Maus I & II A Survivor's Tale

Maus is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and history itself. Its form, the cartoon, portrays the Nazis as cats and the Jews as mice. Moving back and forth from Poland to New York, two powerful stories are told. The first is Spiegelman's father's account of how he and his wife survived Hitler's Europe. The second is the author's tortured relationship with his aging father as they try to lead a normal life against a backdrop of history too large to pacify.