Maus by Art Spiegelman

Literature Circle Packet

Directions for this packet:

Follow the reading schedule provided and the directions contained within. Readings are to be completed upon arrival to that day’s class. Failure to read will not be tolerated. Such noncompliance lets both yourself and your group down and is the antithesis of a literature circle. Plus, this is a graphic novel with short readings. And the book is awesome!

Also, upon entry to class, you are responsible for having prepared four discussion questions for your group. These must be written down ahead of time in your notebook. Each day will begin with a student-led discussion.

Guidelines for creation of discussion questions:

  1. Phrase as a question
  2. Engage other readers by appealing to a subject that many students will be familiar with
  3. Use open-ended questions: These are designed to encourage full, meaningful answers using the each person’s own knowledge and/or feelings. It is the opposite of a closed-ended question, which encourages a short or single-word answer. Open-ended questions also tend to be more objective and less leading than closed-ended questions (Mediacollege).
  4. Connect the text to other books you have read in English class or history
  5. Use examples from our text to connect to other subject areas
  6. Seek to make intellectual and emotional connections through your question
  7. Challenge a text’s meaning through your question
  8. Engage pop culture (music, film, etc) references—you may bring in film clips or song lyrics.

For example, based on the prologue, the question, “Why does Artie cry?” is not good for discussion. It would be answered in a few words by a single person. However, a question like, “This scene reminds me of movies that focus on a group of young friends, one of whom always seems to be a crybaby. If this story is being narrated by a grown-up crybaby, how do you think it will impact the story?” The latter question, though not particularly focused, allows for a variety of responses and connects to other literatures.

Follow along and discuss/answer the discussion questions. You will need to abide by the schedule for the packet.

  • You will rotate positions, and fulfill the obligations of the positions each of those 3 days. The positions and explanations of each are located on page 233 of your SpringBoard textbooks. (There will not be an artist position for this novel)
  • Every 3 days you will need to draw and complete your own copy of the graphic organizers on pages 235, 236, 237 of your SpringBoard textbook.
  • Each member will be responsible of documenting a response to another member’s discussion point each day you are assigned discussion questions. (This is much like a Fishbowl.) You will find a graphic organizer that demonstrates this on page 244 of your Springboard textbook.
  • At the end of the novel you will be responsible for completing and answering the questions on page 247 of your SpringBoard novel.

Vocabulary

The vocabulary correlates with the different parts of the novel, so you will need to complete it as you go along. For each word, you must identify the context in which it is used and then use it in an additional sentence of your own composition. I suggest setting aside a section of your notebook to complete this work.

Please Note: All members of the Literature Circle are responsible for filling out each activity required within the packet. This includes preparing responses to each discussion question. You will need to write all discussion question responses on your own paper/in your own notebook. You will need to make sure you include the title of the section of questions you are responding to.

Day 1 - Prologue and Chapter One: The Sheik

Art visits his dad, Vladek, in Rego Park, New York, after being away for about two years. Vladek has married Mala after the suicide of Art's mother. Art persuades Vladek to begin telling him the story of his life, which Art hopes to use for a book. Vladek begins at the time that he is a young man working in the textile business near Czestochowa, Poland. He has an affair with the beautiful Lucia before he is introduced to Anna Zylberberg. Anna (Anja) is from a wealthy family and is well educated but nervous and sickly. Vladek and Anja are married in 1937, and Vladek moves to the town of Sosnowiec, Anja's hometown.

1. What is your first impression of VladekSpiegelman? What does his remark about friends suggest about his personality? How does it foreshadow revelations later in the book?

2. What has happened to Artie's mother?

3. How does Vladek get along with Mala, his second wife? What kind of things do they argue about?

4. How long has it been since Artie last visited his father? What do you think is responsible for their separation?

5. How does Vladek respond when Artie first asks him about his life in Poland? Why might he be reluctant to talk about those years?

6. On page 12 we see a close-up of Vladek as he pedals his exercise bicycle. What is the meaning of the numbers tattooed on his wrist? How does this single image manage to convey information that might occupy paragraphs of text?

7. Describe Vladek's relationship with Lucia Greenberg. How was he introduced to AnjaZylberberg? Why do you think he chose her over Lucia?

Vocabulary

  1. sheik: irresistibly charming to women
  2. textiles: cloth manufactured into fabric by weaving or knitting
  3. bachelor: an unmarried man
  4. hosiery: stockings

What is a graphic novel and how do I read it?

Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the reader.

McCloud, Scott. (1993) Understanding Comics: the invisible art. New York: Harper Perennial.

An original book-length story, either fiction or nonfiction, published in comic

book style or a collection of stories that have been published previously as

individual comic books. Gorman, Michele. (2003) Getting Graphic!: using graphic novels to promote literacy with preteens and teens. Worhtington, OH: Linworth Publishing.

  • A Graphic Novel is usually a monographic work that has a storyline with a start and a finish. It is typically in bound book format.
  • A Graphic Novel is a book made up of words and pictures: typically the pictures are arranged on the page in sequential panels, while the words are presented in speech bubbles (for dialogue) or text boxes (for narration).
  • “Graphic novel” is a word that describes a medium, not a genre: graphic novels can be histories, fantasies, or anything in between.
  • Graphic Novels are not collections of comic strips

that contains each of the identified elements.

Spiegelman describes himself and his father as mice. Begin thinking about an animal that describes you. Have students work on brainstorming animals (real or imagined) that they can identify with. Write which animal you would be and why.

Day 2 - Chapter 2: The Honeymoon

Art visits his father in Rego Park several times over the next few months. Vladek is focused on the many pills he takes and on his failing health. Art is focused on trying to get the details of Vladek's story. The family prospers since Anja's father has given them money to invest in a textile factory. Vladek and Anja have a son, Richlieu, but after his birth, Anja suffers a deep depression. Vladek accompanies her to a sanitarium in Czechoslovakia, where she is to be treated. On their trip to the sanitarium they see a Nazi banner and hear of the first actions against Jewish people. Anja recovers from her depression, and they return to Poland only to find that their factory has been robbed. Anja's father helps them financially, and for a time, their life is good. But in August 1939, Vladek is drafted into the Polish army and sent to fight the Germans.

  1. What is Vladek doing when Artie comes to visit him? How does his health figure elsewhere in the book?
  2. How does Vladek become wealthy?
  3. What does Vladek see while traveling through Czechoslovakia?
  4. Why does the artist place a swastika in the background of the panels that depict the plight of Jews in Hitler's Germany (p. 33)? Why, on page 125, is the road that Vladek and Anja travel on their way back to Sosnowiec also shaped like a swastika? What other symbolic devices does the author use in this book?

Vocabulary

  1. hysterical: uncontrollably emotive
  2. sanitarium: a place where medically supervised recuperation takes place
  3. governess: a woman who is employed to take care of a child’s upbringing, education, etc.
  4. pogrom: an organized massacre, especially of Jews
  5. frontier: boundary, border of countries
  6. cataract: cloudiness of the eye that causes impairment of the vision or blindness

Art Spiegelman Biography (from The Stephen Barclay Agency)

Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative MAUS— which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. MAUS II continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, their formal complexity, and controversial content. In his lecture, “What the %@&*! Happened to Comics?” Spiegelman takes his audience on a chronological tour of the evolution of comics, all the while explaining the value of this medium and why it should not be ignored. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, for "comics echo the way the brain works. People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in paragraphs.” "

Having rejected his parents’ aspirations for him to become a dentist, Art Spiegelman studied cartooning in high school and began drawing professionally at age 16. He went on to study art and philosophy at Harpur College before becoming part of the underground comix subculture of the 60s and 70s. As creative consultant for Topps Bubble Gum Co. from 1965-1987, Spiegelman created Wacky Packages, Garbage Pail Kids and other novelty items, and taught history and aesthetics of comics at the School for Visual Arts in New York from 1979-1986. In 2007 he was a Heyman Fellow of the Humanities at Columbia University where he taught a Masters of the Comics seminar. In 1980, Spiegelman founded RAW, the acclaimed avant-garde comics magazine, with his wife, Françoise Mouly—MAUS was originally serialized in the pages of RAW. They've more recently co-edited Little Lit, a series of three comics anthologies for children published by HarperCollins ("Comics-They're not just for Grown-ups Anymore") and Big Fat Little Lit, collecting the three comics into one volume. Currently, he and his wife publish a series of early readers called Toon Books—picture books in comics format.They have co-editedA Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics(Fall 2009). His work has been published in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, where he was a staff artist and writer from 1993-2003. A collection of his New Yorker work, Kisses from New York was published in France, Germany and Italy, and will be published in the U.S. by Pantheon, who also published his illustrated version of the 1928 lost classic, The Wild Party, by Joseph Moncure March.

