The 2024 Levy Event

About the book "Judessey"

Shay Charka is the author of Judessey, originally published in Hebrew. Professor Michael Weingrad has translated the book and the new English language publication is scheduled for release May 2024.  

"Judessey depicts the journey of Leon, a Jewish professor from Poland who finds himself in the midst of World War II, who strives to find his way home while battling the monsters of Europe. An epic tale of a Jewish partisan whose family is taken away by the Nazis, this graphic novella shares a new way of engaging with the Holocaust. Judessey expresses the biggest trauma of our time through dialogue with the Odyssey, which has inspired so many human journeys." - Post Hill Press

A WICKED SON BOOK
An Imprint of Post Hill Press
ISBN: 978-1-63758-884-0
Judessey
© 2024 by Shay Charka
All Rights Reserved
Cover and interior illustrations by Shay Charka
Translation by Michael Weingrad

Shay Charka is one of Israel’s most popular comic book creators. He is the author of over twenty books that draw on Jewish religious and historical sources from the Bible to the life of Theodor Herzl. Dara Horn called From Friend to Foe, Charka’s pictorial version of stories by the Nobel prizewinning author S. Y. Agnon, “miraculous.” The creator of long-running children’s comics, he is also a talented political cartoonist whose work appears in major newspapers. His work has been the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Israeli Cartoon and Comics Museum. He participates regularly in the international Cartooning for Peace organization.

Judessey is Charka’s latest graphic novel to be translated into English (2024, Wicked Son Press). A groundbreaking Holocaust story told through dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey, it depicts the journey of Leon, a Jewish professor from Poland who strives to find his way home while battling the monsters of Europe during World War Two.

Gilad Seliktar is a graphic novelist and lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. His graphic novels include The Demons of Mongol, Tsav 8, and Who Are You Anyway, and his work has been published in Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, and English. The book Farm 54, in collaboration with his sister Galit Seliktar, was an official selection of the Comics Festival at Angoulême, France and a Publisher’s Weekly top ten pick for graphic novels.

Miryam Vilner studied graphic design and animation at the Bezalel and Emunah art schools of Jerusalem. Her work in various media has been the subject of a number of exhibitions, and she was recently selected for the Comic Book Artists-in-Residence Program at the National Library of Israel. Her Kunilemel is a radical, apocalyptic vision in comic book form, and was displayed last year at the Geula Gallery in Jerusalem.

Galit Dahan Carlibach is one of Israel’s most prominent writers under 50, an award-winning author of numerous literary novels, children’s books, and poems. Born to a Moroccan family in Israel’s southern town of Sderot, she currently resides in Jerusalem and teaches at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. Her novel It’s Me, Iowa is a dark satire of her time in the Iowa International Writers Program, while her highly acclaimed latest novel, Orphan’s Luck, is an homage to Charles Dickens set among the poor and cast-off of Jerusalem. Her two children’s fantasies set in the otherworld of Arfileah are favorites of Israeli tweens. 

Host and moderator, Michael Weingrad is professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University. He is the translator of Shay Charka’s Judessey. Weingrad's novel of the 1980s in verse, Eugene Nadelman, will be published in September 2024 by Paul Dry Books.