Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began Author: Visit Amazon's Art Spiegelman Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0679729771 | Format: PDF
Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began Description
From Publishers Weekly
Spiegelman's startling comic about the Holocaust, which revolves around his survivor father's experiences, won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
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"Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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- Series: Maus (Book 2)
- Paperback: 144 pages
- Publisher: Pantheon; Gph Rep edition (September 1, 1992)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679729771
- ISBN-13: 978-0521814256
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 0.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
The second part of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus picks up where the first part left off. His father Vladek and mother Anja are captured and sent to Auschwitz. However, things aren't well at home. Mala, Vladek's second wife, exasparated at Vladek's tight-fisted controlling ways, leaves him. Artie and his wife Francoise rush over to help him out and during this time, Artie continues the interviews with his father and thence into Maus II.
The path of Artie understanding his father is smoother but at a cost. Following the success of Maus I, Spiegelman depicts a pile of dead Jewish bodies lying under the Artie's writing desk symbolizing how much the history his father has bled from that first volume has seeped into him. He is beginning to understand, but at the cost of emotionally and vicariously going through his father's experiences, for which he has sessions with Pavel, a Czech Jew psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor.
Artie gets more perspective during these sessions with Pavel. He tells Pavel that as a child, he constantly argued with his father, who said that anything he did was nothing compared to surviving Auschwitz. Pavel refers to the psychological concept of transference: "Maybe your father needed to show that he was always right--that he could always SURVIVE-because he felt GUILTY about surviving. ... and he took his guilt on YOU, where it was safe... on the REAL survivor." The argument stands to reason. Vladek survived the death of so much family and friends, as well as the millions he never knew.
We learn more of how Vladek survived Auschwitz. He teaches English to the Polish kapo, who expecting the Germans to lose the war, wants to get in good graces with the Americans.
I was compelled to read this after finishing Art Spiegelman's astonishingly brilliant "Maus," a graphic novel retelling his father, Vladek's, experiences as a Jew in Poland during WWII. This sequel picks up right where the first left off, with Vladek's separation from wife, Anja, after arriving at Auschwitz. There Vladek must struggle to survive starvation and disease as well as the guards and the ovens, all while trying to get news of his wife from over in Auschwitz's second camp, Birkenau. His horrific time there is expertly rendered as Spiegelman manages to get across a complex range of emotions through his illustrations and words. Even after Auschwitz is abandoned and the Nazi soldiers go on the run, Vladek must still struggle to survive and make his way to safety. His journey home to his wife (from Auschwitz to an abandoned German landscape, through ruined cities and, finally, back to the now unrecognizable city he once called home) is utterly compelling, unforgettable stuff.
Equally compelling is the story of Vladek in later years that is mixed in with his history in both volumes of "Maus", after he has come to America with Anja, had another son (the first, Richieu, did not survive the war), lost Anja to suicide in 1968, remarried, developed a heart condition and a strained relationship with his surviving son, and begins telling his story to 'Artie', who is interested in adapting his father's tale into a comic book). In the WWII segments Spiegelman captures the horrors that took place during that tragic time, and in these father-son moments he explores how surviving an event like that leaves a mark on you forever, and can even pass on the burden of survivor's guilt to a new generation that wasn't even alive when the atrocities took place.
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