Ranger Read Program
About MAUS II: A Survivor's Tale
MAUS II: A Survivor's Tale is a prize-winning graphic novel. The primary story of this book is the experience of Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived the concentration camps of Nazi Germany during World War II. This story is framed by Spiegelman's obtaining the story from Vladek. This process is in turn framed by Spiegelman's working on the book after his father's death and suffering attendant anxiety and guilt, ambivalence over the success of the first volume, and difficulties of his "funny-animal" mteaphor (Spiegelman draws the characters as anthropomorphic animals–Jews are mice, Poles pigs, German cats, American dogs, and French frogs). The interconnections and complex characterizations of people and families are engrossing, as are the vivid personal accounts of surviving concentration camps.
