The first graphic novel ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, “Maus” was based on interviews with Spiegelman’s harsh Holocaust-survivor father, as much a dissection of their fraught relationship as a condemnation of the horrors of Auschwitz. If the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons, so are the sins of the mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers visited upon the daughters. In this first book by Art Spiegelman’s daughter, those sins are cause for a fierce exhumation of the author’s maternal lineage. Throughout the author’s childhood, her mother — who had fled Paris for New York to escape her own troubled French family, then became a woman about town and, ultimately, art director at the New Yorker — was Nadja’s protector and idol. What Nadja learned about her mother’s childhood sent her flying to Paris to interview her grandmother Josée about the mother-daughter enmity that seemed to have been passed down in each successive mother’s milk. [...] the ferocious honesty with which Nadja Spiegelman tells her story and those of her female progenitors indicates that she took her father’s critique to heart. Recounting decades of multigenerational emotional, physical and sexual abuse, Nadja spares no wince-worthy detail, protecting no one. Neither her lyricism nor the stylistic liberties she takes with the memoir’s structure, bouncing around in time as actual memory does, can soften the impact of what the mothers in Nadja Spiegelman’s family did to their daughters. In a book populated by so many unreliable narrators, the reader longs for the author to rise above the fray, pointing the reader toward the truth — if such a thing exists — when her progenitors’ memories clash.
‘i’m Supposed To Protect You From All This,’ By Nadja Spiegelman
By Meredith Maran, San Francisco Chronicle: Entertainment
Sun, 08/28/2016 - 5:15am
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