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MAUS: A SURVIVOR'S TALE

Vol. ii, and here my troubles began.

by Art Spiegelman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1991

Full of hard-earned humor and pathos, Maus (I and II) takes your breath away with its stunning visual style, reminding us...

Together with the much-acclaimed first volume of Spiegelman's Maus (1987—not reviewed), this unusual Holocaust tale will forever alter the way serious readers think of graphic narratives (i.e., comic books).

For his unforgettable combination of words and pictures, Spiegelman draws from high and low culture, and blends autobiography with the story of his father's survival of the concentration camps. In funny-book fashion, the all-too-real characters here have the heads of animals—the Jews are mice, the Nazis are rats, and the Poles are pigs—a stark Orwellian metaphor for dehumanized relations during WWII. Much of Spiegelman's narrative concerns his own struggle to coax his difficult father into remembering a past he'd rather forget. What emerges in father Vladek's tale is a study in survival; he makes it through by luck, randomness, and cleverness. Physically strong, he bluffs his way through the camps as a tinsmith and a shoemaker, and also exploits his ability with languages. Every day in Auschwitz, and later in Dachau, demands new bribes and masterly bartering. All of this helps explain Vladek's art of survival in the present: his cheap, miserly behavior; his disappointment over Spiegelman's marriage to a non-Jew; his constant criticism of his own second wife and his son; and even his inexcusable racism. Haunted by the brother who died in the camps, Spiegelman (born in postwar Sweden) also mourns his mother, who survived only to commit suicide in the late 60's. Within the time span of the writing of Maus (1978-91), Vladek died, and Spiegelman now must sort out his complex feelings as he reflects on the success of the first volume—a success built on the tragedy of the Holocaust. With all his doubts, Spiegelman pushes on, realizing that his book deserves a place in the ongoing struggle between memory and forgetting.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-394-55655-0

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | HOLOCAUST | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Jon Krakauer

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The Best Fiction Books » Comics & Graphic Novels

By art spiegelman.

***Pulitzer Prize 1992 Special Citation***

Recommendations from our site

“It’s a hard thing to read for me because many of my family perished in the Holocaust. I read it when it came out. There was Maus I and Maus II . It left a real big impression. There’s notes that resonate with my grandparents, who were German, and what they had to go through. They had to flee and were caught up in the Second World War and were immigrants. It’s a hard read, a tough story to tell.’ Neil Emmanuel, Illustrator” Read more...

Best Graphic Histories

“This is an amazing book. Like all the books I love, it gets the reader to see the world with fresh eyes. But Maus is also unusual in the way it combines a deeply serious topic with a genre not usually taken very seriously. It’s about the Holocaust. It’s also a comic book, in which the various characters are depicted as animals – the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats etc.. The combination of a comic book and the Holocaust itself is startling. But on top of that, Speigelman breaks another taboo in moving back and forth between the story of his father, who was a Holocaust survivor, and his current relationship with him, which is full of resentment and complaints. The notion that an author writing about a Holocaust survivor would include unflattering portrayals was shocking to many. But for many more—the book has won numerous prizes and been translated into many languages—a bracing reality had challenged a soothing but dishonest sentimentality.” Read more...

The best books on Popular Culture

Susan Bordo , Social Scientist

“If I have a preferred book to read about the Holocaust, it’s probably the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman, about his parents’ experience in Poland. Many have read it, but if you haven’t, you must. It’s set in late 1970s New York, and is as much about the son’s relationship with the father who went through all this, as it is about the events of the 1930s and 40s in Poland.” Read more...

VE Day Books: Editors’ Picks

Sophie Roell , Journalist

“The publication of the first volume of Maus in 1986 was absolutely a terrain-shifting moment. It was nominated for a National Book Critic Circle award in the category of biography and people freaked out. In 1991, the second half was on the New York Times bestseller list on the fiction side of the ledger. Art wrote a letter to the Times complaining and, for the first time in the history of that list, they published his letter and moved it to non-fiction. So it’s this pushing on taxonomy that Maus accomplished and which fascinates me so much. Maus changed the face of comics and also modern literature.”

