Germaine's Daughter tells a universal story of overcoming trauma through the lens of one family over three generations. In one hundred dramatic images and text, this graphic novel follows Germaine as she survives the Holocaust in France but succumbs to psychosis in her new life in America. Her daughter, driven to become an 'all-American girl,' struggles to be a good enough daughter while living her own war at home alone with her sick mother.
The daughter remains deeply connected to her mother throughout her long, challenging life, and, once the daughter's own sons grow up, she goes searching for the story that she never knew — How did her mom survive the war? What she uncovers surprises her — about Parisian political meetings and a passionate affair, about Nazi Europe and lost relatives.
Through her work as a psychotherapist, the daughter discovers the healing gift of helping others overcome their own adversity. As an artist and writer, she finds the solace of telling stories. While her life and her sons' lives open to a world of abundance and gratitude, she is compelled to understand, What transforms suffering into a life of meaning and beauty?
The full-color images that accompany the text are not traditional comic panels but adaptations of large-scale paintings. Their dramatic size and emotional intensity give the story a unique visual language, making the book both a narrative and an art experience. The result is a fusion of history, visual art, and literature that invites readers into an intimate, transformative journey. This is a graphic novel about the overcoming, the move from the darkness to the light over time.
Lydia Kann is an artist, writer, and psychotherapist who often integrates prose into her visual art. She has attended many artist residencies in the U.S. and France, including summer 2025 and a year 2017-2018 at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, where she started this novel. Her job as a psychotherapist deeply influences her creative work. For Lydia, art is about sparking connections — between people, places, and stories.
Lydia exhibits widely in museums, universities, and galleries in Los Angeles and New England, and publishes in literary journals. She is active in the arts community, is a member of art collectives, leads critique groups, has created art in the schools, and has made public art.
She has been bicoastal since childhood, growing up in New York City and Los Angeles. Lydia lived in Western Massachusetts for many years and recently returned to L.A. to fulfill her lifelong dream of waking to the sound of the sea.
Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and writer in Los Angeles, CA. A contributor to the Village Voice, Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications, she was the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly from 2018-24.
"The War Inside: Lydia Kann's Inheritance of Memory. There are stories that live in our bones before we learn their words. In Germaine's Daughter, Lydia Kann gives powerful form to the lingering, mutating aftershocks of historical trauma as it reverberates through three generations, rendered with both formal vigor and narrative compassion. Bridging the personal and the political with unapologetic intimacy, what we have witnessed is not illustration — it's revelation... The deep roots of art historical stylizations in the paintings in Germaine's Daughter recall the seminal work of artists from Edward Munch and Kathe Kollwitz to Art Spiegelman and Leon Golub... That is the quiet power of Germaine's Daughter. It doesn't scream. It pulses. It aches. It gathers the scattered fragments of memory, family, and place, and composes them into an embodied archive — not to resolve history, but to hold it differently." — Shana Nys Dambrot, art critic, curator, author, Afterword of graphic novel, Germaine's Daughter.
"I was deeply moved by Lydia Kann's evocative graphic novel, Germaine's Daughter. The book tells the story of Germaine, born Zelda, a Jewish survivor of war-torn Europe. Germaine settles in New York, has a daughter, and eventually loses her mind. From that daughter's confusion and guilt emerges a story full of questions and heartbreak. 'Being in this world means facing a series of unpredictable calamities. Like the war,' our narrator, who has never been through the war but nevertheless has always lived tightly bound to it, tells us. Kann's surrealist illustrations—mini-paintings, really—are drawn in a style reminiscent of artists and storytellers like Edvard Munch, Renée French, and Charlotte Salomon. Like Salomon's famous work, Kann's book reveals a narrator's search for the right mix of visual and verbal metaphors to convey the full force of melancholia and madness passed over generations ('I long for books about crazy people,' the story begins). And like postmemorial storytellers from Art Spiegelman to Miriam Katin, Kann's expressions are not so much satisfying as complicating. Germaine's Daughter is a product of the exhaustive nature of vigilance and guilt mixed with the generative, stubborn vigor of longing and love. It will be an impressive, unusual, and most welcome addition to the genre of second-generation Holocaust literature." — Dr. Tahneer Oksman, Professor at Marymount Manhattan College, specializing in memoir, graphic novels and comics, author of How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?
"Lydia Kann's graphic novel paints an intimate portrait of her struggle to live a good and productive life despite being raised by a single schizophrenic mother who survived the holocaust in Nazi-occupied France. On the surface Lydia was like many other 16-year-old girls in 1960's New York City. She took long subway rides early every morning to attend a high school for gifted children. But unlike the others she spent her after school time at the main branch of New York's Public Library until it closed at midnight in order to avoid going home to her mother's snow-dusted, freezing apartment. Freezing because neighbors had thrown rocks through its windows in response to her mother's screaming. The novel is graced with Lydia's powerfully evocative drawings and pitch perfect narrative. Together they carry us beyond the depths of the Nazi holocaust and horrific psychological trauma by showing how much humans can overcome. In that manner Lydia Kann's novel becomes a testament to the power of resilience and familial love. I found it a stunning reminder of my life experience, and an inspiration." — Robert Meeropol, Author of An Execution in the Family, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed by the United States Government when he was six years old.
"Through her illustrations and prose, Lydia Kann lights a pathway through the unpredictable calamities of love and war. We are left with hope, the most unpredictable emotion of all." — Jacqueline Sheehan, New York Times bestselling author.
"Lydia Kann's graphic memoir vibrates with the pain and deep love of a daughter growing up in the shadow of her mother's descent into madness. Her haunting, dreamlike paintings illustrate the push and pull of her inner life, as she fights for a future of her own, while remaining the faithful protector of her war-ravaged mother. A beautiful, moving testament to the power of both love and self-preservation." — Susan Quinn, Author of Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady.
"This stunning graphic memoir underscores the deadly risks of intergenerational transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust and what it means for those 'born after.' It is the compelling life story of an American-born artist daughter, interwoven with the life of her fragile and mentally unstable mother, for whom in a typical role reversal between children of survivors and traumatized parents, she becomes a child-parent caretaker. The daughter ultimately comes to terms with her inherited trauma by confronting the familial Holocaust history and by restorying the trauma that her mother had tried to suppress. The compelling interaction, or what Art Spiegelman called 'co-mix' of text and image of the novel combine to afford a new and meaningful narrative within art discourse." — Louise O. Vasvári, Holocaust and Gender Studies, Prof. Emerita, Stony Brook University
"Through her fine pitch-perfect prose and haunting figures, Lydia Kann tells of a daughter giving voice to her mother's pain and suffering, as well as her own. She renders powerful illustrations of intergenerational transmission of trauma. Kann melds her knowledge of the psyche and unconscious as she actively participates in her own healing. We become witnesses who experience firsthand her pain, psychic growth, and development — indeed, her transformation. She ends her marvelous word and picture book triumphantly." — Dr. Samoan Barish, Psychoanalyst
"I've read dozens—perhaps hundreds—of novels and memoirs and accounts of the pogroms and the Holocaust. Few carry the strong simplicity of Germaine's Daughter, the sense of delving deep into the author's pain, memories, and research while never letting go of the thread of how suffering can transform into hope and beauty. [...] In an almost magical fusion of a complicated inheritance, her insights as a therapist, and her talent as an artist and writer, Kann has created a visual story of trauma and illness, of claiming selfhood, and of sharing her strength and hope with her sons and her readers." — Ellen Meeropol, author, Mom Egg Review: https://merliterary.com/book-reviews/
