Representing Loss: Maus and Dead Wake

I’m pairing these two texts together because they both deal with world war and because they both attempt to grapple with how to represent loss, how to represent voices forever silent. For that reason, neither were easy reads – but they may be necessary ones.

Dead Wake was recommended to me by several fellow readers, but I kept delaying it in order to finish Devil in the White City. Devil focuses on a world’s fair, which I count as “museum related” and it discusses parks, which had been the subject of a research assistanceship I completed in my last year of graduate school. So Dead Wake waited and grew in reputation. I will commend it by saying that it made me feel interest and sympathy for the German crew – despite the terrible deed they would perpetuate – and it gave me clear pictures of the passengers, both those who lived and those who would be lost. The hardest thing to bear was reading about families with several children. Which ones could they save? And how? 

This had an especial resonance for me. On the evening of June 14, 1990 my family became victims of the Weegee Creek Flash Flood. Our trailer lifted from its foundations and began to float. Our car had already been swept away. My parents stood on the deck of our porch and came up with a plan. My mom took my sister, my stepdad took me and swam for a tree. I don’t know how we survived the swim together or how we got into the tree. I do have a clear memory of sitting with my tiny sister and thinking, I hope someone gets up this tree soon! I can’t take of a baby! Thankfully, our little tree survived the night (though larger ones were swept away) and we climbed down homeless and bruised, but hale. My mom was eight months pregnant at the time, but baby Erik was safe, too!

My only criticism of Dead Wake is, perhaps, the pacing near the end. Since one goes into it knowing what happens it starts to become a bit anticlimactic.

Maus is less of a read than an experience; I doubt anyone emerges from it that doesn’t spend a day dazed, blinking, wondering… It is, perhaps, the most honest book I’ve ever read – to the point that there are moments where one flinches away, wishing for less honesty. It deals not only with European history but the history between children and parents. There were moments when I was angry with almost every single character… and then moments when I wondered who I might have been, who I might become, if shaped by the things these characters witnessed and endured. My favorite moments in the text concerned the obvious affection Vladek felt for his wife Anja and the pages that chronicle Spiegelman’s success, guilt over success, and attempts to deal with it. It well deserves its Pulitzer Prize.

It also pushed me back to another painful work, Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust. The best work I’ve ever read on the subject, reading Gilbert’s book is like taking repeated punches to the abdomen. But we must remember, and reading is one small tribute that I can make.