The Best Graphic Narratives, recommended by literary scholar Hillary Chute

“One of the things in it that has always really stuck with me and that I thought was really affecting is he draws all of the different people’s nationalities as different animals. So Jewish people are mice and German people are cats. Polish people are pigs and French people are frogs. And there is a really lovely scene, written between him and his wife. His wife has converted to Judaism but is originally French. And he says, ‘Well, I’m not sure how I’m going to picture you in this scheme I’ve come up with.’ It’s very meta—he’s talking about the process of writing this. And she says, ‘Well, I’ve converted to Judaism, so surely I’m a mouse?’”

The best graphic history books, recommended by historian Eleanor Janega

Other books by Art Spiegelman

Breakdowns by art spiegelman, our most recommended books, persepolis by marjane satrapi, watchmen by alan moore, madame livingstone: the great war in the congo by barly baruti (illustrator) & christophe cassiau-haurie, nausicaä of the valley of the wind by hayao miyazaki, kariba by daniel clarke, daniel snaddon & james clarke, understanding comics by scott mccloud.

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Book of a lifetime: Maus by Art Spiegelman

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I'm not ashamed to admit it; I do read prose books. However, being a writer and artist of graphic novels, I find myself obliged to choose one in order to champion the form in general.

It's Art Spiegelman's Maus. Dealing with the harrowing wartime experiences of his father, Vladek, a Polish Jew and survivor of Auschwitz, and Spiegelman's troubled relationship with him, it's biography, autobiography and historical memoir, told in the comics medium.

Not wanting to trivialise Vladek's story by employing an overtly dramatic style, Spiegelman presents it in a straightforward cartoon way, with Jews represented as mice (the rodent metaphor taken straight from Hitler's own propaganda) and Nazis as cats. As with Hergé's ligne claire depictions of Tintin, the simple mouse masks make it easy for readers to empathise with the protagonists. Along with the eloquent visual storytelling, they make the book easily accessible to non-comics readers. The cartoon style and anthropomorphic characters allow the reader to approach otherwise horrific situations in a direct way, without the use of realistically explicit images and melodrama, while still retaining the power of the experience.

The style is deceptively simple. Spiegelman experimented with different approaches and each page underwent multiple stages as he strove for clarity and fluidity. He tells the story dispassionately and honestly without any knowing winks to comics-literate readers. Nor is he trying to tell a "worthy" story, but simply documenting his father's wartime experiences and depicting how he elicited this information. The present-day sequences give us an unsentimental portrait of this survivor of the death camp. Spiegelman doesn't glamorise his father as some kind of hero. Vladek comes across as irritating, manipulative, exasperating, and even bigoted.

One wouldn't expect humour, but it's there, often wry and situational. It's a rich, well-rounded book. The first comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize, Maus paved the way in English-speaking countries for the recognition of the comics medium as a legitimate art form and for graphic novels that deal with "serious" issues. It's fashionable to say that articles promoting the graphic novel as an art are redundant because this is now a truth universally acknowledged. It's not. There's still a tremendous amount of prejudice against the comics medium that's in dire need of redress. Never read a GN? Why not try Maus?

Bryan Talbot is author of 'Grandville Bête Noire' (Cape) and co-author, with Mary M Talbot, of 'Dotter of Her Father's Eyes' (Cape), shortlisted for the Costa biography award

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Books of The Times

After a Quarter-Century, an Author Looks Back at His Holocaust Comic

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By Dwight Garner

• Oct. 12, 2011

Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” the most unconventional great book yet written about the Holocaust, the one that turned Nazis into cats and Jews into mice and Poles into pigs, turns 25 this year. It was the first comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize, and it changed the way comics — the term seems wrong for “Maus” — are viewed in America. It proved they could be serious art.

