ISBN 978-1-0696926-1-0
9x11.5 inches / black and white / 264 pages / $40
Spring 2026 / North American rights
Part memoir, part folklore, part pop culture parable, this beautifully hand drawn graphic novel from Rotem Anna Diamant takes the reader on a journey through growing up Jewish in Winnipeg while being haunted by the ghosts of the past.
Ro is a multidisciplinary artist and librarian who creates comics focused on themes of identity, often conveying experiences and ideas using elements of the surreal and magical. In 2018, they founded Canada Comics Open Library, and they maintain the Canadian Cartoonists Database. They run a distro/bookshop called Lost Doll.
rotemannadiamant.com
"Rotem’s deeply personal book asks what makes a person and answers with a dazzling Queer feminist story about broken belief leading to self-knowledge. Their magical visual iconography is peopled by mermaids, angels, demons and ghosts, all in conversation with the cartoonist. They share the mythologies and tenets of Jewish faith, distilling the parts that have been rejected and hidden by patriarchy. It’s a heroic declaration of life and perseverance told with electric linework."
- Fiona Smyth, Somnambulance, You Know, Sex (with Cory Silverberg)
From the author -
From 2021-2022, I completed a series of short experimental comics called Cute Nose that explore mental illness, gender identity, and my Jewish identity using themes of cuteness and the physicality of the body. The second issue debuted at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in 2022, and the third issue debuted in 2023 at The Prairie Comics Festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
For Dancing With the Sheyd, I wanted to work on a larger, more cohesive autobiographical narrative that enabled me to further develop and reflect on these themes as well as on my own queer Jewish identity in relation to my family, ancestors, and Jewish mythologies. This longer narrative enabled me to provide more context and framework to my art, ideas, and experiences.
I believe that provoking conversation and reflection through the sharing of experiences is vital for improving the health of Jewish communities, especially with the weight of generational trauma, antisemitism, and colonialism both within and outside of Canada.
Growing up with a sole-support parent and two siblings, I often felt ashamed of our poorness and alienated from our community. Throughout my adolescence and adulthood this alienation carried forward for a variety of other reasons, including holding secular religious beliefs and critical views of the Israeli government, zionism, and especially as a Jewish person born in Israel/Palestine, with an Israeli name, who moved to Canada as a young child.
For so long, these circumstances and feelings went unexamined, and this feeling of alienation turned inwards into self-blame and depression, which I believe is a common experience for many people who hold views that oppose those of their traditional communities.
In my early twenties, I came across comics and other narratives where women were telling personal stories that could be grotesque and dealt with complex themes like sexuality, depression, racism, and sexism that weren’t often talked about in the communities I knew growing up. This included the autobio work of artists like Gabrielle Bell and Geneviève Castrée.
These stories were vital for my survival. Reading narratives by women and queer creators helped me reflect on my own experiences, understand that I was a feminist, and acknowledge some of the frustrations that I previously couldn’t articulate about how I was treated being perceived as a woman.
This project explores what Judaism means and has meant to me, utilizing Jewish mythology, family folklore, and other narratives and experiences from my upbringing, and offers a critical lens on Zionism. While creating this project, I explored themes of alienation and community using my personal experiences and perspective as well as research, listening, and learning. I actually worked from a script for this project unlike most of my other work! but I still made space for intuitive and spontaneous drawing and a kind of gradual sculpting of the story over time.
