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A memoir of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and about his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father, his story, and history. Cartoon format portrays Jews as mice, Nazis as cats. Using a unique comic-strip-as-graphic-art format, the story of Vladek Spiegelman's passage through the Nazi Holocaust is told in his own words. Acclaimed as a "quiet triumph" and a "brutally moving work of art," the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus introduced readers to Vladek Spiegelman. The story succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive. As the New York Times Book Review commented, "[it is] a remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness ... an unfolding literary event." This long-awaited sequel, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Maus ties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing tale of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of daily life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Vladek's troubled remarriage, minor arguments between father and son, and life's everyday disappointments are all set against a backdrop of history too large to pacify. At every level this is the ultimate survivor's tale--and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors.… (more)
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As with the first volume in the
Is this really YA? That is where my library shelves it, but these are really quite amazing books for anyone. The comic form and the black and white only
The book is brilliantly real. The fact that the story is told as a graphic novel allows the reader to detach just enough to get through the gruesome subject matter. The Jews are mice, the Germans are cats and the Polish people are pigs. The first book deals with Vladek's life before with his wife Anya. Their relationship resonated with me long after the final pages. The second book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, focuses on Vladek's time in Auschwitz and the war's resolution.
Reading it reminded me of an interview I did with a holocaust survivor when I worked at a daily newspaper. I remember being shocked by how angry he was. In my naïveté I assumed he would feel only gratitude for the fact that he survived, but there are some wounds that you can never truly forgive.
Maus is the story of a survivor of the Holocaust as told to his son through an extended interview. The book depicts the Jewish as mice, the Polish as pigs, and the Germans as Cats and goes back and forth between a current timeline and what was happening to Vladek (the survivor) during his experiences with the Nazis.
This first installment is really a build up. Artie starts talking to his father about his history and this leads to the overall tale. Vladek in this book is talking about the beginning, being in the war, coming home, having things taken, people going missing, and the events leading up to his stay in Auschwitz. Although, readers don't start to hear the tales of the camps until the 2nd book.
I have to admit that this book is very deep, it is an emotional journey regardless of if it is fiction or non-fiction. Tales of the Holocaust are always emotional. It too was very sad that the author chose to depict the characters as animals - I think that these choices say a lot about how each of the groups were portrayed and I feel there was some insensitivity to those groups. Everyone in Europe was affected by the Holocaust and I think this tale is taking a very complex social dynamic and trying to fit it in a box... 'the cats were bad, the poles were no better'... and there were some that did not stand for the injustices committed.
I think that this is an important piece of graphic novel evolution/ canon - it is a strong message, an emotional event, and I think that Spiegelman wrote it to be as deep as it is. It makes readers think about the horrors, but it can also make readers think about how complex the issues were by being so understated here.
This would be a great ext to use along with a Social Studies unit on the Holocaust. Most Holocaust books do not include pictures, but this graphic novels tells history through pictures. Using this book in a class would help students see the impact the Holocaust, Nazi prison camps, and Hitler had on the Jewish people at this time. This book also provides an interesting use of metaphor. In this book, the Nazis are portrayed as cats, the Jewish people are portrayed as mice, and the American soldiers are portrayed as dogs. An interesting study would be to discuss why Spiegelman gave each type of person this specific identity. To take the study further, students could discover other issues where they can characterize different people through metaphors.
Overall, I enjoyed Maus. This was my first experience reading a graphic novel and it took me a while to understand how to read the text. The pictures add so much detail to the story and literally bring it to life. I also feel that the lack of color in the illustrations added to the dark mood and tone throughout the text. I feel this is a text readers of any age could grasp and enjoy reading. I learned a great amount of new knowledge of the Holocaust from reading this book, which I believe is because it was an account of Vladek's personal experiences. This was a great read to further my knowledge of history and experience a different kind of literature.
It was harder to read this book than Maus I because of the concentration camp scenes and the accumulated hardships his parents had endured by this point. Their lives had been full of uncertainty, fear and deprivation for almost 10 years by the mid 1940s.
I never expected a comic book format to be able to tell this type of story so effectively. Some of the comments of Spiegelman’s shrink will stay with me. “It wasn’t the BEST people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was RANDOM!” “Look at how many books have already been written about the Holocaust. What’s the point? People haven’t changed . . . Maybe they need a newer, bigger Holocaust.”