“Maus” is not a graphic novel but a work of memoir and history. It tells the story of Mr. Spiegelman’s father in Poland before World War II, in Auschwitz during the war and as an old coot in Rego Park, Queens, after the fighting stopped. Part of Mr. Spiegelman’s accomplishment in “Maus” is that he turned it into a second-generation Holocaust survivor’s account, too. That is, he made himself a character in the book and threaded in his own quizzical modern sensibility . “Maus” doesn’t have a tired or sanctimonious bone in its body.

Mr. Spiegelman’s new book, “MetaMaus,” functions as a kind of artist’s scrapbook, chapbook, photo album and storage trunk. Packed with more extras than a new “Transformers” DVD, it’s a look back at “Maus” and its complicated composition and reception. His publisher calls this shaggily engaging volume, accurately enough, a “vast Maus midrash.”

An extended Q & A with Mr. Spiegelman, a kind of swollen Paris Review interview, fills most of the book’s pages, while arty and inky things pack the margins: draft sketches from “Maus”; personal photographs; family trees; official documents like his mother’s passport and his parents’ arrest records from Auschwitz.

There’s a DVD included, as well, with an interactive version of “Maus” and features like interviews and home movies. It’s O.K., I suspect, that, as with all such DVDs, few will look at it more than once; then this already-fading technology will become defunct and you will find this swastika-stamped disk at someone’s lawn sale. Let’s talk about the book instead.

The interview with Mr. Spiegelman, conducted by Hillary Chute, an English professor at the University of Chicago, is overly long and reverent. But Mr. Spiegelman is a witty and testy raconteur, and Ms. Chute knows a good deal about comics and she pulls good things from him.

The success of “Maus” — the first of its two volumes appeared in 1986 — was far from preordained. The book was turned down by many publishers, and Mr. Spiegelman prints his rejection letters here, from nearly all of America’s major publishing houses, including Alfred A. Knopf and Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The idea of a comic book about the Holocaust was inconceivable to most. The idea made people snort. One editor wrote: “You can imagine the response I’ve gotten from the sales department.” “Maus” was finally published by Pantheon Books, which gave its author only a small advance.

“Maus” became a best seller, surprising Mr. Spiegelman as much as anyone else. “I had actually thrived on the relative neglect; it made me get up and work,” he says. “Neurotically, the anhedonic way I experienced the success of ‘Maus’ was to spend the next 20 years trying to wriggle out from under my own achievement.”

Mr. Spiegelman has been a stern critic of what he calls “Holokitsch,” and has been at pains to avoid it. His wife, Françoise Mouly, said to him, “Next to making ‘Maus,’ your greatest achievement may have been not turning it into a movie.” He knows the sort of life he does not wish to live. “I didn’t want to become the Elie Wiesel of comic books and become the conscience and voice of a second generation.”

The author is instructively apoplectic about the idea that “Maus,” because it is a comic book, is somehow “Auschwitz for Beginners,” a sugarcoated pill. When the book won a young-adult award from librarians, he was peeved. “I’d made something as mature as I was capable of making, and it seemed unfair that I was a victim of a prejudice against my medium,” he says. Ultimately, he says, “I reconciled to the fact that if ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn’ can be considered children’s books, I can settle for ‘Maus’ being on those shelves.”

Still, he reprints one of his own comic strips from The New Yorker, in which he declares, “When parents give ‘Maus,” my book about Auschwitz, to their little kids, I think it’s child abuse.”

He has complex thoughts about his use of animals to represent Jews, Germans, Poles and others in his book. He notes that Israelis have resisted “Maus,” uncomfortable that “the image of mice contains the stereotype of Jews as pathetic and defenseless creatures.” Mr. Spiegelman convincingly argues that he was using “Hitler’s pejorative attitudes against themselves,” and that using animals “allowed me to approach otherwise unsayable things.”

There is some fetishizing of the artist’s tools in “MetaMaus,” things like his specially modified Pelikan fountain pens . There are interviews with his wife, son and daughter. They seem like wonderful people, but this material is total filler. More usefully, he reprints transcripts of the often moving interviews he conducted with his father while researching “Maus.”

