A New Way to Understand the Holocaust
The Holocaust is often expressed as an event that cannot be appropriately described in any language known to the human race. Art Spiegelman's Maus and Maus II tries to overcome this perplexing language barrier by presenting the story of the author's father, a Jewish man who survived the Final Solution, in the format of a graphic novel. Spiegelman's illustrations and dialogue storyline help to capture both his father's distressing story as well as the personal difficulties he experienced himself as a second generation survivor, so to speak, giving readers a new way to try to understand this dark moment in history. A relatively new medium when the Maus books were first created, the graphic novel has the power to attract a diverse audience.In his books, Spiegelman is telling the story of his father, Vladek, and how his life was affected during the Holocaust. Artie, as his father calls him, gets his father to tell him the story over many visits, and includes in the plot his own feelings about the visits. The drawings follow the plot from the present setting in which his father is actually relating the story to him with lengthy flashbacks to the time during which the events actually took place. The first book is entitled My Fat
On the other hand, the reader is also able to experience the hardships that Artie experiences as the son of two survivors (his mother was also a survivor). First of all, Artie mentions that he feels he is always competing with his older brother Richieu, who died in hiding at the age of five or six, "The photo [of Richieu] never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble...It was an ideal kid, and I was a pain in the ass. I couldn't compete" (II Spiegelman 15). Here, Artie is affected by the Holocaust in his daily life even though he had not yet been born at the time of the actual event. Another way that Artie is affected by the Holocaust is though his mother's suicide. Anja, Vladek's first wife, committed suicide in 1968 when Artie was in his twenties. She did not leave a note (Spiegelman 100-103). Presumably, living through the Holocaust is the main cause of Anja's suicide, but no one will ever know that for a fact as, much to Artie's dismay, Vladek burned her memoirs. The pain Artie experienced after his mother's death is expressed throughout the two books. Thirdly, Artie has to deal with the Holocaust through his father. Vladek becomes a miser as a result of his experiences of shortage during the Holocaust, which becomes a problem for Artie, "Whenever I needed school supplies or new clothes mom would have to plead and argue for weeks before he'd cough up any dough!" claims Artie (II Spiegelman 130). It seems as though Artie is even more affected by his father's experience during the Holocaust because he cannot identify with it, and because it played such a large role in his father's life, not being able to understand this experience makes it difficult to understand his father, "I can't visualize it clearly, and I can't BEGIN to imagine what it felt like," comments Artie to his psychiatrist (II Spiegelman 46). Artie is proof that children of survivors are also affected by the Holocaust; its effects reach down through the generations. Maus and Maus II clearly c
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Approximate Word count = 1342
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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