[NOTE: The topic of the two-volume graphic novel Maus came up in a recent thread, and I’ve decided to republish a review that I first wrote in 2009. So here it is.]

I recently reread the two-volume graphic novel Maus, by Art Spiegelman. It struck me once again, as it did the first time I read these books, that they should not work on any level. And yet, against all odds, they constitute a bona fide masterpiece.

Why should they fail? Let me count the ways. Because of our over-familiarity with the genre, as well as the risk of trivialization, Holocaust stories are inherently difficult to write, especially by people such as Spiegelman who did not directly experience the horrors. He chooses to write in the form of the graphic novel—in other words, a lengthy cartoon. This genre should be especially offensive as a medium for telling so deeply horrific and monumental a tale.

What’s more, Spiegelman decides to depict the protagonists as various animals, which might have served to underline the cartoon aspects as well as dehumanizing the story: the hunted Jews are mice, the Nazis are cats, Poles are pigs, Russians bears, Americans dogs. And he intersperses his own experience of typical and somewhat pedestrian intergenerational angst and parent-child strife with the searing Holocaust sufferings of his parents.

How is it that Spiegelman manages to succeed? He begins slowly, by introducing his father Vladek but concentrating on their present-day post-Holocaust American life (the book was first published in the mid-80s). The man is so crotchety and annoying, so stingy and testy, that the reader shares Spiegelman’s frustration with him. And then the son gets the idea of interviewing his father about his experiences during the war, and the story begins to shift gear into a very different time and place.

Part of the power of the book comes from the idiosyncratic, colorful, and yet laconic way Vladek expresses himself, in accented English that conveys his practical and canny nature. The use of animals to portray the different ethnic and national groups stops seeming strange and becomes powerfully symbolic, keeping the reader from ever forgetting for a moment that these identities were the most salient characteristics of the world in which Vladek and his fellows lived, marking him and his fellow Jews as hunted prey and others as predators, helpers, or neutrals.

The reader learns at the outset that Spiegelman’s mother is dead. Although she came through the Holocaust seemingly intact, she committed suicide when Art was a young adult. As Vladek’s story introduces the reader slowly to the person she was, it becomes more and more apparent that the love between the two was an extraordinarily powerful force, and largely responsible for her wartime survival. Vladek was able to at least temporarily transfer some of his own remarkable gift for endurance to his wife. He was very clever and resourceful. But “clever” and “resourceful” are mild words to describe his stunning ability to find a way out of almost any situation.

Virtually all Holocaust survivor stories involve large elements of both luck and skill. But, having read many such tales, I think I can safely say that Vladek’s history involves more of the latter than any other such story I have read. He is always planning ahead, always thinking, always ingratiating himself with those who might be able to help him in the future. He pretends to have knowledge and training he lacks, and then he makes it his business to learn those skills and to learn them quickly and well (shoemaking, tinsmithing). Although starving, he manages the extraordinary feat of controlling his hunger in order to save food to use as bribes or gifts in ways that can help him in the future.

As Vladek’s past emerges in his own words, the reader—and his son Art—learn the source of many of the man’s maddening quirks. What appears from the perspective of the bountiful America of the 1980s to be a miserly and rather nasty need on the old man’s part to save and hoard seemingly useless things is revealed to be the same impulse that allowed him to live while so many others died. The angry Vladek who is so mean to his second wife (another Holocaust survivor) still mourns the first wife he loved so deeply. The man who maddens son Art with his clinginess and demands is the same person who lost almost every member of his large family, including his first child, in ways that retain their power to horrify even those who are familiar with the Holocaust.

It is said that to know all is to understand all. By the time Art has finished interviewing his father and writing the book, he has come to understand as best he (or any other person who did not directly experience the Holocaust) can what motivates the man, and to respect those very traits of his that originally drove the son nearly crazy. In one of the final panels of the book, Vladek, now very ill and lying in bed, sleepily addresses Art by the name of his deceased first son Richieu who died as a young child in the war. This especially moving moment demonstrates the fusion of the past with the present, and the fact that the dead still exist in the mind, untethered to time.

The strength of Maus is that it tells two tales simultaneously: an almost unimaginably terrifying story of suffering and heroic survival is interspersed with the story of the ordinary middle class life of an American family in which Old World parents give birth to a New World son. No one is spared and no one is glorified, and yet the final message amidst the horror and cynicism is of the power and depth of love.