Maus II: A Survivors Tale: And In this My Troubles Begin

Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spieglmans Maus introduced readers to Vladek Spiegleman, a Jewish survivor of Hitlers Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his fathers terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiararity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive.This second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Maus ties together two powerful stories: Vladeks harrowing tale of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of daily life in the death camps, and the authors account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. At every level this is the ultimate survivors tale - and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors.