Description

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The journey of a Jewish partisan during the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is an event greater than the sum of the survivor testimonies and the stories of its six million victims. It is an event beyond the capacity of the human brain to contain. It deserves to be described not only in testimonies and documentation, but in legends.

Judessey depicts the journey of Leon, a Jewish professor from Poland who finds himself in the midst of World War II, who strives to find his way home while battling the monsters of Europe. An epic tale of a Jewish partisan whose family is taken away by the Nazis, this graphic novella shares a new way of engaging with the Holocaust. Judessey expresses the biggest trauma of our time through dialogue with the Odyssey, which has inspired so many human journeys.

About the Author

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Shay Charka is an illustrator for various renowned Hebrew authors and a wide range of publishing houses. He publishes weekly cartoons, caricatures, and illustrations in Makor Rishon, an Israeli magazine, and has published twenty comics books and graphic novels—two of which have been translated into English and published abroad. Charka’s comics albums are mainly inspired from Judaism and Jewish sources, as well as from daily life in Israel. He was the 2019 Animix Notable, an international animation, comics, and cartoon festival held in Israel.

Shay Charka also lectures on visual language to a variety of audiences at national and private institutions, museums, festivals, educational bodies, and cultural centers in Israel and abroad.

Praise For…

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“Odysseus, that lucky bastard, had to travel far and wide to meet and best his monsters. Leon, the hero of Shay Charka’s masterful and intense graphic novel, wasn’t so lucky: the monsters, wearing jackboots and swastikas, came to him, devouring his family and everything else he held dear. Gorgeous, profound, and tragically timely, Judessey is a reminder that Jews are forever called to rise up and resist their pursuers, and are forever busy returning to their indigenous homeland, Israel. This epic, hallelujah, places Charka where he belongs, in the front row of comics greats, an artist whose ideas are as stirring as his artwork is transcendent.”
— Liel Leibovitz, Editor at Large, Tablet Magazine