Module 13: Maus, I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman

Books Summary: A graphic novel that tells the story of a Jewish survivor during the Holocaust. Told in both flashbacks to the Holocaust and more present-time (1990s) with his son (the author).

APA Citation: Spiegelman, A. (1991). Maus, I: a survivor's tale: my father bleeds history. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Impressions: I'm finding that I really love comic books/graphic novels/illustrated books that are memoirs. First, The Wall and now Maus. 

This is a great story that is based on the true story of Art Spiegelman's father survival during the Holocaust. The story uses anthropomorphic animals to bring the people to life. Spiegelman purposely uses different animals for different groups of people. Jews are mice, Polish are pigs, Germans are cats. It made the story one that I think would get kids more interested in, or at least get their attention. The story and artwork would keep them once they started reading it.

It is a hard story to read at times because it is about such a dark part of history. His father's tale is amazing and heartbreaking and very human. No one is portrayed as being wholly good or completely evil. Spiegelman uses the story he knows and has been told and shares it with the world without sentimentality. This works incredibly well in Maus. It makes the horror of what happened and what people had to do to survive very real.

I will definitely be picking up the other volumes of Maus because this first one ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. Due to the subject matter, I'd recommend it to readers ages 12 and up, but my library only had it in the adult section.

Professional Review: The publisher of Maus directs libraries to shelve the book under "Holocaust/Autobiography," and indeed, although it is a comic strip featuring white mice as Jews, pigs as Poles, cats as Nazis, and wartime Europe as a gigantic mousetrap, Mausis as restrained an exemplar of this garish genre as can be found nowadays. For several years the tale has been appearing as specially bound installments in the avant-garde art comic Raw, of which the artist-author Art Spiegelman is coeditor along with his wife Francoise Mouly. (A New York quarterly founded in 1980, Raw sports a different subtitle each quarter: "The Graphix Magazine -- of Postponed Suicides," "for Damned Intellectuals," "that Lost its Faith in Nihilism," " for your Bomb Shelter's Coffee Table," "of Abstract Depressionism," and other equally jejune shock-schlock tags. Its folio-size pages, crawling with violent, absurdist, sick and stylish images, are a leading repository of Eurotrash chic, a fact which ticks off American comic artists who feel unfairly left out.)Maus is actually less another "survivor's tale" than it is another cruel anatomy of the legendary Jewish Family. We have all met this Wunderfamilie: it is uniquely warm, supportive, close and nonviolent. Its parents never hit. Its mother may be "pushy," but only out of bottomless maternal desire to see her precious offspring flourish. Its father is wise, gentle, intellectually stimulating, and never alcoholic. Since the war, the more heavily propagandized countries such as the U.S. have imbibed this myth with their mother's milk; similarly acquired lore includes "The Nazis tied pregnant women's legs together when they went into labor," "The Nazis swung Jewish babies against brick walls and dashed out their brains," and of course that old Christmas favorite, the Anne Frank Story. It is a measure of how much more potent a well-told (and oft-repeated) fable is than mere empirical observation that not until we encounter Revisionism, which dares to call a thing by its proper name, are most of us able to retroactively "conform" the actualities of Jewish behavior we ourselves have witnessed to a rather sounder theoretical framework
Until recently Jews have tried to present a united front of perfect harmony before the rest of the world and keep the weird little pathologies strictly to themselves. Increasingly, however, emboldened by the "untouchable" status they have extorted from American society (if not from other cultures), Jews have been treating these inherent tensions more and more blatantly. That Jews have in fact even less difficulty than most people despising their own kin is clear from the dozens of recent novels, plays, biographies, autobiographies, pop psychology tomes, and films in the Where's Poppa?mode (the father in Death of a Salesman had already gotten pretty hard to forgive, for that matter...). The best way to obsess someone is to reject him, and parental rejection would seem to be the dynamic underlying these ferociously unsparing dissections now masquerading as "American literature." It is also the dynamic, of course, that plays such a large role in ensuring the reproduction of the peculiarly Jewish character structure.
