Maus II: A Survivor's Tale. And Here My Troubles Began (review)

134 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 In contrast to Gentile Holocaust humor, Jewish Holocaust humor tended to be wry and cosmopolitan, self-mocking and self-referential. Furthermore , Jewish Holocaust humor focused on racist ideology and its effects on individuals. Finally, it often predicted Allied victory. In "Outside the Walls, After the War," Lipman examines postwar Jewish Holocaust comedy, which can be classified almost exclusively as galgenbumor-the fatalistic wit of the condemned. Lipman gives as an example of this type of humor an excerpt from the bitterly comic play Auschwitz by Peter Barnes, a British Jew. The following joke is told during the farewell performance of two concentration camp inmates, the comics Bieberstein and Bimko: Bieberstein: Bemie Utvinoff just died. Bimko: Well, if he had a chance to better himself .... (THEY die in darkness.) (p. 242) When we read this exchange of words, we experience complex emotions; we witness gallows humor that expresses bravura indifference to the power of the oppressor. Steve Lipman asks whether we "who do not share the victims' pain, can fully share their laughter." As with any aspect of the Holocaust, those who were not its victims are outside. Nevertheless, the humanity ofJew and Gentile alike cries out to somehow share the suffering, and in doing so, assuage the unassuageable pain. So we who are outside will continue to read historical studies of the Holocaust, including studies of its humor, so we can share, know, and understand, so we can remember the victims of the most barbarous era in modern times. Wilma Kahn Department of English State University of New York at Albany Maus II: A Survivor's Tale. And Here My Troubles Began, by Art Spiegelman. New York: Pantheon Books, 1991. 136 pp. $18.00. Among second-generation writings on the Shoah, none has attracted more attention or raised more issues than Art Spiegelman's Maus. Simultaneously praised and condemned, Maus is a text which exposes both the viciousness of Nazism and the continuing impact of the Shoah. Dedicated both to Richieu, the brother he never knew who was lost during the Holo- Book Reviews 135 caust, and to his newborn daughter Nadja, Spiegelman's book tells of the haunting presence of the dead among the living. The continual intrusion of the Holocaust past on the American present, an enmeshed yet emotionally devastating father/son relationship, and the importance of bearing witness dominate Maus. In his first volume, Maus: A Suroivor's Tale (1986), dedicated to his deceased mother Anja, Spiegelman told the prewar story of his parents' life in Poland. Vladek and Anja had married prior to the Holocaust, had a son (Richieu), and were caught in the Nazi web of death. Years later, in America, Anja commits suicide and Spiegelman calls Vladek a murderer for having destroyed Anja's wartime diaries. The present volume treats his parents' experience in Auschwitz and ends with Vladek's death in 1982. The novel's comic-book format is highly significant. The book's epigraph, taken from a German newspaper of the mid-1930s, condemns Mickey Mouse as "the most miserable ideal ever revealed." The newspaper article concludes with the following exhortation: "Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!" Consequently, it is no accident thatJews are portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats. Staying with his by now familiar animal figures, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, a non-Jewish French prisoner is a frog, and Swedes are reindeer. As the editor ofRaw, Spiegelman realizes the educative and evocative power of comics for adults. Yet it is the very issue of form, so inextricably related to content, which arouses such passionate discussion. I will return to this issue later. Spiegelman's is one of several second-generation works which have appeared over the past decade. These novels shed light on the issue of genre and experience in writings by daughters and sons of Holocaust survivors . For example, there is a distinction made between the survivor's experience and the offspring's reaction. No attempt is made to imagine oneself in the Holocaust. Spiegelman clearly and honestly subtitles both his volumes "a survivor's tale." But the second...