How do we begin to comment on the legacies, dreams, and stories of our ancestors? How could we not comment? What if we never knew a grandparent or ancestor personally in the first place? You might assume that artificial intelligence would be the last place you’d go to create meaningful séances with an ancestor; yet, given how unwieldy and fragmented family histories tend to be, especially diasporic histories, why not experiment with a highly personalized chatbot of your deceased forebear? Manifesting as a ghostly avatar, transcending time and mortality, this bot could chat with you, conjuring a conversation and manifesting syntax out of a pile of documents that would otherwise, at best, be in a cardboard box. Although chatbot technology focused on resurrecting the dead is flawed and awkward at times, and limited to existing textual archives, it could produce a palimpsest of intergenerational knowledge, a relationship even. In the beautiful, heady, witty, and visually arresting graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story, Amy Kurzweil shapes her inheritance from her deceased grandfather, Fritz (Fred) Kurzweil, whom she never met and whose voice she never heard. Sometimes in tension, sometimes in harmony, Amy conspires with her father, Ray Kurzweil, an infamous suspender-wearing futurist and inventor sketching possibilities for eternal life through AI, to resurrect what was lost: the father Ray didn’t have enough time with, the grandfather Amy never knew. Amy proves that chasing your ancestor down and using every technology to do so may not lead to knowing that person in a traditional sense, but it may lead to something more significant: loving them.
A crucial context for documenting and archiving one’s family history is that so much may have been lost, erased, or stolen. So many people murdered, and so much history for which there is not a single photograph, scrapbook, or heirloom. So much is unknown and unknowable. Amy’s first graphic novel, Flying Couch (2016), documents the Holocaust narrative of her maternal grandmother, Lily Fenster, who escaped the Warsaw ghetto and was the sole survivor of her family: Lily’s four sisters, her mother, and her grandmother were murdered, dying in the Warsaw ghetto or in concentration camps. Flying Couch explores the imprint of intergenerational trauma and resilience across three generations of women: Lily; Amy’s mother, Sonya; and Amy. The book captures the strong personalities of three women, and at one point Amy asks, “Why does it feel like I’m not the protagonist of my own life?” Lily is a larger-than-life character, and perhaps would have been a singer or actress if she hadn’t endured such enormous loss as a young teenager. Comparing herself to the dutiful daughters in Judaism, although not strictly religious, Amy sees herself as an interpreter of her genealogy, a collaborator and artist who keeps her family’s story from erasure.
By following her debut with a book focused on her father’s lineage, she participates in this resistance by archiving and commenting upon her ancestors’ legacy, not only translating memory but extending it. Amy surmises the magnitude of her ancestors, and the space they occupy in her consciousness: “We are living in the light of their ambition, their sacrifice, their escape, their dreams, and the way they told their stories. What I’ve learned from this legacy: your passions might save you.” Amy’s paternal grandfather, Fred, a brilliant conductor and pianist living in Vienna, caught the attention of an American woman (and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt), Gertrude Sumner Ely, who saw him perform in 1937. A year later, Ely sponsored not just Fred’s immigration visa, but his “salvation.” Fred’s artistic passions spared him from the fate of over six million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and safeguarded the future generations Fred and his wife Hannah (née Bader) gave life to. “What’s it like to be saved by your own art?” Amy wonders, depicting a seemingly chance meeting between Fred and his eventual sponsor: a simple tap on the shoulder, brief conversation, a hatted woman shaking Fred’s hand, her left arm on her heart as if to indicate she was touched by the poignance of the musical performance. What if the two had never met? The images cascade fretfully: a letter to Ely in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; Fred’s worried eyes; conducting hands; hands at the piano; a swastika; an image of Jews being humiliated, forced to scrub the cobblestones with a toothbrush; Nazi boots; another swastika; an unsettling image that looks like a train ride to a boat but may be a cattle car to the concentration camps. Finally, a stamped passport and the boat that would ferry him to safe passage in New York. Like a musical score except that it’s actually a matter of life and death and not the civilized containment of an orchestra performance, the sequence ends with Fred’s closed eyes: relief.
Two significant collaborators, in different ways, are Amy’s father, Ray, and her partner, Jacob, a moral philosopher and professor. Ray’s concept of the “singularity,” the eventual merging of technology and humanity, was featured this summer in The New York Times, as a capacious interest in chatbots and AI suggests we are nearer to the singularity. Ray’s prophesies might have felt outlandish decades ago, but not now. Despite the fears and dangers many associate with chatbots, much of Ray’s motivation, as presented in Amy’s book, is to communicate with his deceased father, thus chasing eternal life and lineage, including a child’s fantasy that there was something he could have done to save his father from an early death. Amy weaves together her father’s sense of loss with her own and seeks a version of immortality through her family’s creative legacy. Interpreting the results of the Google Dadbot/Fredbot chatbot that her father helped design, Amy introduces how art and love are part of the detective work of comprehending a person in a more soulful and embodied way than computer science alone. Whereas Ray believes “a person is a series of patterns,” Amy goes on to intuit, “A person is not information.” At the same time, Amy relishes revealing how some patterns or rituals are the quirky things that make us us, like her father’s clearing of the throat on every voicemail, or her childhood obsessive rituals of touching everything in the clothing store. These are patterns that make us different from each other, yet are not quite algorithms, and our obsessions or ways of being may shift over time.
