In the first half of And Here My Troubles Began, the second trade paperback compilation of Art Spiegelman's Maus comic strip, Art depicts himself in the mid 1980's when the first half of his award-winning graphic novel was a remarkably successful property. He's drawn as a human wearing a mouse mask, surrounded by other Americans who wear the animal masks of their ethnic heritages. When beset upon by journalists and marketing executives who all want something extra out of the first Maus book, Art literally shrinks into a child in front of them. Maus is every bit Art Spiegelman's search for own his place in the post-Holocaust world as it is a document of his parents' experience during the war. He wonders aloud whether or not he can actually capture the truth of life and death in Auschwitz, whether or not Maus says anything profound, or even anything that hasn't been said already in the countless books documenting Europe under Nazi rule. The responsibility of finding something meaningful in Maus may be up to us readers, not Art Spiegelman. He just recorded his father's words and tried not to spare any details.

The two aspects of Maus I've found most striking have been the technical schematics scattered throughout the two books and the depth of the depiction of Vladek Spiegelman in his last years. These two things balance each other out. Without Vladek's warts-and-all characterization the diagrams and matter of fact descriptions of things like the Auschwitz gas chambers would have only a fraction of the emotional energy behind them. By the same token, without the technical details Vladek would be just another long-suffering protagonist and not a stand-in for all of the survivors. The flesh of Maus balances the machinery.

Most famous Holocaust narratives put their readers squarely inside the concentration camps, ghettos and hiding places. They don't spend that much time in the before and almost none of them endeavor to reconcile the after. Maus spends at least a third of its time in the after and in doing so it transforms its hero, the survivor Vladek Spiegelman, into a very flawed person. It becomes increasingly clear that some of Vladek's least admirable qualities in the world outside the camps are what kept him alive in Auschwitz. He's a miser, a hoarder and a freeloader. His capacity for kindness puts him and those he loves in danger as often as it saves a life.

As we readers follow Art's experience with his father in the few years he has left, we end up feeling the same frustration Art does. The first two chapters of And Here My Troubles Began take place both in Auschwitz in the 1940's and in a Catskills bungalow community in the 1980's where Vladek retreats after his second wife, Mala, leaves him. Forced to stay several days with Vladek, Art and his wife Francoise are brought to their wits' end. Vladek is a difficult man and even though the book gives us a guided tour through the traumas that cemented his most irritating habits, he's still far from being the irreproachable hero of the story.

This humanization puts a special spin on the Holocaust narrative. It's important to see that the people who survived had full lives after the war. It's the essential piece to the survivor's puzzle. Like for Art Spiegelman, it has been the worry of post-war generations that they could never live up to the strength and accomplishments of those who lived through that darkest period in human history. The image of the Holocaust survivor is a variation on the traditional Greatest Generation ideal. To recognize that these people remained human, that they weren't so transformed by the war that they weren't recognizable as normal people, is arguably just as important as remembering the horrors they experienced so they will never happen again.