There can’t be many things more cheering on a dark January night than having to tell someone they’ve won a prize, and when I telephone Astrid Goldsmith to give her just such a bit of good news, her reaction is everything I hoped it would be. For a while, Goldsmith, an animator who lives in Folkestone where she makes stop-motion films in her garage, struggles to speak in full sentences. She is just so thrilled. “That is the greatest compliment,” she says, when I tell her that her story, A Funeral in Freiburg, the winner of this year’s Observer/Jonathan Cape graphic short story prize, brings to mind the work of that genius Posy Simmonds. “I love her tone. I always have.”
Goldsmith’s entry is based on a real event: the funeral of her paternal grandmother in Germany in 2015. “The outrage had been percolating for a while,” she says, with a laugh. “But I only came to write it after my first baby was born, while I was breastfeeding: I drew it all on one of those trays with arms that invalids use in bed.” Her story revolves around the difficulties involved in organising a Jewish funeral service in a place – Freiburg, in the Black Forest – where the rabbi has been imprisoned for embezzlement, and the Jewish cemetery is full. The woman in charge is, very difficult, refusing even to believe that Gisela Goldschmidt was really Jewish (at the age of 18, Astrid’s grandmother fled Germany for Zimbabwe, only returning after the war was over). Her rules and regulations, not to mention her insistence on the performance of certain rituals, infuriate the Goldsmith family. But what choice do they have? It is a case of her way, or no proper funeral at all.
Our regular judges – Dan Franklin, the publisher of Jonathan Cape’s graphic novel list, Suzanne Dean, the creative director of Vintage, Paul Gravett, who runs the Comica festival, and yours truly – were joined this year by Alison Bechdel, the acclaimed author of (among other graphic novels) Fun Home, and by Samira Ahmed, the journalist and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. Our decision was unanimous. Goldsmith’s rich, funny, plangent story isn’t only beautifully drawn; its subject, though highly particular, also has a universality that speaks to the past two years, a period during which too many of us have had to organise funerals at a distance. “It is weird,” says Goldsmith, who studied for an MA in animation at Norwich art school, and has worked in it ever since. “Death is so raw and emotional, and yet you’re also greeted with this bureaucracy. If you’re lucky, the people helping you through will be great. But our experience really wasn’t; when we went back to Germany for the stone setting a year later, it was just as bad.”
There is, she says, a lot more to be said about the whole experience, and her hope now is to make A Funeral in Freiburg the beginning of a full length novel: “After someone dies, there’s so much bad behaviour, however good people’s intentions. It fell to me and my dad to drive to Germany to remove everything from my grandmother’s flat and distribute it to her family – and either everyone wanted something, or no one did.” Animation and the writing of a graphic novel are, she thinks, pretty similar in that they’re both extremely labour intensive. “But this is the first piece I’ve made that is truly personal,” she says. It captures something that is quite complicated: the territory that lies between a secular upbringing and a Jewish identity, and how the two might (or might not, in the case of A Funeral in Freiburg) fit together.
The standard of the entries this year was very high – though it was striking how many of the stories had to do with anxiety, isolation and a longing for travel; the pandemic finds its way everywhere – and for this reason, we decided to anoint two runners-up. We loved Tat Effby’s Cancer Sells!, an uproarious satire on publishing’s obsession with illness memoirs (and reality stars) that for Samira Ahmed brought to mind the work of the late, great French cartoonist Claire Bretécher; and there was a lot of admiration, too, for A Wolfgang Crowe’s mournful and disquieting story, Andrew, a story of two loners that is clearly (and wonderfully) influenced by Daniel Clowes. Congratulations to both of them, too.
