In their debut graphic memoir, Heavyweight (William Morrow, June), cartoonist Solomon J. Brager mines family history to draw lines between the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples by German colonial forces in South West Africa in the early 1900s and the Holocaust. A historian and educator, Brager spoke with PW about their hopes for using memory and narrative to create a more inclusive culture—one with ample humor and creativity.

You poke gentle fun at the standard Holocaust education that Jewish kids receive, as in the scene where your Hebrew school teacher thinks you’re crying about the Holocaust, but it’s actually because you have a toenail in your eye. Did it ever feel like stepping on a live wire?

Part of it is poking fun at myself. I know I can come across as very serious—I have a PhD and study trauma and genocide—but I am also a doofus who draws cartoons. I’m really beholden to and in love with the history of Jewish comedy. Mel Brooks always said, “You can’t make fun of the Holocaust, but you can make fun of Nazis.” I feel like I’m making fun of the container and the power structures.

Also, I’m very critical of the way that Holocaust education is being implemented and being used in Jewish communities today and outside of Jewish communities today. Punching up to that is important.

Your partner, Charles, plays a grounding presence when your character is deeply immersed. How did you develop their role in the book?

Charles will joke about how I use them in the book. They say, “I would never wear that shirt. I did not say that.” But this project evolved during lockdown in 2020, and we were both working from home on book projects. Their book is about disco and gay culture and it’s really fun. There’s a scene where I’m reading about death marches and deportations and they were like, “Come hang out.” And I’m like, [sobbing noise].

You quote Aimé Césaire saying, “Before they were its victims, they were its accomplices.” What are your theories on why German colonization of Africa is rarely connected to the Holocaust?

Particularly after the 1960s, the Holocaust takes on a “big lights” place in cultural memory in Germany, in Jewish memory, and in the United States. And it knocks out other memory projects. That included the way that, for example, anti-Blackness, anti-Roma sentiment, homophobia, all these other -isms continued to function unabated in German society after World War II.

The Holocaust doesn’t come out of nowhere. There’s something that precedes and leads into it and structures it. Some of the key Nazi figures, their parents worked in the colonies. Eugen Fischer was doing all this eugenic research in Africa and then created Nazi sterilization programs.

This is a book about intersections of class, race, and religion. Does, or how does, your own experience with gender transition inform the way you see history?

Being queer or any alternative identity that takes you outside of the normative family structure or creates an early division between you and your community has the possibility of opening you up to other ways of thinking and questioning. I think that’s why a lot of queer and trans people are in progressive organizing or are doing critical history or are in comics.

It’s almost impossible to read this book and not think about what’s happening in Gaza. What kinds of conversations have come up about the present-day world?

The reason I had time to write this book is because I was fired from my high school teaching job for tweeting that I didn’t support ethnonationalist projects. I’m trying to expand the idea of what Holocaust memory contains and what Jewish identity means in the present, because I see it being very limited. I hope I’m providing a narrative structure or set of tools for people to tell their own stories and make connections, and to create another Jewish culture.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.