(Jewish Group) You can't just swap out 'Maus' for another Holocaust book. It's special.
Like many people, I encountered “Maus” as a middle schooler. But unlike many people, I can say that it set me on a direct path to my eventual career — as a scholar of religion, especially Judaism, and popular culture.
I was 12 when the second volume of “Maus” was published, and I read both volumes in one long afternoon. It was the first graphic novel I had read, and like many 12-year-olds I was just starting to think of myself as a person able to have independent ideas and opinions. The very fact of “Maus,” the fact that I could hold in my hand something so simple and yet complicated, changed the way I thought about how we tell stories.
Art Spiegelman’s nonfiction graphic novel uses the conventions of comic books to tell the story of his parents’ experiences as Polish Jews before, during and after the Holocaust. It is also a second-generation story about the legacy of the Holocaust on Spiegelman, a survivor’s child. Spiegelman took a genre that many could not see as literature and turned it into a medium that could tell stories in a way no other book could. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then “Maus” may as well be Proust, because it contains words in the millions in under 300 pages.
In college I took a class on the Holocaust. I wrote my final paper on “Maus.” For my PhD comprehensive exams I needed to choose a text to study for one of my exams. I chose “Maus.” I had to convince people it was a worthy text, but convince them I did.
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