Maus: A Survivor's Tale - 2 Volume Boxed Set

Descriptive and Cunning

If you like Night by Elie Wiesel, you would love Maus by Art Spiegelman. They both contain father and son relationship, that would leave you turning the pages until the end. Introduced to me by inspiring English teachers, who deserves all the praise, Maus captures the perspective of life during the Holocaust. It teaches readers more about the personal and physical life during the time of racial discrimination. Read it. It is worth your time knowing more about the past. You would know what I mean once you get your hands on it.

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The books are set in the 1990’s as a son asking his father

The books are set in the 1990’s as a son asking his father what it was like to be Jewish when the Nazis came. It flashes between the son’s life in America and the father’s life in Poland. The father and son don’t get along very well, and this is shown a lot in the books. The books reference many vague historical events, such as when the Nazis began differentiating Jewish people, when the Nazis sent the Jewish people to concentration camps, and when the Nazis tried to bring them back to Germany after the Allies came. It exemplifies the Holocaust and the struggle many Jewish people faced. It shows that genocides often don’t make sense to people outside the country the genocides occur in. The son has difficulty understanding why his father just let the Nazis take over and force him out, but the father says he couldn’t stop them. This is probably the mindset of many Jewish people in Poland and Germany.
The author is just a cartoonist, but the books are actually based off of his father’s experiences. The human factor of the Holocaust is clearly evident in his story. The father’s point of view is interesting because it changes throughout the books. At first he is a poor salesman, but with his father-in-law’s money, he begins a cloth factory and becomes a wealthy factory owner. When the Nazis come, they take control of his business and he is forced to become a salesman once again. The Nazis eventually send him to a concentration camp, where he teaches German and fixes shoes. The father meets many different people along the way. Many of the people he meets were openly hostile and degrading. He almost always has to pay people to help him, but once he pays them, they are fairly friendly and willing to help. The son ultimately portrays his father as a mean old miser, but the son’s perspective may be biased because of his unhappy relationship with his father.
The books really opened my eyes to the atrocities of the Holocaust. I knew about the Holocaust before reading these books, but the human element changed my idea of it completely. It demonstrations how the Jewish people really didn’t have any idea what was in store for them, and how much they suffered for religious prejudices. The books showed why the Jewish people didn’t rebel more than they did, which had always confused me before. People in the books just amazed me. Despite all the extenuating circumstances they went through, they still tried not to judge people and believe that the world would become a better place.
Overall, I would recommend these books. The books provide a deeper insight into the past through the view of a survivor and his son. They’re relatively quick reads and you get a lot of new information from them. The harrowing details of the Jewish people’s lives in the Holocaust are all exposed in these books.

Different Spin

I read these graphic novels when I was in college & thought they were a great way of explaining ordeals related to the Holocaust but in a different way than most books do. Now I finally own a copy for myself & look forward to rereading and sharing with others. I would definitely recommend reading this set!

Maus

I had taken a Holocaust history class my senior year in college and this and Maus II were two of my textbooks. The holocaust has always touched me; you'd have to have a cold heart to not be touched by it. After a while though you wonder how anyone can tell their story any differently. Art Spiegelman tells his father's story as a comic. It was one of the most unique ways I've ever read about the holocaust and Spiegelman's father's story has probably stuck with me the most after everything I've read. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

My Father Bleeds History

Art Spiegelman hasn't invented the genre but he's certainly expanded it, he's created a unique graphic book by the subject he's chosen. The author a contributing editor and artist for the New Yorker, cofounder/editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics has made first and foremost a classical comic, a story about anthropomorphically depicted animals, told sequentially in a series of square panels six to a page, containing speech balloons and voice-over captions in which all the lettering is in capitals, with onomatopoeic sound-effects to represent rifle-fire, and so on.

The story has three levels, the author shows Art Spiegelman, the narrator when he's overrun and overwhelmed by the success his Maus stories have, ad people urge him to give them the permission to use his mice for their own purposes, he has to see a psychiatrist for help. On the next level we find the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, the author's fictitious alter ego, born in the USA as the son of a Jewish couple, survivors of the holocaust, interviewing his father about his life.

This is the third level, Vladek Spiegelman tells his son about his family's life in Poland before the rise of the Nazis, what happened to his family during the Third Reich, his and his wife's experiences in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau and their final salvation, inserted photos of Art's younger brother (he died during the war) and father show that this is a real biography; Vladek's story forms the core of the book.

The situation of the son interviewing the father serves as a frame, but it doesn't appear only at the beginning and at the end, Vladek's story is repeatedly interrupted; these interruptions serve several purposes, they show Vladek, the survivor, in his second life in the USA, what the camp has done to him, what kind of man he has become, and we also learn that the son is affected by what his parents went through, he was born in the USA but he's also shown as a mouse just like his father and the other survivors now living in the USA.

I think I'm not the only reader who experiences these interruptions as a kind of relief, too, a possibility to breathe freely and relax a bit so that one can go on reading and contemplating the horrors of Vladek's story. Last but not least we can watch in true post modern fashion how a story is made, Art lets us share his scruples and reflections one of which is the question if a comic is an adequate art form to describe the horrors of the holocaust.

