Solomon Brager: Don’t Count on Sticking to Your Timeline

Solomon J. Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Their comics and research have appeared in The Nib, Jewish Currents, ArtForum, World War III Illustrated, Pinko Magazine, Refract Journal, and The New Inquiry, among other publications. They hold a PhD from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and teach as adjunct faculty in history, media, and gender studies. Follow them on X (Twitter) and Instagram.

Solomon Brager

Photo by Solomon Brager

In this interview, Solomon discusses which historical moments were most important to include and which to leave out in their new graphic memoir, Heavyweight, their hope for readers, and more!

Name: Solomon Brager
Literary agent: Aemilia Phillips
Book title: Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Release date: June 25, 2024
Genre/category: Nonfiction Comics/ Graphic Memoir
Elevator pitch: A graphic memoir exploring inherited trauma, family history, and the ever-shifting understanding of our own identities, for readers of Gender Queer and I Was Their American Dream.

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What prompted you to write this book?

In 2019, when I started thinking about Heavyweight, I was teaching high school history in New York after finishing my PhD the year before and had just started moving from self-publishing comics to placing comics in venues like The Nib. Liz Frances from Street Noise Books came up to me at a comics fair and told me I should write a book. We talked a little bit about doing something about the histories that I was teaching my students—particularly settler colonial history. I hadn’t even thought about doing a book before that, and started playing with the idea of that.

But in the spring of 2020, I was fired from my teaching job after a public smear campaign accusing me of antisemitism because I had posted critiques of Israeli nation-state law and support for the BDS movement. In the period after that, I turned back to my doctoral research on the afterlives of the Holocaust and other colonial genocides, to my own family experience escaping Nazi Germany, and to nonfiction comics as a way to figure things out and make meaning out of confusing circumstances.

I drew a comic for Jewish Currents magazine in April 2020 called “Heavyweight,” that was about my great-grandfather, Erich Levi, who was a heavyweight boxing champion that beat up Nazis in the 1930s. He didn’t do that because it was great political strategy, but because they pissed him off. I wanted to think about the effect of behaving badly in response to injustice, and to think about what I had inherited from this mythic figure in my own family. It was a pretty short comic, and I felt like I had a lot more to say about Erich Levi, and a lot of questions I wanted to answer, and the idea for the book unfolded from there.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

The comic for Jewish Currents was published in April of 2020. In August of 2020 I emailed Liz at Street Noise Books, who was very complimentary but passed on the project. In September, a friend put me in touch with my original agent, Ross Harris (who has since left agenting for a new career). Ross walked me through the process of putting together a book proposal, which included a 25-page inked chapter of the book (which I ended up totally redoing later!). I finished that in January and we sold the book in March to William Morrow. I think the original contract had a one-year turnaround time for the whole project, which was incredibly optimistic! It took about a year to write the book, and another year to ink it.

The idea for the book remained pretty constant, but the thing that changed the most was the scope of the book, which was—and I think still is—pretty ambitious. Because I’m zooming out from this one story to try to tell a much longer historical story, I had to really think about which historical episodes were important to include and which ones I had to hold back. During the editorial process I also got a lot of feedback about putting myself in the story more, to help the reader enter those historical and even theoretical frameworks I’m throwing at them. I was a little resistant, but it ended up making the story much more accessible.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Because this is my first book, everything felt like a learning moment. I also had the really pleasant surprise of having a publisher that has been incredibly supportive of the project I wanted to make—I was expecting more pushback or anxiety about publishing trans stories, or even basic history, which is being banned all over the U.S. Some were just things I didn’t know, like that you don’t get your whole advance all at once. Some were things I didn’t think about, like we didn’t have a conversation about how the art for the book would be scanned until the art was done.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

The biggest surprise was (and this is maybe a spoiler) the appearance of my great-grandfather as a voice in the narrative. I didn’t even think about it, there was just a moment where he showed up and started talking, and I went with it. It’s the biggest foray into fantasy in what is otherwise a very nonfiction book, but I think it allowed me to access something very true.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

Heavyweight both insists on the specificity of individual stories and on zooming out in the historical narrative— you can get a much better understanding of how and why things happen if you look at a transnational story that includes not just the Holocaust but, crucially, European colonialism, the ideological structures that produce violence across sites. I write in the book that my family’s story isn’t unique, it’s only specific. I think ultimately, I want to say to readers, “Here’s my family’s story, now tell me yours, and let’s see what we can do together.”

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Don’t count on sticking to your timeline. Give yourself at least double the amount of time you thought it would take! And as part of this, have other sources of income to get you through the process.

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