Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History
— 1986 —
New York: Pantheon Books, 1986; 159 pages
FIRST LINES
It was summer, I remember. I was ten or eleven…
“Last one to the schoolyard is a rotten egg!”
… I was roller skating with Howie and Steve…
…’til my skate came loose.
“Ow!
Hey! Wait up fellas!”
“Rotten egg! Ha Ha!”
“W-wait up!”
“SNK, SNF”
My father was in front, fixing something…
“Artie! Come to hold this a minute while I saw.”
“SNRK?”
“Why do you cry, Artie? Hold better on the wood.”
“I- I fell, and my friends skated away w- without me.”
He stopped sawing.
“Friends? Your friends?…
If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week….
THEN you could see what it is, FRIENDS!”
PLOT SUMMARY
The first installment of what became a two-volume work, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History is an account of the Holocaust, told in comic book–style panels, in which Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs.
The Holocaust? As a cartoon strip? Yes, it is included here for both its intrinsic literary value as well its place in publishing history. Before Maus, few graphic novels or comic books of any kind were accorded the status of literature. Maus changed that.
Through this landmark combination of words, art, history, and biography, author and cartoonist Art Spiegelman recounts the story of his parents, Vladek and Anja. Polish Jews, they are depicted in the years before the war begins and then during Vladek’s brief stint in the Polish army when Germany invades Poland in 1939.
Vladek and Anja are forced into hiding with the approach of the Holocaust until—and this is no spoiler—Vladek is unloaded from a truck at the gates of Auschwitz. Set against that story, Maus also explores the troubled relationship between father Vladek and son Artie, who is trying to comprehend his mother’s suicide.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ART SPIEGELMAN
Art Spiegelman was born on February 15, 1948, in Stockholm, Sweden, and was brought to the United States in 1951 as a toddler by his parents, survivors of Auschwitz. An older brother had died during the Holocaust before Spiegelman was born. The family eventually settled in Queens, New York. While attending New York City’s High School of Art and Design, Spiegelman began selling illustrations to newspapers and later designed art for Topps Chewing Gum. While in college, he helped develop the successful “Garbage Pail Kids” and “Wacky Packages” trading cards.
Spiegelman later told the New York Times that after he showed his father one of his first comics, “his only response was, ‘From this you make a living?’ ”
After his mother’s suicide in 1968, Spiegelman left the State University of New York at Binghamton and began contributing to the alterative comics scene pioneered by R. Crumb. In 1972, two groundbreaking strips were published. The first was Maus, originally appearing as a three-page story. The second, Prisoner on the Hell Planet, dealt with the suicide of Spiegelman’s mother. In 1980, he founded Raw, an underground comics anthology, with his wife, Françoise Mouly, later the art editor of the New Yorker. In Raw, they pioneered graphic novels and “comix” (comics written for a mature audience).
Spiegelman continued to tell the story in Maus in serial fashion. Attempting to sell the series in book form, Spiegelman was rejected by many mainstream publishers. But a newspaper article praising the project led to its eventual publication in book form by Pantheon in 1986.
A second volume, Maus II, published in 1991, was accorded a prestigious front-page review in the New York Times Book Review. It went on to become a New York Times best seller initially on the Fiction list and later moving to the Nonfiction list. The two works were awarded a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 1992. Spiegelman’s art for Maus was also given an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Spiegelman went on to work as an illustrator for the New York Times and Playboy and as a staff artist and writer for the New Yorker. In 2004, Spiegelman published In the Shadow of No Towers, his reflection on the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. It was selected as one of the “100 Notable Books of the Year” in 2004 by the New York Times.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
There is, of course, an extraordinary range and sweep of Holocaust literature, in both fiction and nonfiction. John Hersey’s The Wall, a fictional account of the Warsaw uprising, left an indelible impression on me as a young person. And such novels as Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s Ark (Schindler’s List), and The Reader, as well as Elie Wiesel’s many books, including Night, and Primo Levi’s memoir (see If This Is a Man), are central to the historical memory of the Holocaust.
But as Lawrence L. Langer wrote in reviewing Maus II in the New York Times in 1991: “Perhaps no Holocaust narrative will ever contain the whole experience. But Art Spiegelman has found an original and authentic form to draw us closer to its bleak heart.”
On my second reading, I was struck by the significance of the difficult relationship between father and son, a level of emotion that a focus on the Holocaust material tends to overlook. A brilliant blend of memoir and history, Maus is presented in a visual format that makes the humanity of Spiegelman’s cartoon “animals” all the more vivid. To a German reporter who once asked if his depiction of Auschwitz was in bad taste, Spiegelman replied, “No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.”
Early in 2022, Maus made international headlines when a school board in Tennessee removed the book from the school curriculum, provoking an outcry over censorship. That decision came in the midst of a wave of book bannings across America, many of them directed at books written by and about gays and people of color, as well as nonfiction focusing on gender issues, teen sexuality, slavery, and racism in America.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Obviously, the answer is Maus II, which continues the saga of Artie’s parents, his fraught relationship with his father, and his own sense of guilt and loss. Reviewing it in 1991, New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote, “In recounting the tales of both the father and the son in ‘Maus’ and now in ‘Maus II,’ Mr. Spiegelman has stretched the boundaries of the comic book form and in doing so has created one of the most powerful and original memoirs to come along in recent years.”
In the Shadow of No Towers emerged from his experience living near the World Trade Center towers struck on September 11, 2001. Depressed and obsessed with the attack and its aftermath, he spent several years drawing the panels, which were serialized in Europe before being published in the United States in 2004. While he was working on the project, he told an interviewer:
It’s hard to explain why these drawings that everybody thinks you scrawl on the side of a math test should take so long to put into shape for publication. I think it’s useful to think of them as haikus.