In 2004 he completed a two-year cycle of broadsheet-sized color comics pages,In the Shadow of No Towers, first published in a number of European newspapers and magazines including Die Zeit and The London Review of Books. A book version of these highly political works was published by Pantheon in the United States, appeared on many national bestseller lists, and was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2004.

Spiegelman’swork also includes a new edition of his 1978 anthology, Breakdowns (Fall 2008); it includes an autobiographical comix-format introduction almost as long as the book itself, entitled Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!; as well as a new children’s book (published with Toon Books), called Jack and the Box. In 2009 MAUS was chosen by the Young Adult Library Association as one of its recommended titles for all students (the list is revised every 5 years and used by educators and librarians across the country). In 2009 McSweeney’s published a collection of three of his sketchbooks entitled Be a Nose. A major exhibition of his work was arranged by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the "15 Masters of 20th Century Comics" exhibit (November 2005). In 2005, Art Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and in 2006 he was named to the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. He was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2005 and—the American equivalent—played himself on an episode of “The Simpsons” in 2008. In fall 2011, Pantheon published Meta Maus, a companion to The Complete Maus – it is the story of why he wrote Maus, why he chose mice, cats, frogs, and pigs, and how he got his father to open up (the new book includes aDVD of the transcripts of Art’s interviews with his father; it is not a graphic novel, but it is populated with illustrations, photos and other images). MetaMaus was awarded the 2011 National Jewish Book Award in the Biography, Authobiography, and Memoir category. In 2011, Art Spiegelman won the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, marking only the third time an American has received the honor (the other two were Will Eisner and Robert Crumb).

“"“Spiegelman has become one of The New Yorker’s most sensational artists, in recent years drawing illustrations for covers that are meant not just to be plainly understood but also to reach up and tattoo your eyeballs with images once unimaginable in the magazine of old moneyed taste ... From his Holocaust saga in which Jewish mice are exterminated by Nazi cats, to the The New Yorker covers guaranteed to offend, to a wild party that ends in murder: Art Spiegelman’s cartoons don’t fool around.”"”

— Los Angeles Times

Author Biography Worksheet

Answer the following questions on this paper or by downloading this document from the network and typing your answers. Be sure to answer all parts of every question. Use the two column format to help you study for tests by covering up the right side and quizzing yourself with the questions on the left.

  1. Author name

  1. Place of birth

  1. Date of birth

  1. Date of death (if applicable)

  1. Place of death (if applicable)

  1. Burial location (if mentioned)

  1. Interesting facts about this author’s childhood(parents, siblings, people that influenced them, interests, etc.)

  1. Place(s) where this author lived. Include dates and explain how each place influenced them.

  1. How didthis author become inspired to write? (What events happened in their life to make them become a writer or to make them write they way they do/did, e.g., education, work experiences, historical events, family life, lost love, etc.)

  1. Where applicable, explain any obstacles this writer faced, such as character flaws, conflicts with other people or with society, prejudice, mental or physical illness, etc.

  1. How successful was this author during his/her lifetime? (Did they win awards, earn money, become popular, etc. from their work? Were they successful at something besides writing?) Be sure list the author’s accomplishments throughout their lifetime.

  1. If the author wasn’t successful or popular at the time of their death, explain how and why they are still well known today (Who revived their work? When? etc.).

  1. Why is this author considered influential? (What was/is unique or revolutionary about their writing?) If possible, name other authors or literary movements who were influenced by this author.

  1. Identify five (5) characteristics of this author and give specific examples of when they demonstrated these characteristics. You should focus on their personal life and professional life only. Do not discuss characteristics of the author’s literary works as they have already been discussed above.

Day 3 - Chapter 3: Prisoner of War

During additional visits to see his father, Art hears Vladek tell about his service in the Polish army. Vladek has little training and shoots his gun only for appearances, but he manages to kill a German soldier. He is later taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to a POW camp in Germany where he cleans stables. It is cold, and the Jewish prisoners are treated worse than the other Polish prisoners are, but Vladek volunteers to work for the German soldiers and gains some additional food and warmth this way. He has a dream in which his grandfather appears to him and tells him that he will be free on a specific day in the future. The dream comes true, and Vladek is sent back to Poland where Jewish authorities are able to connect him with a friend of his family. After much difficulty, he is eventually reunited with his family. Art ends the chapter in the present with Vladek complaining about Mala and throwing away Art's coat because it is shabby.