Maus is a compelling, true story of survival, love and loss. It’s a skillfully told story that follows a Polish Jew from youthful success through the holocaust and into being a difficult old man. The reader, like the author, can at the same time be awed by his resourcefulness and reeling from his maddening, petty behavior. The Pulitzer-winning tale is told through a medium that is generally associated with juvenile, fantasy adventure stories.
Maus is a powerful story of the holocaust and a complicated story of a son and his father. Vladek Speigelman survived horrors that killed many and had the presence of mind to help his wife come through it, too. This resilient man was full of flaws, miserly, racist, and competitive with his son, underground comics writer and artist Art Spiegelman.
In this sense, Maus is Art’s story. He is trying to have a relationship with his difficult father. He is trying to record his family’s amazing history. He and his father are both still coping with the death of his mother. Art’s love, awe, anger and frustration come through.
His sense guilt comes through, too. Art struggles with telling a story he can’t full appreciate. He wishes at one moment that he had lived through the holocaust so he could understand what his parents suffered.
Though Vladek seems to not think on it, Art speculates that his father’s need to be the best and to save stem from survivor’s guilt. Evens so, he presents plenty of evidence that Vladek’s parsimony, fastidiousness and vanity were with him before the Nazi invasion of Poland and might have contributed to his survival, along with a lot of luck.
Art Spiegelman didn’t seek easy answers about his father or the holocaust. Maus may be more about living with the questions and facing personal and societal history honestly even when we don’t have the answers.
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