Jerusalem: A Family Portrait
*Starred Review* Chronicling the birth of a country so long torn by strife, Jerusalem is, fittingly, a war story. Taking place in the mid- to late 1940s, as Israel struggled to establish itself as a Jewish nation, it is about both the war against British occupiers and Palestinian residents and the story of a family at war with itself. The Halaby family—angry, stubborn, fractious, but ultimately fiercely committed—proves effective both as metaphor for the strife and as a way to put a human face on a much larger piece of history, with individual characters able to illicit both livid frustration and deep sympathy. In a visually dazzling move, Bertozzi (Louis and Clark, 2011) embraces artistic styles with conceptual connections to the material. His work shares gray tones and idiosyncratically humanistic character lines with Will Eisner’s—a pioneer of Jewish realism in comics—and the battle scenes, of which there are many, are deftly suspenseful but also highlight the tragic cost of warfare, a balance perfected by EC’s classic Two-Fisted Tales. Though it does include a two-page primer on the political history of the region, this is most powerful for investing a massive and complex issue with real human emotion. --Jesse Karp