"Getting in touch with my inner racist"

Rather strange Speigelman essay in Mother Jones: "Getting in touch with my inner racist"

The ending

I found the ending pretty sad. First we see Vladek and Anja's reunion after the war, and Vladek says, "We were both very happy, and lived happy, happy ever after." But we know that's not true. Anja eventually committed suicide, and Vladek became a miserable old man. And in the last line, Vladek confuses Art with his dead son, Richieu. It's as though the tragedy of the past will never really be over for this family.

"Prisoner on the Hell Planet"

What were your thoughts on the comic within the comic, Art's reaction to his mother's suicide? The comic depicts his mother's suicide and his father's reaction. Art is wearing a concentration camp uniform throughout. In the last panels, Art is shown in prison, and he says, "Well, Mom, if you're listening ... Congratulations! You've committed the perfect crime ... You put me here ... shorted all my circuits ... cut my nerve endings ... and crossed my wires! You murdered me, Mommy, and you left me here to take the rap!!!"

I found this rather disturbing. What was your reaction?

All there is to know

Have you seen this Leonard Cohen poem about Adolf Eichmann, who was considered the mastermind of the Nazis' "final solution"? I think of it every time I read something about the Holocaust.

All there is to know about Adolf Eichmann

EYES - Medium
HAIR - Medium
WEIGHT - Medium
HEIGHT - Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES - None
NUMBER OF FINGERS - Ten
NUMBER OF TOES - Ten
INTELLIGENCE - Medium

What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?

Comparisons

Do you see any parallels in the struggles for survival in "Maus," "The Road," "A Thousand Splendid Suns"?

I saw something of Desdemona and Lefty from "Middlesex" in Vladek and Anja — the same sense of bewildered sadness of people ripped by war from their native land and cast upon the shores of America, a busy, naive country that was largely ignorant of and indifferent to their personal pasts and struggles. I keep trying to imagine what it would be like to be uprooted as an adult and replanted in a foreign country. It's really something. And on top of that, to have a personal history of unspeakable suffering.

Lost history

What was your reaction to Vladek's destruction of his wife's journals?

Empathy II

I'm always shocked when I see people who have been victimized by prejudice victimizing others. I always — naively — expect them to have been ennobled by their suffering, to be empathetic, to know what matters. And yet the author shows his father, a Holocaust survivor, being racist toward a black man. Why do you think the author included that episode?

Vladek

What connections did you make between the father's Holocaust experiences and his life in New York?

Honesty

I was really moved by the sheer honesty of these books — not just the author's honesty that his dad often drove him crazy, but the honesty of the concentration camp story, how it wasn't just a simple tale of good and evil, how it managed to convey the complexity of human behavior under extreme stress. Any thoughts on this?

Empathy

I think the thing that struck me most deeply about "Maus" was the depiction of the father-son relationship — how the fact that his parents' Holocaust experience was the huge, inescapable fact of their existence and yet how they had all this "normal" strife and personality conflicts like family members do. When I was reading it, I thought anyone who lived through the Holocaust should get a free pass to be a jerk or a tightwad or whatever else their psyche needed and the rest of us can only look on with infinite understanding. But I know it's one thing to hold that theory and another thing to actually practice it when faced with the everyday reality of a difficult person. Did you feel this struggle in the narrator?

Graphic storytelling

First, the obvious question: What did you think of the "comic-book" treatment of this serious subject matter?