To get back to Spiegelman's adventure, son Artie hopes to understand through his father Vladek's life history why the old man behaves as he does. Perhaps "the camps" are to blame? Perhaps the "Mauschwitz" experience is the solution to the riddle of unloved, unlovely, unlovable parents? At first it seems so, but by the end it has come to seem not.
Most of the rave reviews Maus has received tiptoe uneasily round this central contradiction: that it is one thing to portray one's parent unsentimentally, the better to serve historical truth but quite another thing to have no sentimentality to forego. None of the reviewers has mustered the feck to address Maus as an irruption of the Jewish repressed. They duly note its contents, from the opening quote -- "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human" (Adolf Hitler) -- to the parting shot -- Art muttering that Vladek is a "murderer" for having destroyed his dead first wife Anja's wartime diaries -but keep mum as to meaning. "A quiet triumph... impossible to achieve in any medium but comics." -- The Washington Post. (Why?) "The tiny animal figures that move, dress, and speak like human beings become a metaphor for the Jewish experience." -- Susan T. Goodman, Chief Curator, the Jewish Museum. (How so, Susan? You don't agree with Hitler, surely?) Spiegelman may well be getting flak from ADL public-image monitors or Mel Mermelstein-style hysterics of authenticity, but so far there's been no public censure.
In the event, Spiegelman's goal of rendering his father's story exactly, warts and all, to make it more truthful, more recognizably human than many of the wildly idealized self-canonizations occasioned by the "Holocaust," has the effect primarily of reinforcing and reconfirming the son's aversion and resentment. As Art confesses to his stepmother, Mala (p. 131), "I used to think the war made him that way... "
"Fah!" blurts Mala. "I went through the camps... All our friends went through the camps. Nobody is like him!"
"It's something that worries me about the book I'm doing about him... ," Art goes on. "In some ways he's just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew."
"Hah! You can say that again!"
"I mean, I'm just trying to portray my father accurately! ... "
And Maus offers no reason to doubt that Spiegelman has accomplished just that. Vladek's irritable, unremitting rejection of his son has driven the latter to become an artist in the first place: because "he thought it was impractical, just a waste of time... It was an area where I wouldn't have to compete with him" (p. 97). In a move which adumbrates a far more serious betrayal at the end, Vladek furtively throws Art's favorite jacket in the garbage, supposedly because it's too "shabby." Anja herself, possibly Vladek's prime victim, has earlier committed suicide by taking pills and slashing her wrists; only a fluke prevents Artie from being the one who finds her lying dead in a bloody bathtub. In a previous strip, "Prisoner on the Hell Planet," reproduced in Maus, Spiegelman described his reaction: "I remembered the last time I saw her... She came into my room... It was late at night... "Artie -- you -- still -- love -- me -- don't you?' I turned away, resentful of the way she tightened the umbilical cord... Well, Mom, if you're listening... Congratulations! ... You've committed the perfect crime... You murdered me, Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!" -- fade out on the vista of an endless cellblock (ellipses in original). The betrayal prefigured by the jacket incident is Vladek's wanton burning of Anja's memoirs, which throughout Maus Art has been eagerly agitating to read at last. And so it goes.
The Elie Wiesel school asserts that the "Holocaust" is so immense that its essence can be approached and grasped only through the most extreme fictionalization, in other words, that nonsense alone touches upon truth (the corollary of Wiesel's unfortunately ignored dictum that "silence alone can speak of such things" as Auschwitz). Spiegelman, on the other hand, writes down all his father tells him, periodically demanding more precise chronologies, dates, concrete details, names, followup. Baldly, the tale is this:
