Cbr15bingo history
Maus is a highly acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning (1992) 2-volume graphic novel that made the news last year as the subject of a book banning in Tennessee (for bad words and a naked female mouse. Really.) Maus is about the Holocaust. Writer/illustrator Art Spiegelman interviewed his own father about what happened to him and their family in Poland during WWII. The Spiegelman family, like so many other Jewish families, was practically wiped out due to Nazi Germany’s extermination camps. In writing about this, Art Speigelman is trying to come to terms with what happened to his family and also trying to understand his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship. Rather than try to draw the Nazis and Jews as individual people, Speigelman rendered them as cats (Nazis) and mice (Jews). In the first volume, Speigelman recounts his parents’ story until 1944, and volume 2 picks up with their arrival in Auschwitz.
In Volume I, Art Spiegelman introduces himself as a young man trying to make it as an illustrator in New York. His mother, a Holocaust survivor, had committed suicide and his father has remarried a fellow survivor, but the elder Spiegelman can be a difficult man. He is extremely thrifty, critical of his wife and son, and demanding of Art’s time. Art visits his father in the hopes of learning what happened to the family during the war but struggles to deal with his father. We learn that prior to the war, Art’s father was a handsome and successful businessman who married the daughter of another successful and wealthy man. We learn that Art’s mother Anja struggled with anxiety/depression and that the Spiegelman’s had had a baby boy in the 1940s in Poland. Volume I takes the reader through the destruction of Jewish businesses and neighborhoods in Poland, and the rounding up of Jews into ghettos. Even in black and white illustrations of cats and mice, the fear, danger and menace of the Nazis is chillingly rendered. Art’s father and mother, along with a handful of others, managed to evade the camps for a while, but eventually their luck ran out and they trusted people who betrayed them. At the end of volume I the Spiegelmans are sent to Auschwitz, and Art learns from his father that his mother had kept diaries about her Holocaust experience but Mr. Spiegelman has destroyed them. Art now has one more reason to be furious with his father.
In Volume II, Art learns in detail from his father about the horrors of Auschwitz. Mr. Spiegelman’s knowledge of English and his “jack of all trades” kind of work knowledge helped him become valuable to people who could help him and Anja. Nonetheless, they, like everyone else, suffered from starvation, cold and the brutality of the Nazis. Art, for his part, is having complicated feelings about his father. On one hand, of course, there is the horror of learning how your parents suffered. On the other hand, Mr. Spiegelman’s behavior toward his wife Mala and toward Art is harsh and verbally abusive. Art discusses with his own wife his feelings of anger and pity for his father. Mr. Spiegelman is growing older and his health is failing, but Art feels as if his father is manipulating him sometimes into doing things Art does not wish to do.
In the end, Art is able to get the story from his father before he dies. It does not bring him any sort of peace, but having the facts, the truth, written down is important. It makes me sick to see stories of school districts like the one referenced above that want to hide a story like Maus from students. I remember reading and seeing on TV many stories about Holocaust survivors when I was growing up (1970s and 1980s). While they are disturbing, as a kid I knew that they were important to hear; trying to shield children from reality does everyone a disservice. How will they learn to handle difficulties as adults if we hide the truth from them as children? I also think that children are more resilient and empathetic than many adults give them credit for. While the censorship of Maus makes me angry, the publicity, I hope, has led many more people to read this outstanding story of survival.
