Maus: A Survivor's Tale

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Holocaust reaches you in Maus the way it reached Art Spiegelman: secondhand, on cassette tape, out of order, from a man who is exhausting to be in a room with. Spiegelman doesn’t treat that as a compromise; he builds the book on it. Across both volumes — My Father Bleeds History (1986) and And Here My Troubles Began (1991), later collected as The Complete Maus — you watch a son in Rego Park, Queens prod his father Vladek into remembering Auschwitz, and you watch what it costs them both. The war story and the story of getting the war story are the same story, and neither one resolves.

Art Spiegelman on SummaryShelf

Maus: A Survivor's Tale