Chad Ruger - Yossel Review

1. Analyze: Event - Primary

The primary purpose of this novel is to recreate an environment for the reader in which we can experience, through the eyes of fictional characters, a historical atrocity.  The characters are more of a vehicle for the telling of the facts and only really range  from sorrowful to more sorrowful.  The depth and interest come from the historical event itself, and not the story specifically.


2. Rating: PG-13

Although there is no language and only backside nudity (butts), I would almost rate this at a PG level.  The thing that really makes it more adult is it's themes.  The depiction of the dead bodies are abstract and skewed and are non-graphic in nature.  But the depth of sorrow conveyed is just so darn heavy...

3. Springboard:

Kubert's information is sound.  By the end of the book, you can tell that this story is very personal, even though it is fictitious, because it could have been his reality.  You can tell that he did his research and his depictions are accurate.  His Jewish heritage helped him with this story as well, as he was able to pull from his own upbringing for the writing of the different Jewish characters.

The thing I researched was the medical experiments performed and needless to say,  can understand that out of all the atrocities mentioned in the graphic novel, this was was glazed over as I will do so here. 

Making Comics-Yossel

Yossel is an illustrated narrative, an fictional memoir of a boy artist trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. The book is ment to be his life drawings, observational sketches of things he sees, hears about, learns. This means that most of the book is subject to subject. For example, on page 24, the narration reads like someone telling a story aloud with the sort of things we'd picture in our heads if reading it like a prose novel. The sketching style is rough and loose, like Yossel is drawing from memory.

Yossel

1. Analyze: (b) Rising Action– “primary”
The entire book drives us towards the climax--The Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Yossel begins his story at the end, showing us the group hiding in the sewers, then jumps back in time to detail what led them there. He shows the barbarism of the Nazi's, both in the ghettos and the concentration camps, through his illustrations. The story throws image after image at us, showing everything the Jews went through, in order to clearly show why the Jews in the Ghetto had every right to rise up against their oppressors. The climax, wrap up, and conclusion are very breif. This story is about the evil acts that led to the uprising, rather than the rebellion itself.

2. Rating: (PG-13)
This is some pretty heavy material. It goes through the Holocaust with incredible detail, illustrating just how savage the German Nazi's were in their attempt to de-humanize their victims. Most of the nudity and violence is heavily stylized and the sexual aspect of the concentration camps are alluded to rather then clearly depicted.

3. Springboard: Yossel is a history book. The author has very detailed knowledge of the Ghettos and concentration camps. He knows details about the lives of the prisoners that come from hard study and first hand accounts. I've read other source material on the Holocaust and have been through the museum in D.C. so I was familiar with most of the material. However, I had never put two and two together and realized that the Germans made prisoners in the camp dispose of the bodies killed in the gas chambers. Thousands of bodies per day were loaded into the crematoriums by other Jews.

4. Application: I've considered having a character in my story who kept sketchbooks like diaries. This book is a great example of that--illustrated text rather than having the story told through pictures.