Graphic novel and historical works win Canadian Jewish Literary Awards

TORONTO · The Canadian Jewish Literary Awards will be presented in Toronto on Oct. 25, recognizing works that explore histories of migration, displacement and survival. Among this year's winners are Danila Botha's graphic novel Vidal, which imagines the life of a Sephardic Jewish artist during the Holocaust, and historian Yolande Cohen's companion volumes tracing the migration of Moroccan Jews across countries and generations. Cohen's work won the award in the Scholarship category.

Botha, who has long used drawing and painting to develop characters, said the art became central to telling Vidal's story. "You could be lyrical on the page and you could write a description," Botha told The CJN. "Or you can use the art to show exactly what it felt like and what he experienced." The protagonist is a fictional artist whose life takes him from Tiberias to prewar Paris, into the Second World War and the resistance.

For Botha, colour, texture and perspective offered a way to convey not only what Vidal saw, but how he experienced the world. The images give readers access to the character's particular way of seeing, rather than simply illustrating a story that could be told in words. Botha said she was influenced by other artists who use illustration to tell Jewish stories, such as Ken Krimstein's When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers and the collection But I Live: Three Stories from Child Survivors of the Holocaust. Her research included material from Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as French antisemitic propaganda, resistance documents and the July 1942 Vel d'Hiv roundup in Paris. Botha imagined Vidal entering the lively Jewish artistic community in prewar Paris, which included figures like Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani. "It's incredibly heartbreaking to research, but also, it was a beautiful, vibrant, amazing scene, and I hope I captured that," she said.

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Some of Vidal's qualities have roots in Botha's family stories, drawing on aspects of her great-uncle Avner, including his optimism and charisma. She also grew up hearing relatives tell stories about their childhoods in Tiberias. Botha's own family history provided a personal counterpoint to the catastrophe she was researching, as her great-grandfather's work took the family to South Africa, where they were comparatively safe during the war. "There were whole communities that just disappeared," she said.

Historian Yolande Cohen's research began in the 1980s with stories close to home. She started interviewing older members of Montreal's Moroccan Jewish community, hoping to preserve memories that might otherwise be lost. The project led to a book published in 1987, but the response from some community members surprised her. "Why are you telling us what we already know?" people asked her.

Cohen told The CJN she saw a gap between what the community knew about its own experience and what had been recorded in published histories. The challenge, she said, was to keep asking questions and look beyond the familiar account. Her research expanded from asking why people had left Morocco to examining how they moved, including the routes they took, the policies that shaped their options and the conditions they encountered. Cohen's work traces journeys across countries and languages, while intersecting with her own family's path from Morocco to Montreal. What began as a project documenting the experiences of Moroccan Jewish neighbours grew into a broader body of scholarship, now recognized in the two awarded volumes.

With files from The Canadian Jewish News