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, as the neighborhood, and much of the city, moved into a period of deep decline. In
Two Cents Plain, Lemelman pieces together the fragments of his past in an effort to come to terms with a childhood that was marked by struggle both in and outside of the home. But Lemelman's Brooklyn is also the nostalgic place of egg creams and comic books, malteds and novelty toys, where the voices of Brownsville's denizens - the deli man, the fish man, and the fruit man - all come to vivid life. Through his stirring narrative and richly rendered black-and-white drawings, family photographs, and found objects, Lemelman creates a lush, layered view of a long-lost time and place, the chronicle of a family and a city in crisis.
Two Cents Plain is a wholly unique
memoir and a reading experience not soon forgotten.
Martin Lemelman is the author/illustrator of
Mendel's Daughter and has illustrated over 30 children's books, and his work has been published in magazines ranging from the New York Times Book Review to Sesame Street magazine. He recently retired from the Communication Design Department at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. See twocentsplain.com for more information about the book and twocentcomics.com for more stories from Brownsville.