Mr. Spiegelman is charismatic, and the photographs of him sprinkled throughout are pretty delightful. In one from his young hippie years, he resembles Che Guevara. Later, he becomes an unholy, raven-haired combination of Martin Scorsese and Edgar Allan Poe. He likes to wear vests; he tends to have a cigarette in hand.

Bear in mind that “MetaMaus” does not contain the actual text of “Maus,” though it can be read on the DVD. This is not a book to present to someone who has not read the original.

Twenty-five years after its original publication, “Maus” continues to provoke. Mr. Spiegelman recalls an incident in Germany in 1987, when a reporter barked at him, “Don’t you think that a comic book about the Holocaust is in bad taste?”

The author responded, “No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.”

A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus

By Art Spiegelman

Illustrated. 299 pages. Pantheon Books. $35.

Why Maus Was Banned

What makes the book controversial is exactly what makes it valuable.

In the 1970s, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman jotted down a thought in a notebook. “Maybe Western civilization has forfeited any right to literature with a big ‘L,’” he wrote. “Maybe vulgar, semiliterate, unsubtle comic books are an appropriate form for speaking of the unspeakable.” It came to him around the time he started making comics about the Holocaust, which would eventually lead to his two-volume, Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale .

Forty years later, at an event where I was interviewing him, I asked about that quote. “For one thing, the unspeakable gets spoken within 10 minutes, by me if nobody else,” Spiegelman quipped. (He got up in the middle of the same event and went outside to smoke a cigarette, leaving me facing an empty chair, and a packed house.) It’s true that Spiegelman “speaks”—and draws—the unspeakable in Maus . In black line art, it presents two narratives: the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to the United States in 1951 with his wife, Anja, also a survivor, and their toddler, Art—and the story of the cartoonist son, as an adult, soliciting his father’s testimony. It is taught routinely in high school, college, and graduate school. It is, in addition, taught to many middle-school students. This came to wide attention this past January, when Maus was banned from an eighth-grade English-language-arts curriculum by the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board. The ban became a global news story; Maus sold out on Amazon.

Read: Book bans are targeting the history of oppression

But the ban didn’t surprise me. A new wave of politically driven censorship, particularly one motivated by a discomfort with discussions of America’s history of slavery, has grown in the Trump and post-Trump years. And Maus ’s frank visual depiction of horrors, the way it acts as a form of witness to dehumanization and genocide, is controversial. Of course, that confrontation with horror is exactly what makes it valuable. In fact, a work like Maus could not be any more urgent during an era of rampant division, one in which racism and anti-Semitism are rising both nationally and globally. One of Spiegelman’s longtime catchphrases—“Never again and again and again”—feels eerily prescient; he gave what he calls “ Maus Now” talks after the fatal racist, white-nationalist Charlottesville, Virginia, rally in 2017 (which included the chant “Jews will not replace us!”), and the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018.

Maus ’s importance cannot be overstated: It shifted how people talk about history, trauma, and ethnic and racial persecution. The critic and journalist Alisa Solomon, for instance, notes in her 2014 essay “The Haus of Maus ” that the book “became the proof text for academic study of the transgenerational transmission of trauma and its representation.”  It also is a high-water mark for comics—exemplifying the medium’s productive tensions between word and image, presence and absence, that are so key to expressing memory. The series famously articulates its characters as animals; they understand themselves as human, but readers see Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, Polish gentiles as pigs, and Americans as dogs. This level of abstraction, which repurposes a metaphor from Nazi propaganda, is hard to imagine being effective in any other medium. The drawing allows Spiegelman to do more than say what happened. In a rich, layered way, he can show it.

Maus is also a tricky text, prone to misinterpretation—and, as in Tennessee, censorship. It was notably banned in Russia in 2015 because the modified swastika on its cover was categorized as violating anti-Nazi-propaganda laws. Maus was also subject to book burnings in Poland in 2001 , the year it was published there (long after other foreign editions), by people who objected to its depiction of Polish gentiles.

