ROME (JTA) — A graphic novel rooted in the Holocaust won the grand prize at an international cartoon and comics festival.
"The Gateway to Zion," by Walter Chendi, was awarded the prize Sunday for full-length story at the International Comics and Games festival in the central Italian city of Lucca.
The book is set in 1938 in the port city of Trieste in northern Italy, where in a speech that year the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini declared his anti-Semitic racial campaign.
Trieste was a major point of departure for Jewish emigration in the 1920s and 1930s. Chendi’s graphic novel focuses on how it became a key gateway for Jews escaping Europe to Palestine in the late 1930s, telling the story of two weeks in the life of one young Jewish man from Trieste who makes the journey.
