Martin Lemelman, Two Cents Plain: My Brooklyn Boyhood
Martin Lemelman's elegiac and bittersweet graphic memoir Two Cents Plain collects the memories and artifacts of the author's childhood in Brooklyn. The son of Holocaust survivors, Lemelman grew up in the back of his family's candy store in Brownsville during the 1950s and '60s. Through his stirring narrative and richly rendered black-and-white drawings, family photographs, and found objects, Lemelman creates a lush, nostalgic but layered view of a long-lost time and place, the chronicle of a family and a city in crisis.