Remember Us to Life. By Joanna Rubin Dranger. 432 pp. Ten Speed Graphic. 2025. $40.
Joanna Rubin Dranger presents a most compelling testament to uncovering truths about family, history and the present in her monumental graphic memoir, Remember Us to Life, the winner of The Nordic Council Literature Prize. As a young Jewish person growing up in Sweden, Dranger had simply assumed the best about the country she called home but an incident as a teenager triggered a lifetime of seeking answers. It was while taking part in a youth Christian workshop, that Dranger approached the priest leading the class. She asked if she could complete the course without going through the confirmation ritual. To that, the priest derisively said: “You Jews, you don’t evangelize, do you?” This struck her as cruel and unusual. Where was all this animosity coming from? Essentially, that is the question driving this book.
“For the building of a Jew-free Europe.”
Dranger’s quest leads her to uncovering the truth of how her Jewish relatives “disappeared” during World War II. Through her research, she comes to find a rich and vibrant family narrative and the devastating violence that led to their senseless murders. Her searching follows her family in Poland and Russia to their subsequent immigration to Sweden and Israel. Dranger also provides historical accounts of the persecution of Jewish people in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia prior to and during World War II, as well as the antisemitic policies and actions of the supposedly neutral government of Sweden. While it may sound harsh to suggest Sweden collaborated with Nazi Germany, history shows that the Swedish government kept meticulous records of its Jewish citizenry and reported that back to Nazi Germany.
The Evian Conference of 1938: zero tolerance on immigration.
History also shows that the U.S. Congress would not budge in allowing in more Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938 since it would interfere with their quotas, already set back in 1924. As Dranger explains, it was made clear during a meeting of thirty-two countries at a conference in Evian, France, in 1938, that even though countries might be sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish refugees, they would not tolerate anymore immigrants.
