The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times).
Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.
Booktopia
Swedish American author and artist Art Spiegelman won acclaim in the 1980s with his two-part graphic novel Maus, an account of his parents' experiences as Jews in concentration camps during the Holocaust. The work brought respect to the comic art world, fully transforming the genre from "funnies" or superhero stories into a new medium for literature. Spiegelman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize special citation for Maus in 1992.
Formerly known as a driving force in the quirky world of self-published and underground comics, Spiegelman was also responsible for many of the offbeat ideas and artwork for Topps Chewing Gum's Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids—trading cards and stickers that featured irreverent pokes at popular culture. In 1980, he and his wife started the avant-garde graphic magazine Raw, and in 1992 Spiegelman began serving as a contributing editor for the New Yorker, stirring controversy with his cover designs because of what some considered offensive themes. In 1997 he published a children's book titled Open Me, I'm a Dog.
Spiegelman was born on February 15, 1948, in Stockholm, Sweden, to Vladek and Anja (Zylberberg) Spiegelman. His parents and older brother were imprisoned in concentration camps at Auschwitz during World War II; the couple survived, but their first son did not. Afterward they moved to Sweden, where Spiegelman was born. The family immigrated to New York City when Spiegelman was two. Though Spiegelman's father wanted him to become a dentist, the young artist was passionate about drawing. He excelled at the High School of Art and Design in New York, and his art was published in alternative and local publications. While still a high school student, Spiegelman turned down an offer to draw comics for United Features Syndicate, deciding that he did not want to tone down his oddball style for a family readership.
Instead, Spiegelman continued writing for underground comics, which were often self-published, printed in small anthologies, or picked up by minor companies. Unlike traditional comics, which usually feature superhero action-adventure or silly humor, underground comics often deal with social issues or taboos, feature black humor or no humor at all, and have been known to contain adult and offensive material.
Speace, Geri. "Maus." St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture Online, Gale, 2013. Gale In Context: High School, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CUMRKZ207330701/SUIC?u=61nhs&sid=bookmark-SUIC&xid=c65f8a78.
Overview: Maus: A Survivor's Tale (Gale in Context)
Introduction
Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a two-volume graphic novel that documents the survival of the author's parents, both Polish Jews, during the Holocaust. Spiegelman depicts Jews as mice--hence the title--and Germans as cats as a metaphor for how Jews were hunted and killed in accordance with the Nazi Party's planned extermination of all European Jews during World War II. Spiegelman began work on the story as early as 1971, and he published portions of the story between 1980 and 1986 in the underground graphic journal RAW, which he edited with his wife, Françoise Mouly. The first volume of Maus, subtitled My Father Bleeds History, was published to critical acclaim in 1986; the second volume, And Here My Troubles Began, followed in 1991. Maus is as much a story about how the author's parents, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, narrowly escaped death in Auschwitz as it is about their son's struggle to translate their personal history into a meaningful narrative and come to terms with the effect it has had on his own life.
Maus broke new ground in the graphic novel genre. Both volumes were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1992 the work received a Pulitzer Prize in the Special Awards and Citations--Letters category. It also received the two highest honors in the field of graphic novels, the Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album and the Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work. Maus was arguably the first graphic novel to reach a mass audience, and it paved the way for other serious works in the genre. As a work of Holocaust literature, it has garnered praise and critical analysis on par with landmark works of the genre, including Elie Wiesel's Night and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz.
"Overview: Maus: A Survivor's Tale." Novels for Students, edited by Sara Constantakis, vol. 35, Gale, 2011. Gale In Context: High School, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1430007400/SUIC?u=61nhs&sid=bookmark-SUIC&xid=e49a5175.
Alternate titles: Hurban, Shoʾah
Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban (“Destruction”), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this “the final solution to the Jewish question.” Yiddish-speaking Jews and survivors in the years immediately following their liberation called the murder of the Jews the Ḥurban, the word used to describe the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE. Shoʾah (“Catastrophe”) is the term preferred by Israelis and the French, most especially after Claude Lanzmann’s masterful 1985 motion picture documentary of that title. It is also preferred by people who speak Hebrew and by those who want to be more particular about the Jewish experience or who are uncomfortable with the religious connotations of the word Holocaust. Less universal and more particular, Shoʾah emphasizes the annihilation of the Jews, not the totality of Nazi victims. More particular terms also were used by Raul Hilberg, who called his pioneering work The Destruction of the European Jews, and Lucy S. Dawidowicz, who entitled her book on the Holocaust The War Against the Jews. In part she showed how Germany fought two wars simultaneously: World War II and the racial war against the Jews. The Allies fought only the World War. The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of the Hebrew word ʿolah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. This word was chosen because in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing program—the extermination camps—the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires.
