Mendel's Daughter h/c back

Martin Lemelman is the son of Mendel's daughter Gusta and this is his recounting of his mother's very difficult early life as a Jew in 1930s Poland, and her eventual escape from Nazi persecution before finally arriving in America. I really wanted to like this book given the worthy nature of the subject matter but sadly I found it strangely lacking in the human warmth I'd expected from such a memoir. Perhaps it's the somewhat broken pidgin English of the narrative itself, or perhaps the rather austere and presumably deliberately ugly (and I mean that in a positive sense) style of the artwork given the nature of the story, but I found it rather difficult to warm to this book. Don't get me wrong, the story of Gusta is certainly a dramatic affair, what with being forced to hide in the woods from the Germans and local Nazi sympathisers, the rather un-Christian behaviour of the Gentiles in her village towards the Jews, and the various other assorted difficulties her and her extended family had to face throughout the wartime years. It's just I found myself strangely disinterested, in surprising comparison with the far less dramatic story of a behind-the-frontlines WWII American GI in the recent ALAN'S WAR, which works so well simply because it is portrayed in a much more heart-warming and engaging style. Even the sequence where Mendel himself is callously killed didn't particularly move me in comparison to the Howitzer-powered, emotion shredding nature of JUDENHASS by Dave Sim. I would, however, genuinely be interested to know what others make of this.