I pondered a long time on Spiegelman's decision to depict the characters as animals or rather as human bodies with the heads of animals, Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs and a Frenchman is a frog. The book would also have been a comic had he drawn human beings, why animals? For one we see at once who's who, an author can write, "Two Poles came in", a cartoonist doesn't have it that easy, how can a reader know which nationality a character has if the outward appearance is the same?

This leads directly into the story, indeed, from the outside people look the same, but the Nazis classified people and then went further, first there were German Jews, Polish Jew, Hungarian Jews and so on, then these people weren't Germans, Poles or Hungarian citizens any more, just Jews, later they weren't even human beings any more, they were seen as vermin, vermin that had to be extinguished.

Good Book!!

This is a really good book, but you must read the second book right after reading this one!! if you don't you will not understand the book!! if you can't stand sad books, don't read this one!!

Maus - Remembered

Wow! After seeing Hotel Rwanda (about another genocide), I remembered reading this book over 10 yrs ago in high school. It was a very unique portrayal of a time in history that will never be forgotten - this reading will never be forgotten, at least not by me.

History In the form of Comic Books

This book is about the Holocaust in a coimic book form. It is one of the best books I have ever read and it teaches you about all the deatails of the Holocaust. This is by far one of the best descriptions of the Holocaust that I have ever read about.

Awesome

This is a great book to read. I was reading it at school during our reading time and I couldn't put it down! Maus is really realistic, and I cried a couple of times.

Brilliant

This was one of the best books I have ever read about the holocaust and the people affected. The comic book style is a great vehicle to tell such a sobering story; the graphics are captivating. The lives of the author, his father, and their families are shown in both past and present, drawing parallels between the generations. The characters' experiences and relationships give new meaning to the human experience. Amazing.

worst book ever

when i first picked up this book i read the back as usal and seemed good till i read it all terrible 1 bad way to tell the story 2 ive heard better writing

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An alternative format can be very successful

These books are incredible! Spiegalman does an amazing job of portraying one of the most well-known holocausts in an alternative format. The characters are so much more than simple personafied animals. The representation of Poles as pigs may not be true as a whole, but nor is the representation of all Germans as evil cats. Some Poles were pigs and some Germans were evil cats. The truth is not always easy to swallow and Speiglman does nothing to ease the pain that the Jewish Holocaust will forever remind us of, nor should he. I first read these books years ago prior to having studied the topic in depth, as a 17 year old high school student, and was moved. I highly reccommend it for high school students and for adults.

there are other ways of teaching about the holocaust

I understand that the author tried to reach as many young readers as possible and the book in that form does just that. what I do not understand is why so many american holocaust authors promote hatred by stereotyping, all in the name of tolerance. I was very offended by spiegelman's portrait of poles as pigs. how low, but hey, a holocaust writer wouldn't fullfill his job if he didn't promote hatred toward poles at the same time. sad. it must be a difficult task to write and not to use such propaganda, only few authors are able to do it. on the other hand, books by norman davies, richard lukas have the tendency to be 'out of print and hard to get.' wonder why.

good the first 2 or 3 times...

While I really enjoyed Maus 1 & 2, I can't say I've ever reread them more than once or twice. The father's descriptions of the camps and in general the Nazi occupation were riveting, but the present-day parts just lacked something. I didn't really care much about Art or Francoise's struggles to care for Art's father, though I think it could be salvaged. I would check it out or borrow it before deciding to buy it.

Maus, An Amazing story.

Maus is probably one of the most uniquely made books about the Jewish holocaust. It involves not only good writing skills, but also involves amazingly depicted pictures which completely relate to the story. The Author Art Spiegelman does a great job of stereotyping some of the races that are involved in this book, such as Jews equaling mice and Germans equaling cats. I really enjoyed this book for a couple of reasons. One of these reasons is because it really taught me more about a subject I thought I knew everything about. Normally I will read a book about the holocaust and I will really feel tragic about what happen to all those people but I feel myself becoming bored with the book, since usually there is no flare that keeps me going. Instead I feel myself falling deeper and deeper into depression. How ever with this book I didn¿t feel the same way. Maybe it was the amazing pictures or the casual state in which the dialogue was said, but for some reason it kept me going with great enthusiasm about what was going to happen next. Another reason why I really enjoyed this book is because of the clever drawings the author produced for this book. An example of this is the Germans, since there are many reasons for why he might have chosen this particular animal. I have thought of many such as maybe he made the German cats because they had clawed their way back from WWII and were ready to fight again. Or maybe he purely chose them because cats are mice¿s worst enemy and the mice in this book are Jews. The reason why I like these clever animals is because the reader has to figure out why Art Spiegelman chose them for his book. This makes the author think into the book a little more which further brings the reader into the story of WWII. I would truly recommend Maus to anyone who wants to learn more about the holocaust and also about the people who were thrown into those terrible circumstances. This is truly a great book and I also recommend it to everyone of every age since it really teaches more about the world¿s history and not just about the normal American history.

Wonderful

This is more than a graphic novel, more than a story. This is the Holocaust. Maus was introduced to me in the eighth grade by my English teacher, who I shall never forget. Reading this was an eye-opening experience. Peace.

One of the Best Holocaust Interpretations

This set I use in my HS Holocaust Class and it seems to help out the students much in regard to comprehension because of the visual means. My hats off to Art Spigleman

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