The epigraph to Jérémie Dres’ 2018 graphic novel "If I Forget Thee, O Alexandria" evokes the Greek myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur but recasts Ariadne’s thread—a golden filament used by the hero to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth—as a thread of memory entangled with “words in forgotten languages” and set against a “horizon strewn with small holes.” This opening meditation on the pain of departure sets the stage for the author’s discovery of a photo album, which inspires an investigative report detailing the history of his grandparents’ exile from Egypt in 1967. "If I Forget Thee, O Alexandria," the third installment of a trilogy that includes "We Won’t See Auschwitz" (2011) and "Exile to Babylon" (2014), nods self-reflexively to the narratological world of bandes dessinées (comics in the Franco-Belgian tradition). In the opening sequence of the novel, Dres visits his deceased grandparents’ apartment and sits facing their ghostly figures. The reader then learns that they never spoke of their traumatic departure. The story of the “nearly total forced exodus of Jewish communities of the Arab world,” as the text box indicates, was eclipsed by the weight of the Holocaust as a focal point of Jewish collective mourning (12). With the photo album as his guide, Dres traces his grandparent’s history and embarks on a journey that takes him to Alexandria, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Paris. My paper explores two salient moments of intertextuality in the novel: first, the title and thematic arch as references to Psalm 137 (If I forget thee, O Jerusalem) and, by extension, the vast body of rabbinical and literary commentary on the themes of Jewish exile and return; and second, the color scheme and ‘stripological’ sequence as a visual reprise of Riad Satttouf’s critique of pan-Arabism in "The Arab of the Future" (2014). My reading of the novel considers the ways in which Dres weaves together his encounters with real-life preservers of cultural memory—Amir Ramses, director of the film "Jews of Egypt" (2012), and Magda Haroun, president of Cairo’s Jewish community—with the extended metaphors and moments of literary intertextuality that course through his documentation. With an eye toward metatextuality, my paper looks at how the novel reflects on its own narrative form, the bande dessinée, as a powerful artistic and political medium for representing multiple layers of traumatic loss.