Embodied Memory: A Graphic Memoir

Karina Shore's graphic novel, written in English and published in the United States, describes her experiences as a child and teenager who immigrated from Russia to Israel. It contains difficulty, repression and triggers of every kind, depicted with wonderful, painful and honest graphics.

Karina Shore | Silence, Full stop: A Memoir, Street Noise Books, New York; 2023

first publication (in Heb.) February 12, 2024.

Aveilable in English.

Karina Shore's graphic memoir is a painful, deep and honest text. It's also, and sorry for the strange phrasing, one of the most graphic graphic novels I've read. Every physical sensation in the body is translated into tangible, colorful and sharp illustration. Every emotion is depicted in precise, detailed and turbulent drawing. And since there's a lot of body and a lot of soul in this book, it accumulates to an extreme overload. Its synopsis makes clear that there will be no shortage of triggers to beware of here: trauma, sexual violence, drugs, drug addiction, sex and eating disorders.

Karina Shore is the pen name of Israeli illustrator Alina Gorban, and the novel published a few months ago in English in the United States presents the coming-of-age story of her adolescence in Israel of the '80s and '90s. Under the title Silence, Full Stop, she notes that this is a memoir and not an autobiography, which indeed allowed her the freedom to deal with memories, to break free from chronology when needed, and to give space to associative writing as well. The plot-chronological line is clear and continuous, from childhood in Kishinev to the end of adolescence, but also interwoven with dreams, thoughts, diary excerpts and memories from the past.

This works well, because the central concern in this novel is indeed the past and the way it's processed into life experiences. The narrator initially has a vague memory of something bad that happened in her childhood, some darkness associated with the first crumbling apartment where they lived when they first arrived in Israel, but it becomes clear layer by layer over the years. It's built in such a graduated and clever way, mimicking well the work of repression and extraction from there.

The opening memory is a memory of drowning in the sea. Surprisingly, no struggle, anxiety, or survival is described - but on the contrary - the absolute acceptance of nothingness, the tranquility and reconciliation with the situation is described. What hurts and is even violent is the renewed creation, the quick extraction from the water and the return to life. From this moment onward, the child and later the teenager will try to cope with her life from this initial knowledge - there is death, it is quiet and peaceful, and life - is what must be dealt with until then.

The temptation is enormous. Sylvia Plath wrote about this before, about the painful extraction from paradise, from the place where there was no pain, fear or doubt. She would need help from friends to understand what Karina would understand well only from her personal experience - on her flesh and with adolescence - that life is not great happiness, but you simply have to live and breathe to get through it. There's no choice.

Karina is an outsider from childhood, as a Jew in a world where there are only good (Russians) and bad (Germans), but this label will stay with her in Israel as well. She indeed immigrated to Israel with her parents and older sister, and also with the entire extended family, but from the beginning this framework didn't provide her with the necessary envelope. They were no longer "Jews" but were definitely "Russians," things were expensive and incomprehensible, they lived in a ruined and miserable neighborhood above garages. All this was somehow okay, "until that thing happened. The thing we never talked about."

The landscape is Israeli, the houses, the streets, the antennas and water heaters on the rooftops. Growing up in the '90s is connected to the big world and therefore the cultural contexts are accordingly. It's clear she doesn't listen to Mashina, but to System of a Down and Air. The book is written in English, even though this isn't a language spoken in the novel at all - the characters in it speak Hebrew most of the time.

In two places there's expression of foreign languages: Russian - when describing the kindergarten she attended in her homeland and learned a Pushkin children's song (then there's a translation within the text); and Hebrew - on the first day of class here (which isn't translated) to emphasize the foreignness and the little girl's lack of understanding. This works well, but also clearly marks the target audience. This also happens when there's suddenly something that maybe won't be understood outside Israel like Yom Kippur or the Gulf War, or the Russian custom "to sit for the road," which get a footnote below with explanation.

The Gulf War that begins a few weeks after their arrival only emphasizes the foreignness. They don't understand, the older sister has to translate for the parents as best she can, the narrator doesn't even know she's supposed to decorate the cardboard of the gas mask, and certainly can't ask the parents to buy stickers. The situation improves a bit over time, they move to a slightly better neighborhood, she manages to get shoes from America and cable TV, but it was a bit too much and too late, and the "outsider" label had already stuck to her - from society's perspective, but mainly from her own self-perception.

In any case, this is the world that's familiar to her, and only toward the end of the novel does she develop hatred for this place, but one that's not specific but integrated into the general hatred she feels: "Everyone here is fucking boring, and also a rapist or racist. Or both."