Jewish mouse Vladek Spiegelman-no Mighty Mouse, nor even Mickey Mouse -- is an ambitious young textile merchant in Poland who coldly dumps his penniless long-time girlfriend to marry the homely but clever daughter of a millionaire hosiery-factory owner, Anja Zylberberg. They have a son, Richiev, and Vladek is soon enriched by the match. Having been drafted into the Polish army some years before -- unlike the rest of his family, whose time- honored practice it has been to pull out their teeth or starve themselves in order to be rejected -- Vladek is called up for service in 1939 and finds himself on the frontier facing the German army. He does not shoot ("Why should I kill anyone?" p. 48), but ends up killing one German soldier almost by accident.
Shortly, the Germans (the cats, that is, and poorly-drawn cats they are, too, for all that cats are hard to draw) overrun the pig and mouse position, and all are taken prisoner. Eventually the prisoners are given the alternative of volunteering to work at "a big German company." Here Vladek's lot improves, although the mice are compelled to wield "shovels and picks... things what we never held in our hands before" (p. 55). Those who cannot do the work are left to "freeze and starve" -- or so Vladek assumes; he cannot really tell us what becomes of them.
One day the captive mice are processed out of camp and shipped by train back to Poland. In Lublin the Nazi authorities fritter away yet another opportunity to exterminate them by permitting their release to Jewish "relatives" (for a fee). Vladek makes his way back to the family in Sosnowiec. From this point on much of the tale revolves around the sufferings of rich mice forced to have recourse to the black market to maintain their standard of living. None of this suffering is unique to Jews, of course, but although Maus tends to obscure the universality of this fact of wartime, it also makes quite plain that hoarding, speculating, and black-market profiteering quickly became Jewish specialties; for example, Vladek describes half his relatives as Kombinators -- connivers.
While the extended Spiegelman family enjoys escape after miraculous escape from Nazi attempts to control the currency and regulate economic activity (see, for instance, pp. 79 and 85), rumors are flying thick and fast, and the cats take their sweet time ghettoizing the mice. Four are hanged "for dealing goods without coupons, " "to make an example of them!" (p. 83). In fact, these are the only authenticated executions in Maus; hearsay and assumption account for the rest ("This I didn't see with my own eyes..."). With one exception: Art's elder brother Richiev does not "come out from the war" with his supernaturally fortunate parents, for the simple reason that the aunt who is caring for him, in a moment of blind panic upon hearing that her town is to be evacuated to Auschwitz, poisons him, her own two children, and herself to death (p. 109).
Suffice it to say that the Final Solution was somewhat lacking in finality when it came to the Spiegelman clan -- like so many others. Vladek even emerges from the war with valuables he now keeps in a Queens safe deposit box. One particularly schizophrenic image in Maus (p. 121) depicts the mice gaining access to a new "bunker" in the town of Srodula: the entrance, emanating from a shoe shop, is hidden by an enormous pile of shoes. One wonders if it was the same pile later photographed to represent "shoes taken from gas chamber victims" ...
Steven Spielberg and crew seem to find the mouse an apt metaphor for Jewry, too. Their cartoon feature An American Tail is the heartwarming story of Mousekewitzes emigrating from Russia to the Golden Burrow of America -- Ellis Islanders all the way. Released for the Christmas season -- excuse me, in time for "the holidays," the new Jewish jargon being employed to knock the traditional spiritual punch out of the gentile festival -- the film will probably clean up at the box office, if only because it will be one of the few entertainments fit for children to watch.
Art Spiegelman is now at work on the sequel to Maus, subtitled "From Mauschwitz to the Catskills." One supposes it will be of some clinical and even aesthetic interest to see how both elder Spiegelmans manage to evade the ceaseless efforts of the Nazi Katzen to trick them into taking that shower. Auschwitz Schmauschwitz -- Maus is the subliminal confession, by a cartoonist whose art is perhaps more honest than its creator can bring himself to be, that the "Holocaust" never happened the way we learned in school.

