ESSAY CEMETERY

In the latter half of the twentieth century, several Jewish American writers have taken on the task of representing the Holocaust and its victims in their art. Even though Isaac Bashevis Singer, Art Spiegelman and Cynthia Ozick are did not experience the Holocaust themselves, several of their works center on this sensitive issue. Through their short story, graphic novel and novella they explore the difficulty of writing about a topic that is for them as American Jews both near and distant, and raise issues regarding American society's treatment of Holocaust victims. Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus embodies the artist's struggle with depiction of the Holocaust on several levels. First, such a struggle is inherent the narrative's very form. For the depiction of a Holocaust story, Spiegelman chose the graphic novel, a medium he associates himself in the novel with the lighthearted fun of Walt Disney's cartoons (in a conversation with Vladek). Even though the su

Because of the non-linear (flashback-filled) storytelling, I decided to summarize the plot using bullet points instead of conventional paragraphs. The tense of the bulleted sentences indicate the time of occurrence of the item - past or present. The order of the bullet points correspond to the sequence in which the actions appeared in the book. Numbers in parentheses (n) indicate page numbers. I can't tell the edition - the title page of Chapter 1 begins on page 9. ------ The book begins with an epigraph attributed to HITLER: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human" . One/The Sheik ·        Mala and Vladek don't get along ·        Vladek had two heart attacks ·        Art's mother is dead ·        Art asks Vladek to tell him Vladek's story ·        Vladek criticizes Art about the way he spends his time ·        Vladek was in the textile business ·        Vladek brags that he was good looking and a ladies' man before