On Leela Corman’s “Victory Parade”

May 8 is V-E Day, and it seemed to me the appropriate time for a little plug for Leela Corman’s terrific new graphic novel Victory Parade.

The book continues two themes explored in her previous Unterzakhn (2012), the historic ties that bind European and American Jewry, and the struggles of women: anytime, anyplace, anywhere. This one follows several characters on the home front during the last days of World War 2 and the immediate post-war period. As you might glean from the cover, the title is ironic. Confetti, cheers, and dancing in the streets are not what this is about. As with Unterzakhn, the tone is somber and fatalistic, punctuated on occasion by grim humor. Homefront gals on the assembly line trying to survive (and keep their dignity). An orphaned refugee who managed to escape Nazi Germany but appears doomed anyway. An army veteran haunted by the horrific sights in the concentration camps. Fans of GLOW will be glad to come across a subplot involving female professional wrestling, though even that is not precisely light hearted.

As human beings living through history we are taught to draw hard lines between time periods. But for most of those who live through the events, it’s rarely cut and dried. Memory will out. Does anyone really ever escape or “move on”? And what precisely was the “victory”? The Allies did indeed defeat Nazi Germany and liberate the inmates of the camps. But neither anti-Semitism, nor racism, nor concentration camps, nor war, nor oppression, nor Man’s Humanity to Man have receded. Horrible wars continue to rage in Europe and the Levant and elsewhere around the globe even as we speak. The “Victory”, Corman seems to imply in this wise and moving book, is the ability to go on at all in spite of the seeming hopelessness of it all. Corman has known great shock and sorrow and despair herself, and in her brave telling of it she speaks of “The Wound That Never Heals“. Refusing to knuckle under in a world of such dark realities is in itself some kind of triumph.