NONFICTION - Nov. 24, 1991

MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon: $18; 136 pp.). Writing about the Holocaust is like rescuing someone from a raging river: Unless you first secure a strong foothold, you too will be swept away by unforgiving currents. Most Holocaust writers have found terra firma in the light at the end of the tunnel, in the promise of freedom. But this was not an option for writer and illustrator Art Spiegelman, for while the hero of “Maus,” his father, had survived the camps, he had no hope of escaping their memory. For the predecessor to this volume, “Maus I” (1986), Spiegelman thus found another foothold. He distanced himself from the oppression by telling his father’s story through absurdly humorous symbolism: a cartoon representing Jews as mice and Germans as cats. While Spiegelman adopts the same device in “Maus II,” he seems so worried about losing his footing that he rarely risks getting his feet wet. His sketches are so inhibited that we end up longing for the more visceral emotionality of artists like George Grosz and Ralph Steadman or even the dark, moody ambience of “Raw,” the avant-garde comic journal Spiegelman edits so well.