Recommended but not an easy read and you definitely need to read Maus I first.
Truly, what Speigelman has done in [Maus] and [Maus II] is remarkable, both in terms of literary achievement and graphic memoir. I think his choice of graphic form stands to bring the story of the Holocaust to a greater number of our youth – and if this can be achieved, it will perhaps be his most significant contribution.
Lest we forget.
This entire series has been
A lot has been said about the book’s value as a Holocaust narrative, and how it illuminates the cost war has on families generations later. The second volume picks up the story of Spiegelman’s parents as they enter Auschwitz and are separated. Spiegelman’s father recounts his time in the prison camp and his eventual release. I think what really makes the book interesting is how Spielgelman weaves together his father’s Auschwitz narrative, his own difficult relationship with his father, and Spiegelman’s struggle to make sense of it all by writing the book. I have seen it mentioned many places, and it is true: the last page of volume two is heartbreaking.
There are still many who don’t give the same weight to good graphic novels as they do to traditional literature. I have to stress that this is not just a graphic novel or comic book. This is literature, deep and wide and heavy. If you have never read a graphic novel, do yourself a favor. Pick up both volumes of Maus and read them. I guarantee you will have a new appreciation for the medium.
Since this is nonfiction, it can't rightly be called a
Anyhow, either way, it's an interesting concept. It's very efficient. As I started it, I thought about all of the narrative with which the author didn't need to bother. Not being much of a comic book reader, I found at first that I was ignoring the artwork, focusing on the verbiage instead. After a short period of consciously forcing myself to both read and look, it became more habitual.
The books were very effective at conveying the slow yet inexorable march towards the Final Solution. The troubled father-son relationship and the comparisons between Vladek and other survivors provided a perspective on the post-war repercussions and fall-0ut.
I would have liked a more satisfying resolution of Vladek and Art's relationship but then it wouldn't have been nonfiction, would it?
Speigelman gives an unflinching view of his father's past and present. This is a heart wrenching story.
Told in a cartoon format where the Jews are portrayed as mice and the Nazi soldiers as cats, the story gains much of its power from the form in which it is written.
Spiegelman alternates between Poland during the war (where Vladek recounts the terrible and terrifying days of the Nazi occupation) and Rego Park, New York in the 1980s (where Art and his aging father struggle to establish meaningful lives together).
The result is a story which compels the reader to keep turning the pages while terror comes to life through vivid illustrations. It is a story of survival and finally of love - love between a man and a woman which the German camps could not destroy, and love between a father and son. Maus I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began are powerful documentaries of a family who survived the Holocaust and its impact on their future and the child who was born after the war.
This was my first foray into Graphic Art as story and I was moved and touched by it. If you decide to read Spiegelman’s work, you must read both books, back to back without a rest in between.
Highly recommended.
The
His father drove Art nuts, but, by the end of his story, I think he realizes that a human being is fundamentally changed forever when forced to survive in the most horrific conditions, surrounded by death or threat of it, man's inhumanity to man even among friends--it's very easy to get irritated with someone when we can't understand events that have shaped them. But, Art loves his dad and knows that he is a strong, smart man who was lucky. Because, we also see that being chosen to live and being chosen to die more often than not was a matter of luck. The whole situation was ghastly, but some situations within the whole were worse. The thing that stood out for me was 'lines'. Sometimes it boiled down to something as simple as where a person stood in line if they would live or die.
I was pleased to actually see two photographs in the book. One was a baby picture of his beautiful older brother Richieu, who did not make it through the war. The other was of his dad, a handsome, determined looking man. I was sad that Art did not include a photograph of his mother, Anja. A delicate woman who surprisingly made it through the camps, only to commit suicide later in life leaving a husband and son. Why? Was she feeling guilt that she lived and so many others died--was the weight of this too much?
A very powerful memoir.
The historical detail in the book was mind-blowing as well as gruesome (obviously.) I also found the father-son relationship to be fascinating.
What
The unique presentation of the story (comic strip) made me understand why it is so vital in Holocaust lesson plans, because the format is much more child-friendly (even if the content is not.)
Overall, I'm glad I was required to read it because I'm not sure I would have otherwise.