Books and Movies

I finished reading Maus by Art Spiegelman today. This was my first foray into the world of the graphic novel, and it was a good choice. I had been unconvinced that a “comic book” could grab my attention and emotionally involve me the way a “real” novel does. I’m glad to say I was wrong.

Maus is the story of Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, who survived Auschwitz. Spiegelman uses the medium of the comic book to reduce the story to it’s barest elements. The Jews are drawn as mice, the Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs. Spiegelman tells the story of his father’s survival of the holocaust, and juxtposes it against his own troubled relationsip with his father. Even though Vladek survived the concentration camps, his personality was shaped from his experiences, and his relationships with his family members suffered for it.

If you are interested in trying a graphic novel, or in reading a thought-provoking Holocaust story, I encourage you to pick up Maus. It was published in two parts, and then as The Complete Maus, which I found at our public library.

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