Starred Review ALA Booklist (Wed Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2006)

Starred Review The burgeoning popularity of graphic novels has opened the door to new voices with compelling stories and artistic skills to match; for example, 63-year-old animator Katin, whose remarkable debut this is. It is a memoir recounting how she and her mother faked their deaths and fled Budapest after the Nazis occupied the city. With forged papers obtained from a black marketer, they escaped to the countryside in the guise of a servant girl and her illegitimate child. Katin relates their harrowing lives there and her mother's desperate search for her missing husband after the war. Brief passages set decades later reveal how Katin's traumatic experiences left her without any religious faith to pass on to her own child. The events she reports are powerful in themselves, and her sensitive, softly expressive drawings and straightforward storytelling, both reminiscent of Raymond Briggs in Ethel & Ernest (1999), about an English couple during the same period, are likewise effective in conveying violent wartime battles, her mother's emotionally distressing choices, and rare quiet interludes. Moreover, Katin's understatement makes the story all the more chilling and heartbreaking. This impressive book belongs in all serious graphic novel collections and is also a natural for Jewish studies.

Starred Review for Publishers Weekly (Thu Apr 28 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

This moving WWII memoir is the debut graphic novel from Katin, an animator for Disney and MTV. It tells the story of toddler Katin—here called Lisa—and her mother, Esther Levy, Hungarian Jews who must flee Nazi persecution. With her husband off fighting in the Hungarian army, Esther is forced to abandon all their belongings and take on the identity of a servant girl with a bastard child. She survives however she can—whether making alterations on the bloodstained uniforms of dead soldiers or surrendering her body to an adulterous German officer. Katin shows Esther's harrowing experiences with an objective eye, but her own experience of the time is the fragmented memory of a child; unable to understand the vast tragedy unfolding around her, she focuses on the loss of a pet dog. The story flashes forward to the '70s and even later to show the long-term effects on Katin and her family's faith. Katin's art is an impressionistic swirl; early scenes in sophisticated Budapest recall the elegance of Helen Hokinson, while the chaos of war is captured in dark, chaotic compositions reminiscent of Kathe Kollwitz. This book is a powerful reminder of the lingering price of survival. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(May)

Kirkus Reviews

Mother and daughter go on the run in Nazi-occupied Hungary, then endure the Russian occupation. It would be difficult to conceive of Katin's debut as anything but a graphic novel, given the strength of its visuals, but a straight-text approach might have been wiser. Her story is obviously dramatic. In Budapest circa 1944, when Miriam is a young girl, her mother, Esther, decides to avoid the impending Nazi roundup of Jews by faking their deaths and escaping to the countryside with forged papers. But things hardly improve outside the city, where villagers treat them no better in their new identities, taking their dark features to mean they're gypsies. To make matters worse, a Nazi officer quickly figures out the Katins' secret and uses it as a means of prying sexual favors from Esther. Hard circumstances turn desperate once the Red Army sweeps through, exhibiting the morals of drunken Vikings; Esther joins the starving, freezing villagers as they take clothes off soldiers' corpses. She does her best to conceal all these horrific events from little Miriam, though the best she can manage is to induce a sort of baffled confusion. Katin's episodic approach conveys events with an admirable economy at times, but often just hurries the reader through situations that could have used more explanation or context. The artwork's smeared, sketchy quality contributes to this sense of undue haste. It may be that Katin chose the graphic form because of her background (she was a graphic artist in Israel and a background designer for Disney and MTV) rather than because it was the best vehicle for her story. However, the author's pain is difficult to ignore, regardless of the limitations of her approach and her sometimes melodramatic tone. A problematic but powerful Holocaust survival memoir.

Voice of Youth Advocates

Hungarian Jews did not experience the direct effects of Nazi genocide until late in the war. In Katin's memoir, the story of her mother's and her own flight from their middle class life in Budapest begins in1944. Jews have been ordered to surrender their pets. Barely three-year-old Lisa-the child Katin was-is relatively well protected from the first of what will be a string of losses of beloved dogs in her life, but the reader follows her mother on the cruel and absurd mission to obey the law by handing over Rexxy and then going home to list the contents of their apartment, which also must be abandoned. Across the next year, mother and daughter hide as Christian peasants, meet Russians who rape many villagers whom they are liberating (including Lisa's mother), wander war-scarred Europe, and are miraculously reunited with Lisa's father. Katin recounts this story in soft pencil, using color only in those moments when the flag under which her destiny lies changes as those in power change, and to highlight brief scenes from her adult life as she tries to understand how to inculcate faith in her own young child. Without the allegorical distance of Art Spiegelman's Maus (Pantheon, 1986), Katin's story shares some of its themes, including wrestling with faith against the memory of annihilation, the roles that parenthood plays for the grown child and that adult child's relationship with the previous generation, and an unerring balance between image and well-chosen word, making it impossible for the reader to stop moving where the story goes, despite its pain and unvarnished truth.-Francisca Goldsmith.