Over the past month in ASTU two of the texts that have particularly stuck out to me are Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a graphic novel about his father’s experiences as a Jew during the Holocaust and Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls, an almost spy-type novel about a women’s journey through Toronto to find her elusive lover. Despite their differences in plot there are a number of common themes that connect the texts. Memory and trauma, naturally being the key themes of our ASTU class, are central to both Mausand Basic Black with Pearls, though each author navigates them in different ways. However, a commonality I am particularly interested in exploring is how both novels explore the concept of coming home and the home itself. I think this is a particularly pertinent question to me, being first year international student here at UBC, as for the first time in my life I’m having to grapple with the notion that I have no real sense of “home” anymore. I haven’t been back to London, where I grew up and would have traditionally considered home, since August and my childhood room has now been changed beyond recognition. Living in dorms here in Vancouver, this doesn’t feel like any notion of home I’ve seen before either. So, with summer and my return to London fast approaching, I’ve found myself increasingly questioning the meaning of home to me. Both Spiegelman and Weinzweig’s work take non-traditional approaches on the notion of home particularly challenging the idea that everyone has a perfect one.

Spiegelman tackles the notion of home on two fronts in Maus. Most strikingly is his father’s understanding of home in Poland under Nazi occupation. The tension between Vladek, his Jewish father, and his fellow Polish countrymen is spelled out plainly in the controversial drawing of the Poles as pigs. The connotations behind this lie in his Vladek’s belief that the Polish people, his neighbours, could have done more to help the Jews during the Holocaust. I find this portrayal interesting as there are several instances in the book where Vladek is actually helped by his Jewish countrymen, such as getting him back home on the train (62) and letting him stay in their barn (139), however despite this Vladek and, in turn, Spiegelman make clear throughout the novel that Vladek was a Polish-Jew, which was a very separate category to a normal Polish citizen. Ultimately, this meant that despite Poland being Vladek’s home, it didn’t actually feel like a welcoming place to him, certainly during his time of greatest need, and so whilst technically it was his address on a very practical level Poland wasn’t really a home for him at all.

However, the challenges of finding a place to call home did not end for Vladek when he leaves Poland. His house in New York plays a defining role in the novel as the place where Vladek tells his story to Art and such is its importance that its location is displayed prominently on the back cover of the book. Yet, this house was also the place in which Vladek’s wife and Art’s mother committed suicide and where Vladek’s current relationship with Mala is fraught with difficulty, Mala describing her nerves as “completely shot” (99) living with Vladek. It shows that home can be more than one thing at the same time, it can be simultaneously a place of great sadness and of career defining significance. It’s all of the emotion that connects you to it that makes it a home, not just happiness all of the time.

Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearlssimilarly challenges the traditional notion of the home. For Shirley, at the start of the novel, Toronto is home, but it is also one of, if not the, last places in the world that she wants to go, even for Coenraad. However, through her attempts to find Coenraad in Toronto, Shirly discovers a side of the city that she has never fully appreciated before and by the end of the novel she has returns home, giving up her trademark black dress and pearls. She notes she will miss travelling to be with Coenraad but also seems to have found a new appreciation for her home through her time away. The reassuring message this sends to me is that even your home may seem like the last place you want to be, the more you explore a city that you have a very set position on, the more it may surprise you and change those perceptions.

To sum up, Maus and Basic Black with Pearls paint different pictures of the notion of home but both challenge the traditional notion of home as perfect environment where you will always fit in. Maus takes a somewhat more pessimistic view showing that even if you call a place home it may never be the welcoming place you would expect, but it can still become an important place in your life. Basic Black with Pearls shows that even if you become totally disillusioned with the place you call home, you may find yourself eventually finding comfort in it as you get to know it better. Both then, provide food for thought as I navigate my own new journey of finding what home means to me.