Jerusalem: The Story of a City and a Family - Hardcover

Yakin, Boaz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596435755 ISBN 13: 9781596435759

Publisher: First Second, 2013

Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Jerusalem is a sweeping, epic graphic novel that follows a single family―three generations and fifteen very different people―as they are swept up in chaos, war, and nation-making from 1940-1948. Faith, family, and politics are the heady mix that fuel this ambitious, cinematic graphic novel.

With Jerusalem, author-filmmaker Boaz Yakin turns his finely-honed storytelling skills to a topic near to his heart: Yakin's family lived in Palestine during this period and was caught up in the turmoil of war just as his characters are. This is a personal work, but it is not a book with a political ax to grind. Rather, this comic seeks to tell the stories of a huge cast of memorable characters as they wrestle with a time when nothing was clear and no path was smooth.

About this title

About the Author

Boaz Yakin is a screenwriter and film director based in New York City. Yakin studied filmmaking at New York City College and New York University. As a producer he has been involved in bringing projects as diverse as Hostel and the award-winning Bombay Beach to the screen. His first graphic novel published by First Second, was Marathon with Joe Infurnari.
Nick Bertozzi lives in Queens, NY, with his wife and daughters and is the author and artist of many other cartoon stories, among them The Salon, Houdini: The Handcuff King, and First Second's Lewis & Clark and Stuffed! He is a teacher at the School of Visual Arts.

From Booklist

*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

About this edition

• Publisher: First Second
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1596435755
• ISBN 13: 9781596435759
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400
• Illustrator: Bertozzi Nick