For a graphic novelist who has hand drawn and handwritten the more than three hundred pages of this book, Kurzweil is proof of how the eye and hand are technologies that are overwhelmingly attentive, intimate, obsessive even. Her visual text, focused on a gathering of beloveds, is a labor of love. A labor of deep listening. Amy has filled this book with the motif of hands: psychic readings, hands at the piano, conducting hands, hands texting or swiping a phone; and of course, the artist’s own hands that create the book. Ray invented the Kurzweil synthesizer and uses computer technology to create music and poetry: Amy remarks that his first invention is the artist. In many families, á la Nabokov, the birth of a writer signals the destruction of that family; however, in the Kurzweil family, it is a way of holding hands, of being in connection and relationship. In her recent TED Talk, “Time Traveling with AI to Connect with Lost Loved Ones,” Amy explicitly links her artistic profession to her cultural identity and family history: “I became a cartoonist to travel through space and time, and I became a graphic memoirist because the place I wanted to go was the past. I come from a legacy of dramatic stories and lost characters.” Clearly, Amy inherits from her grandfather a steadfast, obsessive studiousness and commitment to her craft. Unlike her grandfather, Kurzweil achieves a balancing act between the intense demands of making art and the equally intense demands of loving others and being loved.
Jacob Sparks, Amy’s partner, is a graduate student focusing on moral epistemology when the two meet while teaching at a summer camp for gifted students. Despite the challenges of an artist with a hypochondriac streak falling in love with a philosopher diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome, the couple reckons with long distance, anxiety, and uncertainty with aplomb. Across years and really interesting conversations, including star-gazing listening sessions and snuggling sessions in bed that feature Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, Scott Hutchins’s A Working Theory of Love, and Plato, the two lovers begin to stitch their lives together. At one point, Amy thinks of their story in this way: “I don’t believe in soulmates. Now I believe in patterns, in finding somebody who seeks to know yours.” As Amy toggles and spars with her partner, readers will be deeply moved by the inquisitive, quirky force of her intelligence. While not accepting the notion of a soulmate, Amy nonetheless emphasizes how love is about knowing and being known, about being around people who “teem with ideas” and in turn enjoy your teeming. As Amy balances her art and writing career with her romantic and family commitments, she makes visible how women artists still grapple with how to honor the creative career they’ve spent so much time building and also honor the romantic and family relationships in their inner circle. Amy decides to marry Jacob and move out West with him, and these decisions are portrayed with all the anxiety, scrutiny, and dialogue one might expect. At the same time, Amy shows that the book is a deeply felt and significant passion that transcends self or ambition. She travels widely, for writing and artistic fellowships, and to adventure to her grandfather’s home in Vienna for the first time. Her thoughts about her grandfather’s trajectory begin to resonate more and more deeply with her own path. Although Fred emigrates from Vienna, Amy still thinks about his experience when she makes the move from New York to California: “When granted passage to a new life . . . what comes with you, what gets left behind?”
Way too much gets left behind. There is source material in our personal archive or memory that we forget until something evokes it. Everything stored, unwittingly or not, in our memories, is subject to further investigation, as it often reflects our biases or tendencies. When Amy is visiting with her grandmother Hannah—a painter who sacrificed her ambitions for her husband—she recalls a lesson Hannah was likely unaware of having passed on. It feels like an accidental archive, and therefore, more compelling. Her grandmother’s angry tirade pours through the phone receiver that a young Amy holds up, slightly disturbed and looking around for her father: “I WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS UNCONSCIONABLE TREATMENT. YOU TELL RAYMOND. . . . TRULY SO UNFAIR.” But as Amy says on this page, “It was my grandmother who first made me think about truth . . . that perhaps we are all hostages . . . to our own perceptions.” Although in this scene we see how Hannah’s mental health challenges caused frustration and emotional exhaustion for Ray, Amy also reminds us of the endless unfairness in Hannah’s life: a horrifying car accident that left her in a body cast for months; alienation and stress in caring for her talented husband and family at her own expense; widowhood; and the sense that she was living a kind of posthumous life post-Vienna.
