Tragicomics : Despite Acclaim for ‘Maus,’ Art Spiegelman Worried About Trivializing the Holocaust

Nadja Mouly Spiegelman, 4 1/2, wanders toward a mirror that leans against the wall of the Lower Manhattan loft.

“Why did you bring this down?” she asks her father.

“So I can see what I look like when I draw,” says Art Spiegelman, reaching out for a hug.

Not so long ago Spiegelman resisted the idea of having children. “I just didn’t want to be anybody’s parent in the way my parents were to me,” he said in an interview with Arts magazine in 1987.

“It’s only when I left home that I got some sense that not everybody had parents who woke up screaming in the night.”

That interview was part of the media clamor attending the publication of Spiegelman’s first book, “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.” It is the story, illustrated with cartoon animals, of his parents’ sufferings in the Holocaust.

This month, Pantheon Books published “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began,” the conclusion of Spiegelman’s epic comic book.

Like “Maus I,” it has met immediate, extravagant acclaim. Reviewers have extolled the spare lines, acute dialogue and dreamlike effect of Spiegelman’s cartooning. The New York Times called the work “one of the most powerful and original memoirs to come along in recent years.”

The Wall Street Journal reviewer declared Spiegelman’s books “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust . . . a comic that looks into the abyss from two inches above the edge.”

Next month, a “Maus” exhibit opens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

“Perceptions of the book seem to be very positive,” says Spiegelman. “I just don’t know how clearheaded they are.” He worries that some reviewers miss the point in calling “Maus” a fable, or a fiction.

“It’s fiction,” he says, “in that it is shaped reality, and reality is much more difficult to grab hold of. But I really tried to stay with events that happened in real time and real space.”

His parents, Vladek and Anja Spiegelman, were a young, well-off Jewish couple when they started their life together in the 1930s in Poland. With the German invasion in 1939, Jewish property was seized, including Vladek’s business. Vladek and Anja were forced into the new Jewish ghetto, then into hiding. Separated from their 5-year-old son, seeking asylum, they were captured by the Gestapo. “Maus I” brings Vladek and Anja to the gates of Auschwitz.

“Maus II” follows Vladek as, with labor, bribery and tremendous luck, he managed not only to survive Auschwitz, but also to protect Anja, who was sent to Birkenau, the adjoining death camp. He suffered through forced marches, a false liberation, disease and betrayal, ultimately to reunite with Anja after the war. They moved to the West, leaving behind the dead who included their young son and most of both of their families.

Art Spiegelman was born in Stockholm in 1948. Three years later, his family moved to Queens, N.Y. There, in 1978, Spiegelman began tape-recording interviews with his father, expressly intending to draw a comic book about Vladek and Anja. (His mother committed suicide a decade before.)

The interviews frame Vladek’s memories of Hitler’s Europe and fill out Spiegelman’s countertheme: the struggle of Artie, a cosmopolitan, New York City-bred cartoonist, to come to terms with his parents and their past. As Spiegelman explained upon the release of “Maus I,” “When we say this is a survivor’s tale, we’re not sure who the survivor is.”

“Maus I” was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. It has been translated into 16 languages, including German, Japanese and, soon, Polish. The Guggenheim Foundation granted Spiegelman a fellowship to finish “Maus II.” Film and TV offers have poured in. Spiegelman has turned them all down.

The book became a university text, not just in history classes, but in literature. This year, it is required reading for new students at UC Santa Cruz.

In addition, “Maus I” prompted organizers of conferences to begin inviting Spiegelman to speak on the Holocaust, on the struggle of survivors and their children. He accepted, but with some reluctance.

“I might be an authority on Vladek Spiegelman,” he says, “but on the broader implications of the tale in the book, talk to Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, talk to somebody who survived.”

Jewish educators have endorsed the work. Mark Weitzman, associate director for education at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Los Angeles-based institute for Holocaust studies, says “Maus” treats the Holocaust “with sensitivity and awareness. We tend to think of comic books as glorified cartoon strips for kids. I don’t see this as fitting in there at all. It’s a use of another medium to help bring the story across.”

Spiegelman’s books are “high art,” says Robert Storr, the curator mounting MOMA’s “Maus” show. “Here,” he explains, “a major work on one of the most serious topics in the postwar period has been made in supposedly a throwaway, jokey format--and it’s the right one for it.”

All of the Jews in “Maus” are drawn as mice. The Nazis are cats; the Poles pigs, the Americans dogs, the French frogs and the Swedes reindeer. The initial question of the format’s appropriateness has all but evaporated.

“It’s asked or observed now,” reflects Spiegelman, “more with a kind of astonishment than with a gasp of disbelief. It’s like, ‘Wow! It’s a comic!’ as opposed to ‘My God--it’s a comic.’ ”

Spiegelman, 43, has drawn underground comics, gag cartoons, newspaper illustrations and chewing-gum cards (he invented Wacky Packs and Garbage Pail Kids). Since 1980, he and his wife, Francoise Mouly, have edited Raw, a painstakingly produced, gleefully literate, approximately annual compendium of graphic art descended from the psychedelic comics of the ‘60s. They’ve shepherded other artists’ careers too, publishing a series of chapbook comics called Raw One Shots.

“Maus,” drawn over a 13-year span, appeared chapter by chapter in Raw between 1980 and 1985 and was published in book form in 1987. Pantheon’s release this month of the complete “Maus,” two hardcover volumes available separately or together in a slipcase, brings the odyssey to dramatic culmination.

Once conceived as a simple continuation, the second volume came to embody the author’s mixed feelings about the first, and about the praise heaped on it five years ago.

“I was going, ‘Gulp! Why is everybody saying this is good?’ ” Spiegelman recalls. “I’m only halfway through it. The parade’s going to go by, and I’m going to have to go back and get to work on this.”

When the “Maus I” book tour ended and the hoopla died away, Spiegelman found himself blocked. Pride mixed with the terrible memories that had made his success possible. His father died in 1982, a few chapters into the publication of “Maus” in the magazine. About to become a father himself, committed to retelling his parents’ saga, Spiegelman also believed the Holocaust was too profound an event to be reduced to mere story.

“I needed to do something to find my way back,” he says, “because I was getting very confused.” The way back was a kind of meta-comic in which Art, a human cartoonist wearing a mouse mask, struggles to finish his book about mouse cartoonist Artie and his mouse father. Spiegelman decided to include this sequence in “Maus II.” That introduced a new concern: the moral dilemma of creating art about the Holocaust.

“To create anything of the Holocaust that offers pleasure on any level is a diminishment of the suffering that allowed the art-making,” he says. “The short form of this is a drawing table on top of a pile of bodies”--an unnerving image from “Maus II.”

As an artist, however, Spiegelman is unambivalently buoyant about his MOMA show. Along with showing various stages of sketches and prints, he plans to include drawings that survived Auschwitz and family photos. Through headphones, visitors will hear his original interviews with his father.

At home in the Manhattan loft between stops on his 10-city “Maus II” book tour, Spiegelman says this time around he’s enjoying the applause.

“I figure I might as well, because when this is over I’m going to have the biggest bummer of a depression I’ve ever had, because I’ve got this 300-page mouse off my back. That’s going to happen whether people praise it, don’t praise it, like my book, don’t like it. It’ll come a month earlier or a month later, but I’m on a collision course for having to figure out what happens to me after ‘Maus.’ ”

Nadja will soon have a baby brother. She notices some toy mice on her father’s drawing table.

“I love your little rats,” says Vladek and Anja Spiegelman’s granddaughter.

“I love you,” says their son.