MAUS: A SURVIVOR'S TALE: MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY and
MAUS II: A SURVIVOR'S TALE: AND HERE IS WHERE MY TROUBLES BEGAN
By ART SPIEGELMAN

Pantheon Books, 1991/1992
ISBN: 0394541553/0679729771
160 pages; Hardcover/144 pages; Paperback
GENRE(S): Nonfiction, Memoir, Graphic Novel

Reviewed by Samantha Storey

This Pulitzer-prize winning narrative is, at its most simplistic, an exercise in oral history. The first collection revolves mostly around the relationship between Spiegelman's parents Vladek and Anja (Jewish survivors of World War II Europe) and the slow encroachment of the Nazi regime into Poland; the second collection is primarily about their survival through concentration camps in Auschwitz and Birkenau and their relocation to Rego Park, NY.

Impressive are not just the illustrations—all of the characters take on anthropomorphic qualities (Jews are represented as mice, Germans as cats, Americans as dogs, etc.)—but also the conversational quality of Spiegelman's voice. In the present—actually a period of time in the late-1970s/early 1980s—Spiegelman is an adult, married, and visiting his father every week or so to probe his memory for details of his life pre-, mid-, and post-war. In between pages of Vladek's recollections are the pages of the present wherein Vladek is the aging parent suffering from a heart condition and never fully recovered from the events that transpired during the war.

Although the central theme in both installments is undeniably Vladek's experience, there is equal weight on the disconnect between father and son. Spiegelman struggles to establish a relationship with his father; he is equal parts guilt and grief apropos of his mother's suicide and his father's inability to live outside his nihilism. Spiegelman repeatedly conflicts with the desire to live his own life and overcome the effects of being a child of Holocaust survivors.

Using the graphic novel to undertake an issue as looming as Nazi Germany is not without its "maus"-traps. The graphic format is unique in this sense as it employs a secondary illustration to primary experience. Depictions of hiding spaces, smoking chimneys, and facial expressions all give tone and auxiliary meaning to Vladek's narrative; the perspective is inherently omnipresent. Spiegelman goes to great lengths to preserve his metaphor: Though imperfect and vulnerable, background characters are often nondescript, sometimes shrouded in silhouettes, other times using masks to disguise their ethnicity.

Though the urge to prod more deeply into certain areas is at times overwhelming (tell us more about Anja!), Spiegelman focuses instead on the gaping holes of silence. Although Vladek appears to have retained his experience in explicit detail (at one point, he recalls a dream from his early twenties wherein his grandfather appeared and predicted Vladek's release from a POW camp on Pashas Truma), he regularly solicits topic changes and avoids delving too deeply into uncomfortable areas. In the gaps, the reader must imagine Anja's post-war life (even in death, she is an innocent and perpetual victim of circumstance; a life relegated to "mostly housework" and destroyed memoir) and what left her, despite having survived the war, unable to survive in its aftermath.

Though much fuss is made regarding how to classify Maus—is there enough humor to call it comedic? Is it biography or autobiography? Is it Art's story or Vladek's?—there are rarely questions regarding its significance. Though the Holocaust has been taken from its existence in history and pushed into pop culture many times over, Maus is a free-standing testament of survival on every level. For the brief moments when people read Maus, they are drawn into a world that their minds cannot actually wrap around and one to which nothing else can really compare.

(June, 2007)