native sovereignty. The Leeds family, Sol repeats, were people “displaced into an existing structure of expulsion and replacement that benefited them,” even as genocide proceeded back home and the U.S. continued to refuse Jewish refugees. Bottom line, for Brager: “We stayed here. We became participants in the structure.”
“We belong to the same human family to which our torturers belonged,” Primo Levi wrote of the Jews. After all, “We are the children of the Europe where Auschwitz exists.” One of the clear correlates behind Brager’s choice to include this observation at the beginning of Heavyweight is that many of us are the children of the imperial world system in which the open-air prison known as Gaza exists. Europeans are connected by multiple genocides, some much older than Auschwitz. American settlers are related to one another through the facts of the plantation and Native genocide. Brager is in both these families, they suggest — as am I, an immigrant to Philadelphia whose German mother’s matrilineal Jewishness didn’t stop her father from fighting for Hitler. Both of us, Sol and me, are products of Germany and children also “of this place, of the auction block and the residential school.” Our race treachery is, then, a duty we owe to Palestine and to every other struggle for decolonization.
Much of the naturalization and invisibilization of racial hierarchy can be traced back to the hiding of dirty laundry. It is no coincidence, I think, that this phrase conjures an image of domestic or so-called “reproductive” labor: Gender discipline clearly plays a major role in the nation-building chauvinism whereby the stains, secrets, and vulnerabilities of a population’s collective history must be locked away and repressed. Erich belonged — or so he erroneously thinks in a ghostly conversation with Sol — to a time when “men were MEN.” Indeed, his early twentieth-century brand of Jewishness was shaped by the colonialist Muskeljudentum (or “muscular Judaism”) New Jew creed of the early Zionist leader Max Nordau. He even follows up with a hostile jab at what he clearly considers to be Brager’s baffling sex: “Who knows what the hell you are.” Brager, in-scene, wryly responds: “Truly, it’s a mystery.” This is not a story about Sol ceasing to love the Opa they never met but about de-idealization and its generative, liberatory consequences.
There are no nations, only here-ness.
“I’ve been trying really hard to figure you out,” says Sol to the ghost of Erich when all is said and done. “I guess I was looking for a role model or like, a hero. My mistake.” Brager did fight hard for this fictive heroic ancestor before letting go — they even donned boxing gloves in a moment of crisis in their adult life. It seemed easier to throw left hooks, in a way, than to do endless talk therapy. How did Erich Levi, respected heavyweight athlete and puncher of Nazis — potentially even punching Joseph Goebbels himself in 1924 — become Eric Leeds, seller of one-cup coffee systems at 1950s Long Beach farmers’ markets? Brager finds no answer.
By now, they’ve been forced to abandon not only heroization but also the entire fantasy of reaching some therapeutic point of self-understanding through decrypting the Levi enigma. Instead, merely by virtue of ethical consistency, Heavyweight has stumbled into a form of family abolitionism, by which I mean the communizing of care: a politics of relational abundance informed by the more-than-familial, race-treacherous sensibility of resource-sharing, of comradeship across bloodlines, that history’s anti-fascists teach us is key to survival. Only by recognizing that “other people” are no less constitutive of our family histories than our relatives can we find our way into a decolonial reorganization of care. If we are to decolonize together, we must first understand that there are no nations, only here-ness. “Every moment,” or so Brager now perceives, “is woven into every other moment.”
Sophie Lewis is an ex-academic feminist living in Philadelphia and the author of Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation; Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family; and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. You can find her on Patreon and social media at @reproutopia. Her next book, The Liberation of Children, is forthcoming from Penguin.
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