In “Victory Parade,” Leela Corman captures the pain carried from one generation to the next.
It’s 1943 in Brooklyn. Women are working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard while the men are fighting the Nazis in Germany. In between raising her daughter, Eleanor, and her job as a welder, Rose Arensberg finds company in George Finlay, a disabled war veteran. Ruth, a Jewish refugee whom Rose took in as a child, is laid off from her job at the Yard after defending herself from sexual harassment and eventually finds her way into the world of women’s wrestling.
Yet there is also tenderness, especially in Eleanor’s relationship with Ruth, her not-sister, not-cousin, who has been around for as long as she can remember. Or in the image of a window, lighted with a strikingly luminescent yellow and enveloped by jet-black darkness, which precedes a candid conversation between Rose and George about their feelings for each other, despite the doomed nature of their relationship.
For all the trauma that the characters endure, they seldom talk to each other about it. They cope in isolation, and we witness them in their ruins. Corman conjures their tortured interior reality through references to Greek tragedies, homages to 20th-century painters and other intertextual visual allusions. We find out through an Otto Dix painting called “The Skat Players,” for example, that Ruth’s mother was forced into sex work.
“Victory Parade” is not an easy comic to digest, and perhaps even likely to throw off some readers. But it is one that thoroughly exploits the medium’s potential to visualize the unspeakable. The final scene, where Sam, Rose’s husband , picks up a passenger in his yellow cab, reinforces the isolation of mass trauma. The passenger, a weary veteran from the Pacific theater, asks Sam whether he saw any “real action” during his time in Germany. Sam responds, “Nothing special.
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