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Maus: A Survivor's Tale. Part I: My Father Bleeds History. By Art Spiegelman. (New York: Pantheon, 1991. 159 pp. Cloth, $20.00, ISBN 0-394-54155-3. Paper, $12.00, ISBN 0-394-74723-2.)
Maus: A Survivor's Tale. Part II: And Here My Troubles Began. By Art Spiegelman. (New York: Pantheon, 1991. 136 pp. Cloth, $18.00, ISBN 0-394-55655-0.)
With the 1991 publication of the second volume of Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Art Spiegelman concludes his painstakingly researched and rendered chronicle of a Holocaust survivor. Based on extensive interviews with his father conducted during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the first volume of Maus, originally published in 1986, portrayed the ultimately futile efforts of Vladek Spiegelman and his family to escape the extermination program in Poland from 1939 to 1944; picking up where the first volume ended, at the gates of Auschwitz, the second volume (1991) dwells in terrible detail on the fate of Jews in the concentration camps.
To those readers upset by this journal's recent institution of film and video reviews, it will not come as good news (for those still not in the know) that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, parts 1 and 2, is a comic book. Maus is more than a curiosity, however, and Spiegelman -- a veteran underground cartoonist and currently coeditor of the comic anthology magazine Raw (where most of Maus originally appeared) -- has done more than merely lend a pictorial dimension to our largely text-driven discipline. Maus is a significant contribution to the field of history, not in spite of the medium chosen by its author, but because of it.
Maus is an oral history account and also an account of an oral history. Vladek's narration is framed and often disrupted by the relationship between the teller and the interviewer. It is a stormy relationship, punctuated...