Who Owns the Past?

Rutu Modan’s The Property and the Quiet Power of Post-Holocaust Memory

Rutu Modan’s The Property stands out in the Jewish Comics Library collection not only because of its elegant visual style or its intergenerational storytelling, but because of the way it complicates the very notion of ownership—of land, memory, and trauma.

In contrast to more direct portrayals of the Holocaust, Modan’s narrative unfolds decades later, among its aftershocks. The protagonist, Mica, travels with her grandmother Regina from Israel to Poland, ostensibly to reclaim family property lost during the war. But as with all journeys in Modan’s work, this one is layered with secrets, evasions, and revelations—personal and political.

As Kevin Haworth writes in The Comics of Rutu Modan¹, "The Property is not only about property, but about propriety—what is appropriate to ask, to want, to demand of history." Modan draws out this tension with characteristic subtlety, never pushing her characters into didactic stances. Instead, her story unfolds through a blend of humor, ambiguity, and human vulnerability.

---

A Legacy of Intimacy and Conflict

Rutu Modan, born in Tel Aviv in 1966, comes from a family of medical professionals and Holocaust survivors. Her mother was a child survivor, and Modan has spoken about the quiet, indirect way trauma was transmitted in her household—not through stories, but through silence. It’s no accident that her work often deals with the things characters don’t say.

Modan began her career as an illustrator and co-founded the Israeli comics collective Actus Tragicus in the 1990s, some works of which are in our collection. Her early work, often short, surreal and indebted to Edward Gorey for inspiration, gradually gave way to longer narratives like Exit Wounds (2007), The Property (2013), and Tunnels (2021), each a mature exploration of Israeli life with deeply personal stakes.

Her drawing style, influenced by the Franco-Belgian ligne claire tradition of Hergé in Tintin, might seem at odds with the complexity of her subject matter. But this clean, almost clinical visual language only heightens the moral and emotional ambiguity of her stories. Her use of color reinforces the narrative in impactful ways. She refuses to tell the reader what to feel, only giving gleanings of the emotional undercurrents. As Haworth notes, “Modan’s work is a corrective to sentimentality. She is committed to keeping her characters human rather than symbolic.”

---

Poland as a Mirror

In The Property, Modan gives us a vision of post-Communist Warsaw that is neither nostalgic nor alienating. The city is full of ghosts, yes, but also of life—new relationships, small deceptions, shifting allegiances. Mica’s encounter with a young Polish tour guide named Tomasz becomes a kind of counterpoint to her grandmother’s haunted past. The property in question may be a literal apartment, but it’s also a metaphor for everything that’s been lost, and everything that still might be reclaimed—not always in ways that satisfy.

What makes Modan’s work radical is her refusal to flatten the Poles. “She’s after something more complicated than either condemnation or redemption,” Haworth writes. “She wants to reveal how people live with the past, how it shapes them and how they negotiate with it, often without quite understanding what they’re doing.”

This humanization is not a denial of history, but an acknowledgment that history is messy. Some Poles cooperated with the Nazis; others resisted. Some profited from Jewish losses, while others risked their lives to help. Modan’s gift is to dramatize this range without preaching.

---

Beyond the Holocaust

Part of what makes The Property so significant in the growing field of Holocaust-related graphic literature is precisely its distance from the events themselves. As Modan has put it:

“I didn't want to write about the Holocaust. I wanted to write about what happens after—what stays with people, what changes in them, what they pass on.”

The story is about survivors, yes, but more than that, it’s about descendants. It’s about the second-hand smoke of trauma.

This approach marks a generational shift. Earlier Holocaust comics, like Maus, were concerned with testimony and representation—how to convey the unimaginable. Modan, by contrast, explores how the unimaginable becomes mundane, how it informs a petty family argument or an awkward hotel breakfast. It’s all the more powerful for its restraint.

---

From the Personal to the Political

Modan’s body of work—Exit Wounds, Tunnels, The Property—is rooted in the intimate: family disputes, romantic entanglements, moments of betrayal or reconciliation. But in Israel/Palestine, the personal is always political. The question of property, in particular, resonates on multiple levels. In The Property, Modan displaces the familiar Zionist narrative of return and reframes it in a European context, subtly echoing the conflicts of home ownership and historical justice in Israel itself.

She doesn’t spell this out. She doesn’t need to. Her readers are trusted to make the connections.

---

The Property is a cornerstone of any serious collection of Jewish graphic literature. It complicates, challenges, and quietly transforms the way we think about memory, restitution, and belonging. As Haworth writes,

“Modan doesn’t ask us to admire her characters, or to forgive them. She asks us to listen.”

And in doing so, she opens a space where Jewish history can breathe—awkward, unresolved, and very much alive.

---

We are pleased to announce that Josh Tuininga, author of We are not Strangers, will be joining us at the Couth Buzzard Bookstore on Monday, May 26 - yes that is Memorial Day - from 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM for a meet and greet and book signing. Plan to stop by to learn more about the inspirational story of how Sephardic Jews in Seattle took care of their Japanese neighbors who were interred during WWII.

---

Our pop-up library continues on the 2nd and 4th Friday of the month with our next one on April 11 at Couth Buzzard Bookstore, 8310 Greenwood Ave N, Seattle.

1. This book about Rutu Modan and all of her graphic novels are in our collection.