Crossing Borders, Drawing Lives: Barbara Yelin's Graphic Novels

Crossing Borders, Drawing Lives: Barbara Yelin's Graphic Novels

January 10, 2023

On December 2, the Institute of European Studies in collaboration with the UC Berkeley Department of German, the Goethe Institut San Francisco, the German Consulate General San Francisco, the German Historical Institute Washington, and the UC Davis Department of German hosted a presentation of Barabara Yelin’s contribution to the graphic novel anthology, But I Live with discussion moderated by University of Arkansas’s Professor Brett Sterling. Yelin is a graphic novelist whose work focuses on German history and the Holocaust in particular. 

Yelin began her presentation by contextualizing her graphic novel first by explaining the origins of the project which brought her into contact with the novel’s subject, Emmie Arbel. Arbel is a Jewish woman born in the Netherlands who lived through the Holocaust. Yelin then read her story, which the anthology is named after, using slides to present the illustrations. 

The graphic novel uses Yelin’s interview with Arbel as a framing device for telling the story of Arbel’s childhood experience of the Holocaust. The illustrations depict Arbel, her brother, and mother being deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp in contrast with Arbel in the present surrounded by her children and grandchildren. Yelin’s illustrations done in watercolor bring Arbel’s story to life in the present and the past. 

Following her presentation, Yelin answered questions from Sterling and the audience on her relationship with Arbel, how she selected what to include in the graphic novel, and her artistic process of creating a complex story. When discussing the purpose of the project, Yelin explained how one person’s life shows us how events in the past are not just history and that people like Arbel are faced with the consequences every day . Yelin concluded with a short slideshow of illustrations about the experience of drawing and how it requires one to step into a different world.