Maus II: A Surviror's Tale; and Here My Troubles Began

by Art Speigelman

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Library Journal :

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Spiegelman's Maus, A Survivor's Tale (Pantheon, 1987) was a breakthrough, a comic book that gained widespread mainstream attention. The primary story of that book and of this sequel is the experience of Spiegelman's father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived the concentration camps of Nazi Germany during World War II. This story is framed by Spiegelman's getting the story from Vladek, which is in turn framed by Spiegelman's working on the book after his father's death and suffering the attendant anxiety and guilt, the ambivalence over the success of the first volume, and the difficulties of his ``funny-animal' metaphor. (In both books, he draws the char acters as anthropomorphic animals-- Jews are mice, Poles pigs, Germans cats, Americans dogs, and French frogs.) The interconnections and complex characterizations are engrossing, as are the vivid personal accounts of living in the camps. Maus and Maus . . . II are two of the most important works of comic art ever published. Highly recommended, espe cially for libraries with Holocaust collec tions. See also Harry Gordon's The Shadow of Death: The Holocaust in Lithuania , reviewed in this issue, p. 164; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/91.

Keith R.A. DeCandido, ``Library Journal'

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Told in comic-strip format, the second half of Spiegelman's profoundly moving family memento of his parents' survival of the Holocaust and of his own coming to terms with their tragedies, should be as popular as the first installment ( Maus , 1987). A cartoon featuring Jews as mice, Germans as truculent cats and Poles as pigs might sound flip, but the quasi-innocent simplification of the comic-book genre turns out to be a surgical instrument baring the malignancy of adult evil. The action shuttles between the Catskills, where Spiegelman's father, Vladek, basks in retirement, and Nazi concentration camps, where Vladek and his wife, Anja, secretly communicated before their miraculous reunion. She committed suicide in 1968, leaving no note. There are moments of quirky, uneasy, liberating humor, but make no mistake, Maus II is deadly serious. A timeless book, it burns into the mind.

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Spiegelman completes Maus , the cartoon biography of his father that, more than any other single work, brought American attention to the comic book (aka the graphic novel) as a serious art form. In the five chapters that tell the rest of Vladek Spiegelman's passage through the Nazi Holocaust, he arrives and perseveres through some 10 months in Auschwitz and then, during the last months of the war, through frantic Nazi attempts to "clean up" the last Jews before the Reich crumbles. Finally, he is freed and united with his wife, Anja. As before, Vladek's story is told in his own words as tape-recorded by Art and punctuated by the old man's latter-day obsessions with frugality, his health, and the imagined untrustworthiness of everybody else. Art's reflections about his work and dealings with Vladek's cantankerousness also intrude into the narrative, leavening the horrifying heroism of Vladek's life with the funny-awful stresses of Art and Vladek's father-son relationship. Amid the vast wash of Holocaust testimonies, Spiegelman's achievement is, on account of its format, unique and also one of the most approachable, accessible, and immediately moving of them all. (Reviewed Oct. 15, 1991)¾: Ray Olson.

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