Poradziecka prawnuczka: (auto)biograficzna narracja międzypokoleniowa w powieści graficznej Soviet Daughter Julii Alekseyevej

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.

Keywords

• memory
• generation
• graphic novel
• Holocaust
• Soviet Russia
• communism