Bernice Eisenstein grew up in Toronto as a self-confessed addict of the Holocaust. In her parents’ basement rec room, as her family viewed the Adolf Eichmann trial on television, she sensed the Holocaust’s power in the “trail of needlemarks on the forearms of each person in the room.” Throughout her childhood her family’s tragic connection to the Holocaust was ever-present though scarcely mentioned, a huge mystery she became passionately interested in solving. How did people who lived through such events reconcile them with the vapidity of North America in the 1950s, with weddings and bar mitzvahs, winters in Florida, summer holidays at Wasaga Beach?

Although it’s very different from Art Spiegelman’s now-classic Maus, Eisenstein’s own graphic memoir also employs visual forms more commonly associated with popular entertainment, to frame material that might otherwise be overwhelming. The hundreds of drawings on the pages run the gamut from haunting Chagall-like dreamscapes to comic-book sequences to black-and-white sketches based on family photographs. Speech bubbles abound. One section is an exception: Eisenstein’s transcription of her mother’s story, taped in 1995 for the Holocaust Project, is sparsely illustrated. Matter-of-fact and quietly horrific, it needs no enhancement or mediation.

An artist, writer, and editor, Eisenstein calls upon all her gifts to come to grips with the incomprehensible. I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is beautifully conceived and constructed, intimate and engrossing. Reverent and irreverent, at times wildly funny and always intelligent, it is as much an extended meditation as memoir. The language often moves close to poetry, mixing Yiddish with English (as did Eisenstein’s parents) in a special dialect to open the past. Love and fond exasperation meet on every page. One of the book’s most unsettling passages is Eisenstein’s memory of childhood dinners eaten with her grandparents, traumatized Holocaust survivors. During these meals her young cousins fling imaginary bombs and grenades at each other across the table with comic-book yells. “Eat,” says the grandmother. The grandfather silently endures.