Review by Hélène Tison
Leela Corman. Victory Parade. New York: Pantheon Graphic Library, 2024. $29.00. ISBN 9780805243444. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/552601/victory-parade-by-leela-corman/
“The look of a ghost with ashes in her shoes.”
Leela Corman is a warm, lively,
funny and very serious person – much like her work as a cartoonist, from Unterzakhn
(Schocken/Pantheon, 2012), her Eisner-nominated graphic novel about life in New
York City’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, to her
collections of short fiction and nonfiction You Are Not A Guest (Field
Mouse Press, 2023) and We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big
Planet, 2016), to her new graphic novel Victory Parade (to be published
by Schocken/Pantheon in April 2024) which is described on her website as “a
story about WWII, women's wrestling, and the astral plane over Buchenwald.” To
which one could add such prominent themes as migration and diaspora, racism and
antisemitism, brutal social hierarchies, authoritarianism, predatory patriarchy
and sexual exploitation, and the many grey areas of life, including in the
country that some consider to be “the world’s greatest democracy.”
Corman’s art is striking. She has
been working with watercolor for about a decade now, a technical and aesthetic
choice that underscores the sensory or haptic quality of this entirely
hand-made graphic novel (apart from the lettering – cf. my upcoming interview). It creates a
sense of intimacy with the characters, enables the reader to feel the
tenderness of the author not only for her protagonists, but also for the
survivors and the dead that haunt the concentration camp – and the Jewish
American soldier who has returned to civilian life. Her work is beautiful, but
not beautifying: as discussed in the interview, Corman presents us with a cast
of de-idealized and highly expressive figures.
Corman does a lot of research for
her graphic stories, and Victory Parade, which could be described as
part fantasy and part historical novel, is no exception: it is full of
references, both visual and narrative, not only to the events, but also to the
culture and arts of the time, such as Germany’s Bauhaus and New Objectivity,
the musicals of Busby Berkeley, propaganda posters or period beer cans. It is
also informed by Corman’s family history.
Fig. 2 - Victory
Parade, page 95. © Leela Corman 2023
As in Unterzakhn, the female
characters in Victory Parade are resourceful and impressively powerful –
indeed Ruth, the wrestler, is something of a superhero – but as a social group,
they are rather low in the hierarchy. This is reflected in the very structure
of the book, which first focuses on women (Rose the welder and her colleagues;
her daughter Eleanor; Ruth/Rifche, a young Jewish refugee from Germany who
lives with Rose), who are central to the story as they are to the war industry
for a while – until the soldiers come home, the women are sent back to the
kitchen, and Sam (the husband Rose doesn’t love) comes home after having participated
in the liberation of Buchenwald, and takes center stage in the narrative. With
the exception of the several scenes where Rose and her lover George share
intimate and tender moments, sexuality is generally conflictual or predatory in
Victory Parade: the book opens on a scene of sexual harassment, and it
is ubiquitous, violent and ultimately deadly for Roses’s friend Pearl – as it
is, indirectly, for Ruth who was sexually exploited as a child in Germany.
It is fascinating to read Victory
Parade in light of Corman’s autobiographical and nonfiction work, which
brings to light the more specific and personal meaning of a number of details,
images, and symbols. In her graphic narratives, trauma is embodied in the
figure of falling, drowning or immersed women who are alternately crushed, distraught,
sinister, or empowering – just as nature, the forest in particular, is an
ambivalent space, “a place of trauma as much as refuge” (You Are Not A Guest, p. 3). Traumatic loss and multigenerational trauma run through Corman’s
autobiographical stories, as in “Yahrzeit” (in We All Wish For Deadly Force,
unpaginated), in “Blood Road,” where the figure of the artist braces herself
for “an epigenetic storm” as she plans to visit Buchenwald (You Are Not A
Guest, p. 22) and in the story that gives the 2023 collection its name, when
she visits the Polish town where many of her ancestors were murdered in 1942. In
those stories – as is the case for Victory Parade’s Ruth who is
described by another character as having “the look of a ghost with ashes in her
shoes” (36) – trauma is often impossible to articulate, but it doesn’t go away,
it persists as hallucination, after-image, as specters or the undead, limbs and
bodies hiding in the woods, coming out of the ground or the sky who accompany,
soothe, or bully, Leela Corman’s characters. And so, in the last section of Victory
Parade, she addresses, in painful and tender detail, the central trauma running
through the generations in her maternal family, and in many others – the Holocaust.
The manner in which she chooses to
address it, in a thirty-page episode focusing on the so-called “liberation” of
a camp by young, unprepared American soldiers, points to a central trope in the
book, indeed, in its very cover: the coexistence of two unimaginably opposed experiences,
two continents, one ravaged by brutal, genocidal war and another whose people
were far from unconcerned or uninformed, but where ordinary life did not change
drastically. The superimposition is symbolized in the uncanny figure of the
skull-faced pin-up in a pink bathing suit, legs dangling above a pile of
corpses; smoking and blowing toxic, deadly-looking fumes that form the
background to the word “Victory,” she puts its antiphrastic quality into relief.
The “victory” announced by Harry Truman
on May 8, 1945 (we see Rose listening to his speech on the radio, p. 119) is
bitter in the narrative as well: not only does it signal the end of Rose’s
relative freedom, but it also heralds the end of innocence or ignorance, the
revelations of the extent of Nazi horrors, the confirmation of the fates of
relatives left behind in Europe… The antiphrasis is also a comment on political
hypocrisy and cynicism, exemplified by that very same speech, in which Truman promises
to “build an abiding peace, a peace rooted in justice and in law,” mere weeks
before giving the order to launch atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Although that episode is left out, its “off-frame” presence is hard to miss,
and is confirmed (again, elliptically) in the concluding quote by Japanese
photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu.
After the preceding paragraphs, it
may come as a surprise to read that Victory Parade is not devoid of
humor – humor which is neither gratuitous nor mere comic relief, as when Corman
offers her readers moments of unexpected, highly political and very dark comedy.
She not only dares to tackle Nazi concentration and extermination camps, a
topic which is notoriously hard to do right, without trivializing or
sensationalizing one of the worst episodes in human history. But, in the mode
of Roberto Benigni’s controversial 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, she
dares to do so in a passage that she calls the “Busby Berkeley death scene,”
(p. 172) superimposing the camp and the type of light, extremely popular
entertainment that came out of Hollywood throughout the war years.
Leela Corman’s graphic novels are
both historical and topical – in Unterzakhn, before Roe was overturned,
she reminded her readers of the reasons why access to abortion is a matter of
life and death; today, with Victory Parade, she wants us to remember what
tyrannical supremacy and the murderous maligning of the racial Other actually
mean – and warns us against going on with our lives as though nothing were
amiss while the humanity of others is being denied.
Hélène Tison is associate professor at the University of Tours (France)
and is the author of
Female Cartoonists in the United States: Bad
Girls and Invisible Women (Routledge,
2022).
Read Dr. Tison's interview with Leela Corman.
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