Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman

Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Art Spiegelman
ISBN 978-0-394-74723-1
159 pages
Pantheon Books, 1991

Genre: Graphic Novel; Adult Crossover

Readers Annotation
The author and artist details the life of his father, a Holocaust survivor, in this graphic novel that uses animals instead of people to tell the story.

Plot Summary
In Maus, a graphic novel, author and illustrator Art Spiegelman tells the story of his parents, Vladek and Anja, who were both Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. The story is structured around Art, now an adult, visiting his father and asking him to tell him what happened to him before and during the war so he can write a comic about it. Anja is now dead, and Vladek has married Mala, another survivor; Mala and Vladek can't stand each other. Vladek tells the story, interrupting with asides about modern life or things that happened after the war, or comments about his son or his late wife.

Vladek met and romanced Anja in pre-war Poland, when things were good. Anja's father was a millionaire and Vladek was a successful small-time businessman. After the birth of their first son, Anja suffered from post-partum depression. Vladek accompanied Anja to a sanitarium, while a governess watched their son and her father minded Vladek's new textile factory. Anja regains her mental health at the sanitarium, but they return to a changed world. The rise of the Nazi party in Germany, and Germany's encroachment on Poland, means that life is not good for the Jews. Vladek is recruited into the Polish army, where he is held as a P.O.W. by the Germans. Eventually he is released to a German work camp, and when he is discharged, he manages to escape being sent to a concentration camp and returns home to his wife and family.

Vladek and Anja's situation gets worse and worse, and the Nazi treatment of the Jews grows increasingly horrific. Their wealth before the war means they have goods they can trade for food and relationships with businessmen they can exploit.  Vladek proves himself to be wily, always finding ways to survive. Eventually the Jews are all crowded into ghettos, which slowly are emptied as the Nazis send more and more people to the work camps to die. Their family is torn apart; they send their son away to live where they think he will be safe. Anja's grandparents and then parents are sent to the work camps. Eventually Anja and Vladek are sent to Auschwitz, too. The story ends here, with the story of their experience in Auschwitz and after the war being told in the novel's sequel.

Critical Evaluation
This was a truly remarkable story. Spiegelman uses animals to portray the people in his father's story: the Jews are shown as mice (maus being the German word for mouse), which Spiegelman says refers to the Nazi's portrayal of Jews as the vermin of Europe. The Polish are shown as pigs, and the Germans are cats. Spiegelman uses black and white pen and ink cartoons to tell the story. The drawings are simple but evocative, effective at depicting the horrors of the Jews' situation in Poland.

Spiegelman's storytelling device, which switches back and forth between the past and the present day, and includes many asides from his father, is also really effective at showing the lifelong effects that the Holocaust had on his parents. We learn early on that their first son didn't survive the war, and we also learn that Anja eventually commits suicide. There's a comic inside a comic explaining the effect that his mother's suicide had on Art and his father, and this goes a long way to explain their current strained relationship.  Vladek is constantly berating his son for wasting money: not cleaning his plate, hiring help to do home repairs, throwing things out instead of saving them in case they come handy. Art actually worries aloud to Mala that he is portraying his father as the stereotypical miserly Jew. However, it's clear that Vladek's life experiences, where he quickly went from having everything to having nothing, are the cause for his current behavior.

There are absolutely heartbreaking, unbelievably tragic stories that are included here. In some ways, the graphic novel format brings them to life more than a straightforward prose telling of Vladek's story would. For instance, when Vladek and his wife pretend to be Poles to avoid detection by the Nazis, they wear pig masks. This simply and clearly shows how they had to pretend to be someone else in order to survive in a more visceral way than words alone could.

It's a phenomenal work. While it is not specifically aimed at young adults, it will be an appealing title for teens who will respond to its format and the power of its story.

About the Author
Art Spiegelman is a well-known and highly influential comic artist. While Maus remains his best-known work, he has written a number of other graphic novels. He did a lot of work for The New Yorker and was the artist behind their iconic cover immediately after the September 11th attacks. He also invented the Garbage Pail Kids. Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly published and edited the infamous underground comics anthology RAW, which was published throughout the 1980s.

Curriculum Ties
Maus would be great to use to teach high schoolers about the Jewish experience before, during, and after the Holocaust. Indeed it has been adopted by many high school teachers as an official part of the curriculum.

Booktalking Ideas
1. Explain the concept of the novel: the story of the Holocaust told through animals.
2. Talk about the way that Spiegelman switches between the past and the present to completely tell his father's story.
3. Talk about Anja and Vladek's experience under the Nazis.

Reading Interest/Level
This graphic novel is aimed at adults, though high schoolers will also respond strongly to it.

Challenge Issues
While the graphic novel depicts truly horrifying events--indeed, I had to look away or close the book at several moments--I hope that because all the events are based things that really did happen during the Holocaust, no one would try to censor this book. However, if the book were challenged, the librarian should point to Maus' status as a critically acclaimed title and stress its historical importance.

Selection Criteria
Maus won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Though the graphic novel didn't fit into an preexisting category, the Pulitzer Committee was so impressed by the book that they created a special award to acknowledge it.