Reilly, J. (1987). Review of the book Maus, I: a survivor's tale: my father bleeds history by A. Spiegelman. The Journal of Historical Review, 7(4), p. 478-483.

Library Uses: This would be a great book to use in a lesson on the Holocaust. I'd also put it on display with books about the time period: fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, etc. I prefer displays that have a theme but contain different formats so different types of readers can find something that would interest them.

Module 12: The Wall by Peter Sis

Book Summary: The Wall is the illustrated memoir of a boy who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in Communist Czechoslovakia. It is told in different drawings that bring the story to life, reading as a comic book would.

APA Citatioin: Sis, P. (2007). The wall: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain. New York, NY: Farrar, Strous and Giroux Books for Young Readers.

Impressions: I had seen this book around at different libraries before and am kicking myself for not picking it up sooner. I loved Peter Sis' use of drawings to tell his life story. The drawings, like well done children's illustrated books, brought the story more to life and added to the feeling of what he was writing about. As a fan of comics, I really enjoyed how it was formatted as if it were a comic book with panels and unique layouts. He used words in the artwork to make the artwork more of a statement.

I haven't read a lot about the Cold War and the Iron Curtain but this book did a spark an interest in me to read more about it. It's incredible to think how this is recent history and lives have had to change so drastically in such a short span of time.

It's one of those books that I'm already wanting to reread so I can discover new parts of the story in how he chose to put the story together with the artwork and text. It's definitely a must read.

Professional Review: In the spring of 1957, a Hungarian girl appeared one day in my second-grade class in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Our teacher urged us to welcome the new arrival, who spoke no English and would be staying in our class temporarily. Her family, we were told, had just come to America to escape the Russians.
On the playground days later, during a game of cowboys and Indians, one of the second-grade boys picked up a stick, aimed it like a gun and “fired” at a classmate, who fell to the ground with a theatrical flourish. I was enjoying the spectacle from my perch on a nearby rock when a blood-curdling scream rang out across the schoolyard. It was the new girl. She too had been watching the game. When she saw the boy fall to the ground — I somehow knew this instantly — she thought it was because he really had been shot. The girl, I later learned, had had reason to think this, having lived through the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
Children make what sense they can of the life they are given. Far from our sun-splashed suburban playground during those same years, the artist Peter Sis was a schoolboy growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia. In “The Wall,” he tells the story of his early years as a citizen of that Eastern bloc nation, where he learned at school to think and draw what he was told, and of his gradual rejection of Communism. (In Los Angeles in 1982 to make a film for the Czech government, Sis chose not to return to his homeland.)
The story unfolds in a word-and-picture montage consisting of a spare, fable-like narrative, introductory and closing notes, a historical timeline, diary excerpts, childhood drawings, family photos and, at the center of it all, a sequence of playful but intense pen-line drawings, many of them arrayed in storyboard panels.
“The People’s Militia enforces the new order. ... The display of red flags on state holidays — COMPULSORY. ... Western radio is banned (and jammed).” For young readers unfamiliar with cold war-era history, timeline entries like these are a lot to absorb. As Sis writes in his afterword: “Now when my American family goes to visit my Czech family in the colorful city of Prague, it is hard to convince them it was ever a dark place full of fear, suspicion and lies.”
To bridge the gap, Sis presents his readers with graphic equivalents for the feel as well as the substance of the life he knew. People in the drawings are scaled down, toylike. They look as if they could be easily crushed. The predominance of black and white suggests the diminished possibilities under Communism for freedom of expression. Where touches of color do appear — on a demonstration banner, as a star shape on the side of a military tank — the color is usually red. When a full rainbow of colors makes its voluptuous appearance in the later illustrations, we too feel the rush of joy that unrestrained color came to symbolize in the lives of Sis and his friends.
Because children know all about tattling and betrayal, young readers of “The Wall” will be able to imagine the atmosphere of fear implied in a passing reference to the Czech government’s policy of encouraging schoolchildren to inform on their parents, and one another, for speaking out against the regime. Children in fact know a great deal about tyranny. They learn about it on the playground, as the English folklorists Iona and Peter Opie showed in “The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren” (1959), a study of traditional schoolyard chants and rhymes that laid bare the cruelty implicit in much childhood group behavior. How sympathetically did my classmates and I react to our visitor’s alarmed misreading of our “innocent” war game? That I have no memory of this prompts me to fear the worst.
“The Wall” is a brave book for acknowledging, as Sis writes, “how easy it is to brainwash a child,” and for taking on a serious subject at a time when feel-good children’s books are widely assumed to be what sells. It is also a challenging book, and with its blizzard of fleeting references to everything from the Hungarian uprising to the Beach Boys, 8- and 9-year-olds will most likely need a parent or other handy font of knowledge to help them make their way to the end.
Compressing history into fable can confuse matters. “On November 9, 1989,” Sis writes, “the wall fell.” On that date, the Berlin Wall — a hugely symbolic stretch of the Iron Curtain — did come down. But when did the setting of “The Wall” shift to Germany from Czechoslovakia, where the Velvet Revolution that ended Communist rule followed days and weeks later?
For Sis as for so many others, the collapse of the Eastern bloc’s oppressive governments was a dream come true. In “The Wall,” the ecstatic energy and big-spirited inventiveness of the artist’s drawings make the once all but unimaginable realization of that dream visible for all to see.
Yet history should perhaps have the last word. In “The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989,” Frederick Taylor writes that notwithstanding their public protestations of outrage, Western leaders, including President John F. Kennedy, were more relieved than angered by the Soviets’ sealing off of East Berlin, a move that effectively put a lid for a generation on a highly volatile situation. To ordinary people around the world, it may have seemed that freedom, justice and integrity all lay on one side of the wall, and terror, injustice and lies on the other. What if in fact the wall served the governments’ purposes on both sides equally well? How dark a fable would it take to tell that tale?

