Maus

Volumes 1 and 2 of Art Spiegelman's Maus tell of a very moving tale. Art Spiegelman presents to us the story of how his father, Vladek, survived the holocaust and the many trials he had to undertake. Written as almost a memoir of his father, he frequently jumps back and forth from the past to the present, giving us a glimpse of how he deals with his father. Spiegelman portrays the characters of the tale in a clever way. The jewish are portrayed as mice, or vermin, while the polish are pigs. The nazis are shown to the reader as frightening looking cats. In this almost cute way of showing different racial groups, it gives a lot of powerful impact to the story.

While the story does do a wonderful job of pulling at the reader's heartstrings, there are certain elements that spark question. One of the most important would be how Vladek, after dealing with the events of the holocaust and all the anti-semitism that led up to it, could be such a racist man. Spiegelman shows this in a very good way and even shows the reader how he dealt with it himself. Another difficulty I ran into while reading Maus was a lack of impact for me. Having just taken a course dedicated to the history of the holocaust last semester, I found this story almost hard to care about. This is not to say while learning about the holocaust I didn't give a shit about what happened. In fact its quite the opposite. I feel that if I had read Maus a few months, later than when I did, it would have had a much greater impact on me.

A short film we watched in class around the time we read Maus was “Barefoot Gen.” This was a work by Keiji Nakazawa that started out as a graphic novel, and was later turned into a work of animation. The story is loosely based off Nakazawa's personal experience of surviving the Hiroshima bombing. Spiegelman even compared this work to his own, and even though the Hiroshima bombing was not a genocide, the effects of it are just as devastating and frightening.