Book Review: A Fable of the Holocaust
From: New York Times, November 3, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Art Spiegelman doesn't draw comics. It might be clever to say he draws tragics, but that would be inaccurate too. Like its predecessor, "Maus: A Survivor's Tale II. And Here My Troubles Began" is a serious form of pictorial literature, sustaining and even intensifying the power of the first volume. It resists defining labels.
The author and artist Art Spiegelman continues the story of the character Artie Spiegelman, who is trying to reconstruct in cartoon form the lives of his father, Vladek, and his mother, Anja, both survivors of Auschwitz. In 1968 Anja committed suicide, and the first part of "Maus" ends with the young Artie calling his father a "murderer" for having destroyed Anja's wartime memoirs without even having read them. Early in the sequel, Artie confesses to his wife, Francoise, "When I was a kid I used to think about which of my parents I'd let the Nazis take to the ovens if I could only save one of them. Usually I saved my mother. Do you think that's normal?" His wife dryly replies, "Nobody'snormal," leaving the reader wondering how to redefine "normal" for a family whose Holocaust legacy still exerts its influence over father and son.
With a distinctly post-modern flourish, Mr. Spiegelman reminds us throughout his text that "Maus II" is a narrative about incidents that, in many of their details, may be incommunicable. Artie admits to his wife, "I can't even make any sense out of my relationship with my father. How am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz?" One might conclude that a "comic strip" portraying the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs, the French as frogs, the Americans as dogs and the Swedes as reindeer would divert the reader from a meaningful pursuit of Artie's troubled questions -- but this is not at all the case.
The "meaning" is in the effort, not the results, and the animal characters create a distancing effect that allows us to follow the fable without being drowned in its grim, inhuman horrors. Tensions abound: Vladek has forgotten little of his ordeal, but he doesn't like to think about it and he only speaks of it at Artie's prodding. Some need beyond mere curiosity or professional interest drives Artie to record and draw his parents' Holocaust experience, while at the same time, as he confesses to his psychiatrist, "Some part of me doesn't want to draw or think about Auschwitz." And whatever he does accomplish, he concedes, doesn't seem like much compared to surviving the death camp.
The struggle to transform history and testimony into art is thus a central part of the drama of the text, and the reader is constantly sucked into the maelstrom of the conflict. Who can fail to sympathize with Vladek, an Auschwitz survivor reunited with his wife after the war, only to face her suicide nearly a quarter of a century later in Rego Park, Queens? But who can fail to chide him for being so stingy that he leaves the gas burner lit all day at his summer bungalow because the cost of the gas is included in the rental and he can light his cigarettes without wasting a match? (And who can fail to conjecture about that ominous conjunction of gas with flame, over which Vladek today exerts complete control?) Artie despises his father's frugality, and with some justice, but Mr. Spiegelman constantly reminds us that Vladek's behavior in the present cannot be separated from his anguish in the past. The reader thus develops insights that Mr. Spiegelman's persona, Artie, can't always achieve, and this is one of the many striking examples of the author's expert handling of narrative.
If "Maus II" chronicles Vladek Spiegelman's journey from Auschwitz to Dachau and beyond, it also recounts the impact of that voyage on his son. The story alternates between past and present, but so does the inner life of its characters, reflecting the confused sense of time so many former Holocaust victims and their families have today. In the first part of "Maus" we learned that Artie's parents had a previous son, Richieu, who at the age of 3 was poisoned by Anja's sister together with her own children, to prevent the Gestapo from taking them away. Artie has lived beneath the shadow of this lost brother, whose framed picture hangs prominently in his parents' bedroom, a periodic source of remorse, shame, grief, guilt and despair. Indeed, the presence of Richieu frames the narrative, since that picture also appears on the dedication page of "Maus II." There the words "For Richieu" seem to be meant to ease the burden of memory for the brother born after the war.
But if Richieu has the first word, who has the last? As if to confirm his doubts about making any sense out of Auschwitz, Mr. Spiegelman ends his tale with the same melancholy answer that nearly every Holocaust testimony, written or oral, provides: the dead, those who did not return, have the last word. How could it be otherwise? Once Vladek has finished his testimony with an account of how he was reunited with Anja after the war, he asks Artie to turn off the tape recorder -- he wants to sleep. The old man's last utterance, in the final panel of the text, is "I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it's enough stories for now." So the past has conquered the present, and in Vladek's mind, the living Artie has been replaced by the dead Richieu. This panel is followed by an image of a gravestone, informing us that the real Vladek Spiegelman died in 1982. "Maus II" is his testament.
But this book is not his transfiguration, and it is to Art Spiegelman's credit that he scrupulously avoids sentimentalizing or melodramatizing his tale. He writes with restraint and a relentless honesty, sparing neither his father nor himself. Given his brother's death and his mother's suicide, to say nothing of the other extensive family losses, there is little to celebrate. We are offered a whisper of hope for the future, since the book is also dedicated to his daughter, Nadja (born in 1987), but we are left wondering what kind of shadow her father's narrative will cast over her life, when she grows old enough to read it. Like the other questions raised in "Maus II," the answer remains shrouded in uncertainty. 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. BEHIND THE WORD BALLOONS
Twenty years ago Art Spiegelman published a short, primitive version of the "Maus" tale -- the "Ur Maus," as he put it -- in an underground comic magazine called Funny Aminals. "It was based," he said in an interview in his SoHo studio, "on memories of stories told to me when I was younger.
"With both my father and mother, stories would come up casually. I might be walking with my mother to the supermarket and she would have to go to the bathroom. While dragging me along she would tell me that in the camps they could only go to the bathroom at certain times. If she had to go while working in the fields her friends would form a circle around her" so the guards couldn't see.
But these stories "were decontextualized. I didn't know when they happened," he said. In writing "Maus," "I tried to inhabit the experience, to fix it in my own brain." In 1978, at the age of 30, he began what was to become a 13-year project. He taped more than 40 hours of interviews with his father, Vladek, dredged up conversations he had had with his mother, Anja, talked to other survivors and their children, read histories and traveled to Auschwitz, Dachau and his father's Polish hometown, Sosnowiec.
Trouble was, said Mr. Spiegelman, sometimes "my father's history didn't converge with what I found elsewhere." For instance, he learned from other survivors that when the Jews in Auschwitz marched from the camp to work each day there was an orchestra playing. His father, though, remembered only the sound of guards shouting. In "Maus" the father and son disagree about this, said Mr. Spiegelman, but in the end, "I win. The orchestra is there."
The dialogue, too, is boiled down from the real thing. There were only a few times, said Mr. Spiegelman, "when the way something was said was so perfect" it had to be preserved. The subtitle of the second volume, "And Here My Troubles Began," was one such sentence. Vladek utters this while telling of his life after Auschwitz -- obviously long after his troubles began. "The dissonance of that appearing in the middle," said Mr. Spiegelman, was part of its strength.
Still, no matter how a tale is told, "loss is inevitable," he said. "What my father articulated is less than what he went through. And, because I am an American kid who grew up with Howdy Doody and Mad magazine, what I can understand is less than what he articulated. What I can articulate is less than what I understand. And what readers understand is less than what I can articulate."
If an artist's studio is any indication of his mind, Mr. Spiegelman is still absorbed with cats and mice. On his wall is an original Krazy Kat drawing, on a shelf a tiny stuffed mouse. And prowling around the place, a large, orange and very real cat. -- SARAH BOXER
From: New York Times, November 3, 1991, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Art Spiegelman doesn't draw comics. It might be clever to say he draws tragics, but that would be inaccurate too. Like its predecessor, "Maus: A Survivor's Tale II. And Here My Troubles Began" is a serious form of pictorial literature, sustaining and even intensifying the power of the first volume. It resists defining labels.
The author and artist Art Spiegelman continues the story of the character Artie Spiegelman, who is trying to reconstruct in cartoon form the lives of his father, Vladek, and his mother, Anja, both survivors of Auschwitz. In 1968 Anja committed suicide, and the first part of "Maus" ends with the young Artie calling his father a "murderer" for having destroyed Anja's wartime memoirs without even having read them. Early in the sequel, Artie confesses to his wife, Francoise, "When I was a kid I used to think about which of my parents I'd let the Nazis take to the ovens if I could only save one of them. Usually I saved my mother. Do you think that's normal?" His wife dryly replies, "Nobody'snormal," leaving the reader wondering how to redefine "normal" for a family whose Holocaust legacy still exerts its influence over father and son.
With a distinctly post-modern flourish, Mr. Spiegelman reminds us throughout his text that "Maus II" is a narrative about incidents that, in many of their details, may be incommunicable. Artie admits to his wife, "I can't even make any sense out of my relationship with my father. How am I supposed to make any sense out of Auschwitz?" One might conclude that a "comic strip" portraying the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs, the French as frogs, the Americans as dogs and the Swedes as reindeer would divert the reader from a meaningful pursuit of Artie's troubled questions -- but this is not at all the case.
The "meaning" is in the effort, not the results, and the animal characters create a distancing effect that allows us to follow the fable without being drowned in its grim, inhuman horrors. Tensions abound: Vladek has forgotten little of his ordeal, but he doesn't like to think about it and he only speaks of it at Artie's prodding. Some need beyond mere curiosity or professional interest drives Artie to record and draw his parents' Holocaust experience, while at the same time, as he confesses to his psychiatrist, "Some part of me doesn't want to draw or think about Auschwitz." And whatever he does accomplish, he concedes, doesn't seem like much compared to surviving the death camp.
