Launch for Simon Schneiderman

A lauch for Toronto artist Simon Schneiderman's graphic memoir, Preoccupied With My Father.

Preoccupied with My Father
by Simon Schneiderman
ECW Press, 2007
64 pages
26 colour illustrations; full colour interior
$19.95

In Preoccupied with My Father, Simon Schneiderman has created a graphic memoir about his late father, Yoel. With paintings and poetry, the book depicts his father's life, changed forever by the Holocaust. A life, where, ultimately, Yoel Schneiderman’s “. . . balance was always precarious; living in this world haunted by the last.” These twenty-six expressionistic images intimately portray the arc of his father's transition from his athletic youth in Warsaw to a lonely vibrant presence in a community of the aged, when he was possessed of a mind too lucid and a body too infirm. The text of the book, beautifully designed by Paul Hodgson, has been written in language that has the simplicity and resonance of a journal.

Simon Schneiderman is a lawyer who taught himself how to draw and paint. He had for many years used words to make a living first in advertising and television and, then, as a litigator. In his thirties, he developed a writer’s block so pronounced he would fall asleep when his pen touched paper. He had to learn how to draw, to paint, to evade the wave that crashed over his ability to write. Through trial, error, and perseverance he discovered that painting was a language that could be learned no differently than any other. Twenty years later, everything he learned was applied to this book.