Friday, May 23, 2025
Book Review: Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
(Bought at the Strand for $8.50) I had read Art Spiegelman's Maus I a long time ago. A recent American Masters TV doc. on Spiegelman inspired me to pick up Maus II. In both books, Jews are mice, Nazis are cats, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, gypsies are moths, Scandinavians are reindeer. An unflinching portrait of Spiegelman's Holocaust survivor father and the author's fraught relationship with him. The father is shown as a resourceful survivor in the concentration camps, but this experience makes him stingy, neurotic and impossible to live with. He's prejudiced against blacks and drives his second wife away, after Spiegelman's mother has committed suicide. The author is unsparing on himself as well, portraying himself as wearing a mouse mask while facing the press over his first Maus book and shrinking into a child while confessing his fears and insecurities to his therapist--also a Holocaust survivor. One of the most important works in dealing with the Holocaust. It brings an impossibly horrific event into comprehensible terms. Though the characters are anthropomorphic animals, they are probably the most realistic portraits of those dealing with the Holocaust.
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