In February Fanfare Ponent Mon, which specializes in publishing some of the best literary comics from around the world, will release Farm 54, a graphic novel collaboration between the Israeli cartoonist Gilad Seliktar and his sister the poet and writer Galit Seliktar.  Farm 54 collects three semi-autobiographical stories from the childhood, puberty, and military service years of its female protagonist, who, like Galit, grew up in rural Israel in the 1970s and 1980s.

Keenly observed, Farm 54 provides an intimate and telling look at the traumas of adolescence that disrupt the placid surface of the rural setting of the teenage years of its protagonist, but the most powerful section describes her military service when she is sent into the occupied territories on a night-time housing demolition mission.  Confused and alienated from her unit’s mission of revenge, it is clear that the conflicted heroine of this story would rather be anywhere else.