When the book emerged as a fresh target in the culture wars this year, the school board’s official, and flimsy, reasons for removing it from the curriculum amplified the outrage. The board cited bad language (such as “bitch” and “goddamn”) and nudity (specifically, one small image of Spiegelman’s mother, drawn in human form, in the bathtub after taking her own life, a profoundly troubling visual on which to pin the charge of obscenity). These aspects, while perhaps not ideal for an eighth-grade audience, feel beside the point in a narrative that bears witness to genocide.

Read: The banned books you haven’t heard about

The meeting minutes from the McMinn County school board are especially telling. At one point, a board member seemingly singles out a striking scene in Maus I , where Vladek sees four Jews, executed for trading on the black market, hanging on a central street in the Polish city of Sosnowiec in 1942. “Being in the schools, educators and stuff, we don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff,” the member said. “It shows people hanging; it shows them killing kids; why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy.” As with other enacted and proposed bans—on works about slavery, for instance—this rationale whitewashes racist and anti-Semitic violence. The visceral reaction to these books’ imagery ignores the message behind the pictures. Graphic histories and testimonies like Maus intentionally ask readers to encounter, in small part, what their subjects also encountered, including the malevolent power of Nazi symbols.

Maus is not “promoting” murder by bearing witness to it. As some in the meeting pointed out, hangings and other forms of fatal violence happened. Spiegelman observed in a post-ban event at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville that the censors “want a kinder, gentler Holocaust they can stand.” That version, needless to say, doesn’t exist. What Maus does offer are pages, like the one depicting hanging Jews in Sosnowiec, that engage spectacle—that ask readers to confront a shred of the horror that Vladek Spiegelman experienced. It invites us to witness—in the anthropologist Michael Taussig’s sense of witnessing as pausing that moment when shocking things pass “from horror to banality.” Even as it resists the politics that drive them, Maus asks readers to encounter violent realities and their role in our present. In 2022, facing those realities—and in some cases, teaching them—is a condition for recognizing their ever-present possibility.

This article is adapted from Maus Now: Selected Writing , edited by Hillary Chute.

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'Maus' author Art Spiegelman shares the story behind his Pulitzer-winning work

Terry Gross

Spiegelman's graphic novel, which was recently banned by a school district in Tennessee, tells the story of how his Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in Poland. Originally broadcast in 1987.

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GEORGE L THOMAS

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Home › Book Reviews › Book Review: Maus by Art Spiegelman

Book Review: Maus by Art Spiegelman

By georgelthomas on 1 Mar 2024 • ( 3 )

Hi everyone! I hope you’re all well. It’s Friday, and it’s time for another review . Today, I am reviewing the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman.

Maus was first published as a seria from 1980 to 1991 before it’s first of two volumes were com[piled and released by Pantheon Books. It is 296 pages long.

The Plot Maus is a graphic novel and a powerful and poignant memoir that recounts the experiences of the author’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust.

Characters Art Spiegelman: The author and illustrator of the graphic novel, Art, is also a character in the book, serving as a mediator between his father and himself as he tries to understand his father’s past and preserve his story.

Vladek Spiegelman Vladek is the story’s main protagonist, and it’s narrated from his perspective. He is a Polish Jew who barely survived the Holocaust, having been imprisoned in the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. He is portrayed as meticulous and resourceful and occasionally trades and bribes his way out of dangerous situations to survive. Vladek’s story is one of trauma, loss, and survival, and his relationship with his son Art is strained throughout the book due to the lingering effects of his experiences during the war.

For me, the depiction of Vladek is the book’s main strength. He is shown as heroic and flawed, with his actions in the past being influenced by his stubbornness and need for survival.

He is a complex character – as most real people are, with his personality and behaviour often difficult to understand. He even sometimes comes across as selfish and cruel. However, Art Spiegelman’s portrayal of their interactions allows readers to see the deeper motivations behind these behaviours and to appreciate the intricate and often fraught dynamics between their generations.