This is a coming-of-age novel, and therefore naturally, it contains countless references to the changing body. To weight, to chest, to body image, to braces, to dental bridge, to developing sexuality. It's so alive. Every emotion and sensation is described in strong illustration; you can almost feel the blood draining from her face and spilling on the floor in the exciting moment of shoplifting, her coughing after the first cigarette, the way the belly protrudes from the jeans and the hands trying to hide it.

The secret that needs to be repressed manages to stay there, until the moment she begins to experience sexuality as an adolescent. It's a terrible thought that there's a connection between sexual violence and first innocent sexual manifestations, and it gets horrifying expression in the novel. The first kiss with the first love floods her with memory. In the novel this appears simultaneously on one page, of black fingers wrapping around a little girl. The page after shows obsessive cleaning of face, teeth, hands, that doesn't match the moment of returning home from the first kiss. Something breaks in her. These three pages are so precise, and again, so clear in their physicality.

An even stronger punch to the gut comes immediately after: "Everything erupted from me like a volcano. Ten years of silence. [...] Dad didn't believe I remembered it [...] I saw in my family's eyes that they hurt like me. That they hurt like then." As a child, she had the power to extract herself from the situation, to tell everything to the adults around her, immediately and without filters and even to complain to the police, but she was asked to be silent, for her own good and for her parents' sake, so she closed the secret deep inside her. She understands that "it's mine now. All this ocean."

The addiction to excitement combines diverse experiences - grass, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, Ritalin and everything else that exists in her environment, with constant search for sex with men. A long line of men's face parts makes clear that there's nothing in her heart for the person she's with, only the desire that they be attracted to her.

Ironically, her first exposure to smoking and drugs was through school. As part of social studies classes and drug prevention programs (which I hope have improved since the '90s) they watch the movie "The Basketball Diaries" in class, and the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio gets high after first heroin use achieves at least for her the completely opposite result. The novel emphasizes the beauty and liveliness of running in the field of flowers, the wave of warmth that fills him and washes out all pain, guilt and sadness. "They say it can happen to anyone, but how can I make it happen to me?" she thinks and hopes to succeed one day in being disconnected from the world, free, light.

On another occasion and to demonstrate peer pressure, all students are invited to a party in the school shelter, and given joints with sawdust to smoke and cough. At this stage none of the teachers or students worry that specifically she will fall into drugs, and this is exactly one of the things that pushes her there, "to show them" that she can lie, steal, do drugs, die.

The first experimentation with smoking and crossing boundaries is with Sigal, the best friend from childhood. She's the one who exposed her to local food (hummus, pita and pickled cucumber) and relevant culture (Barbies, Gulf Watch, The Prince of Bel-Air). With Sigal she experiments with smoking, understands what it means "to dress sexy," and learns how to steal a lighter and become addicted to excitement.

And here's a small demonstration of the thought behind every detail in this novel: she says "Like everything good in life, smoking was painful and repulsive at first. Then it tasted like freedom." Freedom feels like the smell of summer, colored in red-orange, connecting in a moment to the image of DiCaprio in the field of flowers. In this moment of warmth and freedom to do as she pleases, she was happy. This is the feeling she'll continue to search for until she succeeds in being just like him.

The addiction to excitement combines diverse experiences - grass, heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, Ritalin and everything else that exists in her environment, with constant search for sex with men. A long line of men's face parts makes clear that there's nothing in her heart for the person she's with, only the desire that they be attracted to her. Everything becomes meaningless, including her desires: "Yesterday I asked for a hug and instead got two hickeys on my neck to remind me that no one cares what I want." Since this novel excels in its visuality, every drug experience is described differently: ecstasy makes everything colorful, melting, noisy. Heroin disconnects from reality to a romantic, melancholic dream where nothing is needed.

"I wanted to binge on everything and then throw it all up. The obsession with getting clean required getting dirty first." She meets more and more terrible men. A horrible and fragmented dream places her at different ages with men and more repulsive and evil men. Drug addiction is replaced by compulsive eating disorder, and after a few hard years the body can no longer take it and collapses. The book doesn't accompany her through the process of cleaning and recovery either. This happens partly in parallel with focusing on drawing and art, but that doesn't concern us at this stage.

The end of the book is so beautiful. It's vague, mysterious, open to interpretation, but communicates well with its opening, creating a complete circle. There's a return to basics, to breathing. Every breath pause is a little death, every renewed breath is a little recreation. A female cycle of birth, bleeding, adolescence, death. She writes: "Nothing is new, everything I simply continue in the infinite circle of pain and joy. What else is there, except to continue moving in the circle of breathing?" She dives into the water, into the trauma, and chooses to breathe, to return herself to the circle of life. And then, to release.

The dedication page at the book's opening makes clear that the piece of life described in it shaped the creator's life, and now she's ready to leave it behind. With the end of this painful and powerful novel, one can only wish her exactly that and wait for the next novel already in progress.