Marcus, L.S. (2007). The Cold War kid [Review of the book The wall: growing up behind the Iron Curtain by P. Sis]. The New York Times. Retrieved April 19, 2015 from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/Marcus-t.html?_r=0.


Library Uses: I would use this book in either a class on comic drawing or memoir writing to show a different way to tell a story. If a speaker could come in to discuss the history of what living behind the Iron Curtain was like, it could also be put out on display as a reading recommendation for those who would like to learn more about that time period and history.

Module 11: An Egg is Quiet by Dianna Aston

Book Summary: An Egg is Quiet is a beautiful children's nonfiction book about the many different types of eggs that can be found around the world. The illustrations are colorful, beautiful and big.

APA Citation: Aston, D. & Long, S. (Illustrator). (2006). An egg is quiet. New York, NY: Chronicle Books.

Impressions: This book reminded me of something that I would have loved reading when I was little. It is informative and interesting and beautiful. The illustrations are detailed and bring the information to life. I found myself rereading it a few times, just to view the different pictures. There was information that I even learned while reading it, which I loved.

I enjoyed this book so much that it played a part in me determining what my theme would be for the story time I was putting on. I found the illustrations and sparse text to be perfect for a 3-5 aged story time. It allows the children to stop and view the pictures and ask questions or add commentary along the way.

It's a beautiful work of art and one that I'd consider adding to my own personal library.

Professional Review: An Egg is Quiet is a glorious feast for the eyes. The book is an illustrated introduction to eggs of amazing diversity. The simple and poetic text just adds a quiet drama to the whole book: “An egg is quiet It sits there, under its mother's feathers… On top of its father's feet …Warm. Cozy." 

The book displays eggs in all their glory, with different textures, colors and themes. There are lacewing eggs, salmon roe, ostrich eggs, etc. Each is gorgeously painted in rich, layered watercolors of such depth and color that they seem to be real. You can almost feel the depth of texture. 