Anja Spiegelman: Anja is Art’s deceased mother, and she was also a Holocaust survivor who tragically committed suicide when Art was young. Although in flashbacks, she is shown as a nurturing and loving mother, her experiences at Auschwitz also left her with deep psychological scars. Anja is painted as a profoundly emotional and fragile person who suffered poor mental health even before the awful atrocities inflicted upon her during the war.

Her story highlights the impact that the Holocaust had on the mental health of survivors.

Richieu Spiegelman Richieu is Vladek’s and Anja’s first son, who died during the Holocaust while he was still small. His fate was upsetting to read about, and his absence from the story is a poignant reminder of the devastating impact of the Holocaust on families.

Mala Spiegelman Mala is Vladek’s second wife, whom he married after Anja’s death. Their relationship is strained, with Mala feeling that Vladek is too controlling and frugal with his money. Meanwhile, Vladek doesn’t understand why she wants to spend it.

Françoise Françoise is Art’s wife. She is a French woman who converted to Judaism when they married. She is portrayed as supportive and understanding and helps Art look after his father in his later life.

Writing Style What sets Maus apart from other Holocaust narratives is Spiegelman’s unflinching portrayal of the horrors of genocide. He depicts the brutal reality of concentration camps, the psychological trauma suffered by survivors, namely his parents, and the difficulties faced by those trying to rebuild their lives in the wake of such tremendous loss. The narrative is frank and unapologetic but also touching and heartfelt.

The story is a brutal reminder of the incomprehensible horrors of the Holocaust and their enduring impact on the survivors. Vladek’s memories of his experiences in Auschwitz and other concentration camps are harrowing but told with a matter-of-factness that serves to underscore the gravity of what he endured. Spiegelman skillfully weaves together past and present, illustrating the inter-generational effects of trauma and the complex dynamics between a father and son.

Artwork The artwork in Maus is brilliantly done, and Spiegelman’s use of black and white colour contrasts helps to blunt the knife of awful truth you’re presented with when reading the story. His drawing style is minimalist yet evocative and effective in capturing the raw intensity of the characters’ emotions, whilst the characters and settings are depicted in a way that skillfully draws the reader into the darkness and brutality of war and its horrific consequences.

Final Thoughts Maus is a masterpiece of the graphic novel genre and a must-read for anyone interested in the Holocaust, memoirs, or graphic novels. It is an intensely moving work that is, at times, challenging but ultimately triumphant, speaking to the strength of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable hardship.

The novel is well-researched, detailed, and beautifully illustrated, offering readers a meaningful and unforgettable experience. For these reasons, I highly recommend Maus to any reader who seeks to expand their horizons and better understand the historical, social, and psychological impact of the Holocaust and its survivors.

I am giving Maus a solid 10/10.

Have you read Maus? What are your thoughts?

Thank you, as always, for reading my review. I really appreciate it!

Until next time,

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Categories: Book Reviews , Reading

Tags: book review , cats , graphic novel , Holocaust , Jewish , Maus , mice , Second world war

I have not read Maus, but first heard about it when it became a banned/restricted book in a school district in the U.S. (I think in Tennessee). From what I have read about it, and your review confirms this, is that it’s a very important graphic novel for all to read. It may be a hard topic, but it’s essential we do not turn away from the realities of this part of human history. This is a must-read!

Like Liked by 1 person

Yes, Molly! I agree 100 percent! 🙂🙂

• Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Non-Fiction Books I’ve Read Lately – GEORGE L THOMAS

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The complete maus.

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Based on 6 parent reviews

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It’s tough, but don’t be afraid.

This title has:

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A important story.

• Too much violence
• Too much sex

An important read for understanding the truth about the Holocaust

• Great messages
• Great role models

Eye opening, for a child that's ready for it

Amazing story and characters.

• Too much swearing

Art appreciation through the value of historical significance

What to read next.

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The Librarian of Auschwitz

We Are Witnesses: Five Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust

Graphic novels that teach history, books about the holocaust, related topics.

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