The Best Holocaust Book I’ve Read

I have a feeling that at least one or two of my readers will take this occasion to shoot me a bit of mockery for writing about a comic book.? (I don’t figure all three of you will do so.)? No matter.? On my brother’s suggestion I put in a hold request for Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (No 1), got it by public library courier Saturday, and tore through all 296 pages of it, finishing it early this morning. It’s a book so good that I’m imagining classes that I could invent so that I can teach it.

What impressed me most about Maus is not that it’s a rendition of a Holocaust memoir (I’ve read those before) or that it does playful postmodern things with categories of narrative and racism and memory (I did grow up reading science fiction) but that a comic book managed to take so seriously the ethics of storytelling.

The animal masks are the first sign that the book wants to wait a minute before simply telling a Holocaust story.? That the Jews/mice sometimes put on masks to disguise themselves as Poles/pigs and that, in Auschwitz, the Germans/cats see someone as a Jew/mouse despite his insistence that he might well have been a German/cat makes for some obvious political allegory, but why he turns the various “races” into animals at all only became evident to me when I saw in volume two Art, the artist, and his wife (who has transformed from French/frog to mouse/Jew because she converted in order to please her Holocaust-survivor father-in-law) taking Vladek (the father-in-law) on a car ride and pick up a black-dog/Black hitchhiker.? Vladek, who survived the twentieth century’s most iconic moment of racism, starts uttering Yiddish racial slurs while they drive.

At that point, what came before became quite clear.? Because Maus is ultimately Vladek’s book that Art is simply relating to the reader, the only ethical way to relate the way that Vladek sees the world is through the lens of racism–in other words, what Art Spiegelman would like to see as a unified human world comes through mediation still divided up into multiple human races.? The evil, so far as Vladek sees things, is not racism as an abstraction but that cats, who hate and kill mice, happened to be the powerful ones in his universe from 1938 to 1946.

Two other moments in the piece reflected quite seriously on storytelling as an ethical practice.? In one of them, Vladek finds a comic that a young Art had composed not long after his mother’s (Vladek’s wife’s) suicide.? The comic-within-a-comic drops the animal-masks of the frame story, casting Vladek and Art not as mice but as caricatures that a bad imitator of Munch might have created, and Vladek is not the “stereotypical Jewish miser” that Art struggles so hard to avoid in the frame narrative but a helpless human figure.? Vladek becomes angry not only at his son’s blaming his mother for the fallout of the suicide but also for making him, Vladek, out to be a creature of circumstance rather than a survivor.? The intrusion of the earlier, amateurish psychodrama interrupts the truth-telling that should be going on, forcing Artie to spend several pages making amends with his father before the story of the Holocaust can continue.

The last one I should have picked up on sooner, but not until the hitchhiker scene did this one occur to me.? In the beginning of volume two, Art is suffering from depression, unable to continue his story beyond the gates of Auschwitz.? As he sits alone in his studio, he is no longer a mouse but a man in a mouse-mask.? But when he goes to visit his shrink (who’s also a survivor of Auschwitz), he’s once again a mouse, as is the shrink.? Although in this segment of the memory-narrative Vladek is dead, Art still becomes part of that world of “races” when he visits someone who was marked to die for being of the wrong race.? In other words, the Holocaust is the sort of monstrosity that not only killed millions of bodies but also left the souls of an entire generation (and their children) misfigured, cast into molds from which they cannot escape.? Ultimately Art and his own son might never escape from being mice, not because the masks are immutable but because such a structural escape might, for the time being, remain structurally impossible.

So scoff if you must, but the book works so well in so many ways that I can’t help but admire it as art.? I still reserve the right to giggle at the teenage boys who insist on calling 300 a “graphic novel,” but I might some day slip and call Maus just that.