The Art of Memory-Telling

Loved Book of the Day: Maus
Author: Art Spiegelman
Genre: Holocaust literature; Memoir; Biography; Historical fiction; Graphic novel
Content: The Holocaust; death; violence; family tragedy
Length: Maus I: 159 pages Maus II: 136 pages


With the publication of Maus I: My Father Bleeds History in 1986, Art Spiegelman catapulted to notoriety for one simple reason: He wrote a comic book about the Holocaust.

At first, the real value of the work he had accomplished was overlooked for the juicy controversy that whirled over one polarizing question: "Could something as serious as the Holocaust be portrayed effectively - and tastefully - in a comic book?" Once everyone had calmed down (and actually read the book), the answer was a resounding "yes." 

Five years later, Spiegelman published part two of his graphic narrative, Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, which was received with widespread critical acclaim. In 1992 the collective Maus won the Pulitzer Prize Special Award, making it the first comic book ever to win such accolades.

It's tremendously helpful to know all of this before you sit down to read Maus because the general concept of reading an illustrated comic about pogroms and Auschwitz is one of the most daunting, troubling ideas there is. But Spiegelman's medium is (obviously) not your average comic book.

Author and professor Deborah Geis put it best when she explained that "Maus is not exactly a comic book, nor is it exactly a novel, a biography (or autobiography), or a work of oral history - and yet it is all of these things." Spiegelman uses a unique graphic style with animal imagery, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats (Americans are dogs, and Poles are pigs). Maus is a son's humble attempt to record his aging father's Holocaust story, but it transcends the mere act of writing down an oral history by portraying physical representations of the past, the present, and the simultaneous fallibility and importance of memory.




Maus is, on the surface, a story about Spiegelman's father, Vladek. As a young man in 1930s Poland, Vladek experiences increasingly brutal German policies against Jews, loses his successful job and his wealth to Nazi confiscation, and eventually watches as his family is torn apart and those dearest to him are ruthlessly murdered or sent to concentration camps to face unknown fates. Vladek himself is sent to the infamous Auschwitz camp where he and his wife Anja are imprisoned and miraculously survive.

Vladek's Holocaust story, however, is only told within the larger context of Art Spiegelman's own story as the son of survivors on a quest for knowledge about his parents' experiences. The narrative structure is based on a series of interviews that Spiegelman conducts with Vladek (his mother has committed suicide years before), tape recorder in hand, in an attempt to record his father's memories for a comic book Spiegelman wants to write. You guessed correctly: that book is Maus.

This narrative frame establishes the young Spiegelman as the primary narrator of Maus, a unique aspect that makes this book just as much about the experience of children of survivors as it is about the survivors themselves. By using his own life as a backdrop to his father's tragic story, Spiegelman showcases the ways in which we remember the Holocaust, and offers a glimpse into how the re-telling of historical events is changed and distorted over time.

The fact that Spiegelman's life is at the forefront of the book doesn't mean that he's unconcerned with the complete story of Vladek's Holocaust experience. Rather, it merely suggests that Spiegelman is deliberately contextualizing his father's story within his own in order to make clear that his book is a second-hand, filtered relating of events that he has never experienced.

Maus never tries to pretend that it can capture or relate the true terror, cruelty and injustice of the Holocaust - and that humility is one of its best qualities.

This is not to say that Spiegelman's depictions of Auschwitz and other nightmarish scenes aren't moving, and even shockingly graphic and upsetting. It's no doubt that the use of animal imagery (and the use of comic illustrations in general) greatly mitigates the harrowing impact of reading a comic about the Holocaust and its human victims. As a result of the cat and mouse allegory, you're able to read about and see pictures of the horrors of war and genocide without being overwhelmed by the unthinkable sight of humans suffering so profoundly. But Spiegelman's illustrations of mice burning alive will still leave your heart aching for those that perished in excruciating pain, only to join millions of other victims in the mass graves of the innocent.

Likewise, Art, his wife Francoise, and his father Vladek (along with all the characters you'll meet in frames depicting friends and family from his Holocaust recollections) are portrayed with such human details and dynamic personalities that the fact that they look like animals matters very little at all. Indeed, Spiegelman's obvious point seems to be that, despite being stereotyped and dehumanized by the Nazi regime, each victim of the Holocaust was a unique individual with a compelling story of his or her own.

Maus, then, does what Holocaust literature should - and must - do. It forces us to relive, in our own way, the horrors of a dark past, and urges us to remember those who had their lives extinguished so arbitrarily. Reading Maus will transport you back and forth between World War II Europe and 1980s Reno Park, New York, in the space of a comic strip, but the continuity of the Holocaust is felt throughout. Spiegelman is masterful at his craft of showing how inextricably linked the past and present truly are. As a result, you'll find yourself just as invested in Art's story as you are in Vladek's - and you'll be just as curious to know how Art has been affected by growing up as the son of Holocaust survivors as you will be to discover the entirety of Vladek's incredibly tragic story of survival.

This is a tale about the challenging process of passing history from generation to generation, and how the Shoah continues to permeate the lives of first and second generation survivors and their families. Among the carefully arranged panels and drawings of Maus, the art of memory-telling comes alive and Spiegelman's journey through an animal past becomes testament to the difficult but necessary real-life process of preserving Holocaust memories.


Other books by Art Spiegelman:
Prisoner on the Hell Planet
Breakdowns: From Maus to Now, an Anthology of Strips
The Wild Party
Breakdowns: Portraits of the Artist as a Young %@&*!
Open me, I'm A Dog
In the Shadow of No Towers
Be a Nose


Buy Maus now at Amazon.com by clicking here.

Or, to learn more about Art Spiegelman, click here.