In approaching Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel series Maus I & II, I had my reservations in how I would engage with this literary genre, albeit, the reference of Jews and Nazi’s to cats and mice, was enticing. However, within reading the first ten pages of Maus I, I found myself giggling at Art’s honest portrayal of his father, Vladek, and hearing his voice through the text- or more specifically, I found myself hearing my own fathers voice, accent, and story told through a different lens and as a different hardship. Therefore reading Maus for me, was not a story which engrained in me “Auschwitz 101” as Spiegelman admittedly resists in this interview, rather for me, I truly engaged with Spiegelman’s portrayal of a “story of a son trying to understand his fathers life” and I read this as a parallel to a story of a Canadian-Iranian daughter trying to understand the adversities her parents endured in order to give their children the opportunties that they are surrounded by today.

I empathize with Art insofar as his way of understanding his fathers life narrative relocated me into my parents’ life narrative, and how growing up it felt as though I was always trying to piece together the atrocities my parents faced being young adults in the 1979 Iranian revolution, forcing them to be smuggled out of the country in hopes of fostering a family in a democratic state. Their story, while it is not one that can be satisfied in a brief blog post, did carry in itself a similar theme to Vladek, of hardship, perseverance, wit, pride, and survival. So like Art, often times I find myself piecing their repressed memories together, and filling in the gaps in their timeline with details that were so often forgotten and left out.

Particularly striking to me in this interview of Spiegelman was the question of Vladek’s casual racism made evident in Chapter III of Maus II, which is something I note from my father as well, and in particular in the scene where Art and his wife pick up a black hitchhiker, which makes Vladek very angry. Spiegelman here very eloquently addresses a generalization that I believe many people succumb to, which is the:

“tendency to think of holocaust survivors as martyrs, and how one expects one to be made better by suffering. Suffering makes you hurt that’s all you can say for it, some people were indeed made more sensitive by what they lived through, some people- that part of themselves was not touched one way or the other, and I wanted to insist that Vladek was not an unsympathetic character but he was not a character that was made better by going through the crucible of the holocaust.” (9:20-10:10) 

This scene and Spiegelman’s explanation were striking to me for two reasons:

1) The scene in itself showcased exactly what James Young in his article titled “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History” commends of Spiegelman when he asserts that: “indeed, it may be Artie’s unreliability as a son that makes his own narrative so reliable” (676). Young here is evidencing a moment in the graphic novel where Art strays from the notion of ‘reliable son’ by exposing a character flaw in his father and in turn, himself, making his work in Maus II & II honest and rich.

2) I found significance in Spiegelman’s explanation in the interview as it relates to how popular media encodes us to view Holocaust survivors through a particular lens but rather these survivors, or any survivor really, are individuals who indeed endured hardship but simultaneously we must be cognizant of the idea that one who has endured hardship may still harbour a prejudice they had in a past life; it is very easy people to see the hardship inflicted on them personally, but it is difficult for people to understand their actions on other people.