Art Spiegelman's Maus

As a huge fan of history especially Wars involving America, this was a trill for me to read. A different perspective on the War was something I searched for activly usually in the form of video for me to listen to while I work. And this was a comic. I was ecstatic to give it a try and was looking forward to a good read.

And yet as I began to read I wasn't sure how to feel about it then.

It was a very different perspiration of Jews and Nazis than I was use to, in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats. A symbolization that is very accurate and made me flinch when I realized just what it meant.

As the story goes on, it confirmed things I already knew about the war and things I didn't about the Jews living under the Nazis. Most of what I had learned was from the average Jew not the ones from wealthier roots. It was curious to see how they did just as much to survive as the commoners. I was surprised at how cleaver they had to be to hide away and survive and couldn't imagine how they made it at all. The constant sense of danger could be seen on every page of the father telling his story. The art did everything to help with this feeling, showing you just how close they had gotten at one point or another to death.

But at the same time, reading the graphic novel, I was having a harder time connecting to it. And what I believe to be my major issue is one of the very things I praise. The representation of the characters as animals and simply this being a comic. I'm so use to humans that it was odd to hear these stories from mice let along in comic form. It was a large disconnect for me. So much so that the only 2 things I really got outraged about in the book were the fact the father burned the diary's and that even after all of that, he's still a racist. It was that sense of disappointment that a valuable source of information was lost forever and we'll never know another thing about Nazi Germany. What I should have gotten outraged about such as the death camps, I knew so much about that it was hard to feel much about them at all.

But even being a comic, this has a lot of valuable information and lessons that I took to heart.