The struggle to transform history and testimony into art is thus a central part of the drama of the text, and the reader is constantly sucked into the maelstrom of the conflict. Who can fail to sympathize with Vladek, an Auschwitz survivor reunited with his wife after the war, only to face her suicide nearly a quarter of a century later in Rego Park, Queens? But who can fail to chide him for being so stingy that he leaves the gas burner lit all day at his summer bungalow because the cost of the gas is included in the rental and he can light his cigarettes without wasting a match? (And who can fail to conjecture about that ominous conjunction of gas with flame, over which Vladek today exerts complete control?) Artie despises his father's frugality, and with some justice, but Mr. Spiegelman constantly reminds us that Vladek's behavior in the present cannot be separated from his anguish in the past. The reader thus develops insights that Mr. Spiegelman's persona, Artie, can't always achieve, and this is one of the many striking examples of the author's expert handling of narrative.
If "Maus II" chronicles Vladek Spiegelman's journey from Auschwitz to Dachau and beyond, it also recounts the impact of that voyage on his son. The story alternates between past and present, but so does the inner life of its characters, reflecting the confused sense of time so many former Holocaust victims and their families have today. In the first part of "Maus" we learned that Artie's parents had a previous son, Richieu, who at the age of 3 was poisoned by Anja's sister together with her own children, to prevent the Gestapo from taking them away. Artie has lived beneath the shadow of this lost brother, whose framed picture hangs prominently in his parents' bedroom, a periodic source of remorse, shame, grief, guilt and despair. Indeed, the presence of Richieu frames the narrative, since that picture also appears on the dedication page of "Maus II." There the words "For Richieu" seem to be meant to ease the burden of memory for the brother born after the war.
But if Richieu has the first word, who has the last? As if to confirm his doubts about making any sense out of Auschwitz, Mr. Spiegelman ends his tale with the same melancholy answer that nearly every Holocaust testimony, written or oral, provides: the dead, those who did not return, have the last word. How could it be otherwise? Once Vladek has finished his testimony with an account of how he was reunited with Anja after the war, he asks Artie to turn off the tape recorder -- he wants to sleep. The old man's last utterance, in the final panel of the text, is "I'm tired from talking, Richieu, and it's enough stories for now." So the past has conquered the present, and in Vladek's mind, the living Artie has been replaced by the dead Richieu. This panel is followed by an image of a gravestone, informing us that the real Vladek Spiegelman died in 1982. "Maus II" is his testament.
But this book is not his transfiguration, and it is to Art Spiegelman's credit that he scrupulously avoids sentimentalizing or melodramatizing his tale. He writes with restraint and a relentless honesty, sparing neither his father nor himself. Given his brother's death and his mother's suicide, to say nothing of the other extensive family losses, there is little to celebrate. We are offered a whisper of hope for the future, since the book is also dedicated to his daughter, Nadja (born in 1987), but we are left wondering what kind of shadow her father's narrative will cast over her life, when she grows old enough to read it. Like the other questions raised in "Maus II," the answer remains shrouded in uncertainty. 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. BEHIND THE WORD BALLOONS
Twenty years ago Art Spiegelman published a short, primitive version of the "Maus" tale -- the "Ur Maus," as he put it -- in an underground comic magazine called Funny Aminals. "It was based," he said in an interview in his SoHo studio, "on memories of stories told to me when I was younger.
"With both my father and mother, stories would come up casually. I might be walking with my mother to the supermarket and she would have to go to the bathroom. While dragging me along she would tell me that in the camps they could only go to the bathroom at certain times. If she had to go while working in the fields her friends would form a circle around her" so the guards couldn't see.
But these stories "were decontextualized. I didn't know when they happened," he said. In writing "Maus," "I tried to inhabit the experience, to fix it in my own brain." In 1978, at the age of 30, he began what was to become a 13-year project. He taped more than 40 hours of interviews with his father, Vladek, dredged up conversations he had had with his mother, Anja, talked to other survivors and their children, read histories and traveled to Auschwitz, Dachau and his father's Polish hometown, Sosnowiec.
Trouble was, said Mr. Spiegelman, sometimes "my father's history didn't converge with what I found elsewhere." For instance, he learned from other survivors that when the Jews in Auschwitz marched from the camp to work each day there was an orchestra playing. His father, though, remembered only the sound of guards shouting. In "Maus" the father and son disagree about this, said Mr. Spiegelman, but in the end, "I win. The orchestra is there."
The dialogue, too, is boiled down from the real thing. There were only a few times, said Mr. Spiegelman, "when the way something was said was so perfect" it had to be preserved. The subtitle of the second volume, "And Here My Troubles Began," was one such sentence. Vladek utters this while telling of his life after Auschwitz -- obviously long after his troubles began. "The dissonance of that appearing in the middle," said Mr. Spiegelman, was part of its strength.
Still, no matter how a tale is told, "loss is inevitable," he said. "What my father articulated is less than what he went through. And, because I am an American kid who grew up with Howdy Doody and Mad magazine, what I can understand is less than what he articulated. What I can articulate is less than what I understand. And what readers understand is less than what I can articulate."
If an artist's studio is any indication of his mind, Mr. Spiegelman is still absorbed with cats and mice. On his wall is an original Krazy Kat drawing, on a shelf a tiny stuffed mouse. And prowling around the place, a large, orange and very real cat. -- SARAH BOXER