Germaine’s Daughter, A Graphic Novel
Germaine’s Daughter is a graphic novel that uses both prose and what I call 'story paintings' — 100 images which sequentially tell a tale. They include color oil paintings and black and white acrylics, and some pastels. The images range in size from 30 X 42 inches to 84 X 84 inches. They stand alone as narrative works for exhibition, in addition to forming the graphic novel. The book explores the legacy of the war outside — the Holocaust, and the war inside — mental illness, over three generations of transformation. The viewer follows the story arc from imagery of suffering to eventual transcendence over time, from darkness to the light. The book is now available, including an Afterword by Shana Nys Dambrot, art critic.
“There are stories that live in our bones before we learn their words. In Germaine’s Daughter, Lydia Kann gives powerful form to the lingering, mutating aftershocks of historical trauma as it reverberates through three generations, rendered with both formal vigor and narrative compassion. Bridging the personal and the political with unapologetic intimacy, what we have witnessed is not illustration — it’s revelation (…)
As the graphic novel moves through sorrow, perseverance, rage, grace, it reminds us that art does not heal by pretending things didn’t happen — it heals by showing how survival, too, can be artful.”
— Shana Nys Dambrot, Art Critic, Curator, Author
"I was deeply moved by Lydia Kann’s evocative graphic novel, Germaine’s Daughter. Kann’s surrealist illustrations—mini-paintings, really—are drawn in a style reminiscent of artists and storytellers like Edvard Munch, Renée French, and Charlotte Solomon. Like Solomon’s famous work, Kann’s book reveals a narrator’s search for the right mix of visual and verbal metaphors to convey the full force of melancholia and madness passed over generations (‘I long for books about crazy people,’ the [story] begins). It will be an impressive, unusual, and most welcome addition to the genre of second-generation Holocaust literature.”
Tahneer Oksman
Prof. of Memoir, Graphic Novels and Comics at Marymount Manhattan College, Author of How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?
“With evocative drawings and pitch perfect narrative, Lydia Kann paints an intimate portrait of her struggle to live a good and productive life after childhood with her single schizophrenic mother who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied France. The story carries us beyond the psychological trauma, becoming a testament to the power of resilience and familial love. I found it a stunning reminder of my life experience and an inspiration.”
Robert Meeropol
Author of An Execution in the Family, younger Son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed by the United States Government when he was six years old.
“Lydia Kann’s graphic memoir vibrates with the pain and deep love of a daughter growing up in the shadow of her mother’s descent into madness. Her haunting, dreamlike paintings illustrate the push and pull of her inner life, as she fights for a future of her own, while remaining the faithful protector of her war-ravaged mother. A beautiful, moving testament to the power of both love and self-preservation.”
Susan Quinn , Author of Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady
"Through her illustrations and prose, Lydia Kann lights a pathway through the unpredictable calamities of love and war. We are left with hope, the most unpredictable emotion of all."
Jacqueline Sheehan , New York Times bestselling author.
“Through her fine pitch-perfect prose and haunting figures, Lydia Kann tells of a daughter giving voice to her mother’s pain and suffering, as well as her own. She renders powerful illustrations of intergenerational transmission of trauma. Kann melds her knowledge of the psyche and unconscious as she actively participates in her own healing. We become witnesses who experience firsthand her pain, psychic growth, and development — indeed, her transformation. She is freer now to experience sustained happiness and joy. She’s achieved a sense of fullness in herself and in her life. She ends her marvelous word and picture book triumphantly.”
Samoan Barish PhD, Psychoanalyst
“This stunning graphic memoir underscores the deadly risks of intergenerational transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust and what it means for those "born after." It is the compelling life story of an American-born artist daughter, interwoven with the life of her fragile and mentally unstable mother, for whom in a typical role reversal between children of survivors and traumatized parents, she becomes a child-parent caretaker. The daughter ultimately comes to terms with her inherited trauma by confronting the familial Holocaust history and by "restorying" the trauma that her mother had tried to suppress. The compelling interaction, or what Art Spiegelman called “co-mix" of text and image of the memoir combine to afford a new and meaningful narrative within art discourse.”
Louise O. Vasvári, Holocaust and Gender Studies, Prof. Emerita, Stony Brook University