Maus is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son Art, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and history itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking the reader out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching the unspeakable through the diminutive. The first volume describes how the Spiegelman parents survived during the Holocaust, while the second volume focuses on Art's relationship with his father, as a child who survives even the survivors. -- Jacket.