Heavyweight is a memoir, an exploration of family trauma & how our identities can shift from victims of hatred to upholders of colonial violence, and a diligently researched historical legacy.

Solomon Brager is fascinated by the story of their great-grandfather, a boxing champion - and the various threads of their family who both escaped and died in Nazi Germany. They’re wondering about what they carry in their own body and mind, and what it means when you contextualize the Holocaust among larger historical patterns.

So they decide to find out as much as they can, and deliver a hauntingly beautiful portrait of family mythology. We bounce between Brager’s modern day discoveries and commentary, conversations with their grandfather and recorded conversations with their great-grandmother, reimaginings of family stories & piercing together lore from documents, and beyond.

It’s a new type of reflection on the Shoah, and while this is definitely a personal story (and Brager’s family is absolutely fascinating), it offers challenges and guiding questions to every reader, Jewish or not.

The organization (both of the throughline and the placement of artwork and panels and text on each page) was a little bit hard to follow at times, and sometimes I had to retrace a few sentences and flip back and forth to the opening family tree to truly understand what was happening. 

I appreciated the vulnerability and the humor, and the strong anti-Zionist commentary. And the research was truly impressive (coming from someone who has struggled to find threads on so many of my ancestors). However, it often felt like we hopped from topic to topic without truly diving deep and chewing on the uneasy questions this memoir asks. 

CW: murder (parent/child), death, antisemitism, racism, slurs, violence, genocide, transphobia, queerphobia, classism, colonization, deportation, grief, terminal illness, war

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(I received a free copy of this book; this is my honest review.)