Monday, July 30, 2012

Not The Israel My Parents Promised Me; Harvey Pekar & J. T. Waldman

Not The Israel My Parents Promised Me is Harvey Pekar's last graphic novel and it seems to me to be a good bookend to the auto / biographical comics (American Splendor) and graphic novels he's written since the early 1970s. I certainly wish this wasn't Pekar's last graphic novel, but this book like his Cleveland, which was released a couple of months ago, were two works I heard him talk about when he and Alison Bechdel (Fun Home, Are You My Mother?) spoke at a presentation at the Clark County Library back in April of 2010 and when he died just three months later (July of 2010), I thought we'd not see these books, so I'm glad these two Harvey Pekar graphic novels were completed before his death.

Not The Israel My Parents Promised Me is Harvey Pekar's examination of the Jewish people's continuing struggle with their occupation of Israel as their state, expecially their continuing conflicts with their neighbors, Palestine. Harvey Pekar was raised in a Jewish family, but he fairly early on in his life, didn't see the Jewish state of Israel to be their land claim right as all (or a majority) of Jewish people do. Throughout Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, Harvey Pekar and artist J. T. Waldman present a historical lineage of the Jewish people and the conflicts between Israel and Palestine, as well as a record of Pekar's personal history growing up Jewish and how he developed his differences. Not The Israel My Parents Promised Me presents different sides of the Israel and Palestine and Jewish perspectives that I've not been exposed to previously and I'd guess even a lot of Jewish people aren't aware of the history outlined in this graphic novel.
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