MAUS II: And Here My Troubles Began

Hailed as a quiet triumph and a relentlessly affecting work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus introduced readers to Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, who struggles to find common ground with his father, understand his horrific past, and History itself. Its format – that of a story in pictures (the Nazis are cats, the Jews are mice) – manages with astonishing ease to shake us off the feeling that we are reading about painfully familiar events, and reveals the ineffable through the insignificant.

The second volume, entitled “Here My Troubles Began,” takes us from the army barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskill Mountains. At times genuinely tragic, at others comical, the story is distinguished by a complex theme and precise thought, atypical not only of comics, but of any other art form. “Maus” weaves together two powerful stories: that of Vladek’s terrifying and incredible journey to salvation, which traces the paradoxes of daily life in the death camps, and that of the author’s difficult relationship with his aging father.

Paperback

Artist: Art Spiegelman

Translator: Vladimir Poleganov

ISBN: 978-619-76264-1-4