The endpapers of the book are pale blue and speckled, giving the feel of an eggshell. The attention to detail is simply amazing. What a labor of love this must have been! 

The book talks about the shapes of eggs – the tubular eggs of the Dogfish Shark or round like a sea turtle’s. It talks about size – the mammoth eggs of the ostrich. It goes on to discuss egg embryos, egg habitats, etc. 

The colors! Oh, the colors used are wonderful! Pale blues, mottled greens, light browns, oranges that ache with their beauty, butter yellows, stunningly simple brown ink text that adds to the lushness of the colors used in the gallery of jewels called eggs. What a lovely way to teach children (and adults) about nature and its diversity. 

An Egg is Quiet is instructional, arty and simply beautiful. An absolute must for any library and a book that is sure to be pored over lovingly for years to come. A masterpiece!
Recommended for ages 3 and up.

Ruiz, G. (2007). Book review: An egg is quiet by Dianna Hutts Aston [Review of the book An egg is quiet by D. Aston]. Blogcritics.com. Retrieved April 12, 2015 from http://blogcritics.org/book-review-an-egg-is-quiet/.


Library Uses: I used this book in my spring-themed story time this semester. It is a great book to get kids interested in different animals and how animals that have eggs grow. There isn't too much text and the pictures are big and colorful, allowing children to find different and unique details in them.

Module 10: Barefoot: Escape on the Underground Railroad by Pamela Duncan Edwards

Book Summary: Written in little text and with dark images, Barefoot tells the story of an unnamed, barefoot slave running away from slavery thanks to the help of the animals, nature, the Underground Railroad, and his bravery and intelligence.

APA Citation: Edwards, P. D. & Cole, H. (Illustrator). (1997). Barefoot: escape on the underground railroad. New York, NY: Katherine Tegen Books.

Impressions: I was absolutely spellbound by this book. The artwork and story were beautiful and powerful. I handed it over to my mom to read as soon as I finished it because I wanted someone else to talk to about it.

The story about a slave who is on the run from men who want to take him back to a life of slavery is told mostly from the point of view of his feet and the animals that seem to come to his aid. Told mostly by the dark illustrations that depict nighttime in nature, there is both a feeling of foreboding and hope.

I also found the use of the animals to be interesting. The story is told in a way that the animals are purposely helping the man run away, which makes sense in a children's books, but I liked how the author and illustrator used the animals along the way. In reality, slaves and the people who helped them run away did use nature, trail markings, and signs to get from one location to another. It was very interesting to see how this book incorporated those in the character's escape.

Professional Review: With a taut, involving narrative and dramatic, shadow-filled full-spread art, the creators of Some Smug Slug and Livingstone Mouse transport youngsters onto the overgrown path that an escaping slave stealthily follows one evening. The sound of the young man's racing heart is almost audible as Edwards describes his desperate predicament: ""He was fearful of what lay before him. He was terrified of what lay behind."" But the man has allies in the underbrush, creatures that perceive him as ""the Barefoot"" (in contrast to ""the Heavy Boots"" who come in angry pursuit). A frog signals the presence of water, which quenches the Barefoot's thirst; a scurrying squirrel turns his eye to a blanket of leaves under which he naps; a deer diverts a crew of Heavy Boots away from this hiding place; and fireflies light the way to the safe house ahead. The vigilant eyes of these deftly rendered creatures peer out from Cole's haunting paintings, cleverly skewed to invoke the animals' ground-hugging perspective on the Barefoot's flight. An author's note at the end briefly explains the workings of the Underground Railroad in helping real-life ""Barefeet"" find freedom. Ages 5-9. 

Publisher's Weekly. (n.d.). [Review of the book Barefoot: escape on the underground railroad by P.D. Edwards]. Publisher's Weekly. Retrieved April 5, 2015 from http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-027137-4. 

Library Uses: This would be a great story to have at a story time during African American History Month. It would be interesting to see how the kids answered open questions while reading it to them. It could also be on a display.