Amy reflects that Fred and Hannah are her only links to her “artistic ancestry.” Above her drawings of her grandfather’s passport and musical scores, she confronts the eerie and nearly impossible path of her origin: “the only line I can draw cleanly into history, since all my mother’s extended family perished in the Holocaust.” Although not taking center stage with Fred, Hannah is also an artistic ancestor, though her talents were largely overshadowed by traditional marriage and motherhood. Some of my favorite images in the book include Amy’s realistic portrayals of Hannah’s paintings of family members, including Hannah’s drawing of Fred conducting. The energy in these drawings is informed by the tension between her grandparents, as Amy comments on how her grandmother’s artistic talents and artistic autonomy were largely submerged in service to her husband’s. As a Jewish-American artist, Amy is conscious of the fortune of her few ancestors who did survive. It’s not strictly fortune, of course, as Fred and Hannah endured an existence that was uprooted, unsettled, and in many ways traumatized.
Artificial reveals the limitations as well as the intimacies of a variety of technologies, all while testifying through Amy’s quirky drawings, musings, and rich imaginative life that a person is not “information.” When Amy interacts with Fredbot/Dadbot earlier on, she remarks that it sounds like her grandfather was a cover letter. Clearly, the robot appears to overshadow a human voice, reminding me of how ChatGPT sounds voiceless or soulless. Yet Amy then reflects on how her grandfather really was applying for jobs all the time. AI isn’t the enemy or the inadequate younger sister to that other artifice of artistic production—pen strokes or brushstrokes—but another way of comparing notes. The book genuinely asks rather than condemns one way of knowing a person over another way: is it through a Dadbot database, the documents, resumes, and journals left behind, the help of a medium, poetry, art, or the resonances we listen for in our own psyches and experiences? It seems that all are mediums or portals, but need the careful, attentive, and intimate mediator, who in this case is the artist, writer, and descendant who is trying to understand her family and herself.
Resonances of Fred and Hannah’s profound uprooting and struggle for artistic identities resurface as we see Amy and Jacob seeking to establish themselves in a cutthroat world filled with qualified applicants, others who are also deserving of fellowships or academic jobs. I couldn’t help but read the excerpted cover letters and artist’s statements, especially when Amy talks about her theories of and approach to drawing. Whereas for Fred and Hannah, there was a sexist clarity about whose career status would be preferred, that isn’t the case for Amy and Jacob. However, the term wife still carries unfair expectations, such that femme writers and artists would be thinking more about the threats that wifedom or motherhood could have to their creative space and well-being. There’s a tenderness and a concern the couple has for each other that I find refreshing, inspiring, and aspirational. The conversations about philosophical thought experiments, the telling of their love story, and the way they confront difficulties in their relationship—a health diagnosis, the covid epidemic, geographic distance, or the future—bring the couple closer together. Amy also shows the vulnerabilities of love, as in an anxious text or a wondering about what the psychic said to her partner, or the concern maybe particular to writers about how to avoid resentments amid balancing acts.
Fred’s advice rings out anew for the Millennial generation trying to make it in a capitalistic, splintering, soulless, catastrophic professional world: “I must believe in myself, regardless of position.” Fredbot, drawing from Fred’s writings and interacting with the author, says, “A work of art begins by opening to us the inner life of the artist; it ends by revealing us to ourselves.” Artificial: A Love Story awakens our own understandings of a meaningful life, how we can integrate our own creative work and fictive or blood ties into a legacy. Amy asks, “To suture vast distances, is language enough?” If it depends upon the intention and the dedication to one’s craft, I would venture that Amy’s book bridges the distance between herself and her grandfather. There is so much love behind the archival enterprise. So much visceral presence. The concept of punctum is everywhere, but especially in the idea of touch, the artist-granddaughter’s hands touching Fred’s handwritten journals and looking for home in them. One of the most magical moments in the book is when Amy tells Jacob that suddenly she can understand Fred’s handwriting. In one image, the artist’s left hand touches Fred’s looseleaf journal pages, and, beneath that image, there’s the frame of a computer file “journals transcribed.pdf” and an indicator this is “page 20 of 71.” On the top and bottom of the page, diagonal to each other, is an avatar of the artist at her drawing table, computer propped, and touching the screen. The book becomes a portal to the lost ancestor who is never really quite lost.
Though Amy never heard his voice, she is still listening for and to Fred, commenting, “None of us are really knowable, but with time and attention, with close looking, all of us are loveable.” Against masculine ideals of genius, Amy Kurzweil evokes a feminist understanding of accomplishment, one that centers connection: knowing and being known by others. Drawing from the frustrated legacy of Hannah, who sacrificed her career for Fred’s, Kurzweil depicts art as a hard-won struggle for creative space, but also just as importantly, a room of bonding, sharing, giving with others. A room of one’s own, but not merely one’s own: a space for listening, exchange, intimacy. Amy rereads Plato’s The Symposium, resurrecting a reference to Diotima, an invented or real teacher of Socrates, who said, “the path to immortality is not through Kleos [fame, as in ‘to have one’s name on the public’s lips’] but through love.” Revising Descartes, Kurzweil claims, “I think we only exist through our attachment to others: I care; therefore, I’m real.”
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Artificial: A Love Story. By Amy Kurzweil. New York: Catapult Publishing, 2023. 368 pp. $38.00.
