Yossel: April 19, 1943, by Joe Kubert. ibooks, inc. New York, 2003. 978-1594970917

Summary: A narrative of the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, told through the eyes and drawings of a young teenage boy.

Analysis: This and other tragic episodes in histor

ical fiction/autobiography have had me thinking about different ways that these books "work". Most tend to give the reader some form of narrative shield to blunt the blow a little, besides the obvious one of it being just a book.Safe Area Gorazde hands the reader journalistic protection along with the narrator. Deogratias is told as a reminiscence (so you know at least some people survived to make a normal-seeming society) and is technically fiction, so while you know that similar horrible things happen to real people, these particular people are not real and thus you are not obligated to feel quite as bad about them. Maus, Mendel's Daughter, and Barefoot Gen are autobiographical, which is on the one hand worse, because you "know" the main character, but on the other hand, you know that at least one person gets out of the situation in good enough shape to write/tell the book. Maus also uses anthropomorphic animals, who are remarkably empathetic, but also give the reader the perceived safety of cartoons to retreat to. Yossel, in contrast, gives the reader only the flimsy shelter of the pencil sketches which don't let you see very much detail. This type of fictionalized narrative of a historical event combines the bleakest of both worlds -- you know that it actually happened to real people, but since the specific people aren't real, none of them have to get out of the book alive. And while the sketches aren't detailed, that just makes them more evocative, as they're distilled down to the essence of the scene he's trying to portray.

Illustrations: Soft pencil sketches...Kubert says in his introduction that he normally would have followed up with pen and ink, but after the first couple of sketches he decided that the roughness of the result gave it an immediacy that he liked.

Rating: 5Q/4P

Curricular connections: 10-12th grade unit on the Holocaust.

--SLH