Maus II: A Survivor's Tale

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman  135 pp.

This continues the story of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, continuing from where the first book ended, with Valdek and Anja at the gates of Auschwitz. Depictions of life in the concentration/extermination camp are suitably dark. By probing into his father's story, the author learns the reasons for much of his father's behavior. Scenes from the holocaust are juxtaposed against scenes of Vladek's and Art's stormy relationship in the 1980s. It is not an easy book to read because of the subject matter and the bare, traumatic truth within. This is one of the books being read for the Great Stories Club at the Lieberman  Learning Center. I look forward discussing it with the teens.

Maus

Maus: A Survivor's Tale I: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman  159 pp.

I read this back when I first started working at the library. I re-read it now before re-reading the second volume for my book club at the alternative school. This is the award-winning and ground breaking graphic novel about Spiegelman's parents' experiences during the Holocaust. Spiegelman depicts the characters as animals: his family and other Jews are mice, the Poles are pigs, the French are frogs, Americans are dogs, and the Nazis are cats. This is the book that changed graphic novels into something more than just "comics."

Maus

Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, 296 pages
1992 Pulitzer Prize winner
A 2015 Top Ten Popular Paperback for Teens

Maus has been on my to-read list for ages, so when it popped up on the Popular Paperbacks for Teens list, I took it as a sign to finally read it. It's sort of a biography of Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz and the Holocaust. It's also about the thorny relationship between the father and son. While Vladek's story is told chronologically with each chapter focusing on one story, Art frames it with whatever is going on in his father's life in the present as he tells the story, whether they're walking to the bank or going to the grocery store. And Art includes his struggles as well - how to tell the story, his arguments with his father, his feelings about growing up with the specter of not only the war but also his older brother who died at a very young age. The art is great, simplistic, but Art manages to infuse each of the characters with plenty of emotion (which is no easy feat when you're drawing anthropomorphized mice and cats!). It's pretty clear why Maus is so revered. Even though Vladek does nothing more than survive, in the light of the atrocities of the Holocaust, even that seems like a triumph. This is easily one of the best examples of the vitality of comics and how well they can be used to tell stories.

(Read as part of YALSA's Hub Reading Challenge.)