Courage to Dream: Tales of Hope in the Holocaust (Family Comic Friday)

Disclaimer: I won a free preview copy of this book through a giveaway on Goodreads. Other than the complimentary volume, I have not received any monetary payment for this review.

There's a famous early Superman story called 'How Superman Would End the War.' It's a great fantasy of how things could have ended much quicker and less bloodier if super heroes really did exist during World War II. A Siegel and Shuster classic, the spirit of it is captured in this forthcoming graphic novel by the Scholastic imprint, Graphix.

Writer Neal Shusterman pens several tales about the Holocaust in which elements of the supernatural and Jewish folklore is used to protect the European relatives of God's chosen people. The more supernatural themed tales are about a window which provides a portal for freedom to a trio of Jewish girls being hidden in a secret room from the Gestapo and a crystal heirloom provides a young girl with a look at what might have been if the Holocaust never happened. These were both good stories, though I hated the ambiguous ending of the magic window tale. But it was the stories that integrated Jewish folklore that I loved the best!

In those adventures, a golem enacts revenge on the guards of a concentration camp and a pair of siblings are rescued by freedom fighters, only to be able to provide some unexpected allies to their defense from German forces. There was also a fifth story that integrated fantastical happenings with the story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt. All of these stories got my blood pumping. But the story of the children rescued by freedom fighters got me wanting the adventure to never end. It was a team up of several mythical characters of Eastern European folklore with characters like the Baba Yaga and the Fools of Chelm, I don't think there's ever been a story told just like this one and I am a nut for team-ups and crossovers!

Every story had a touch of truth to them and each section ends with a 2-page spread explaining the historical contexts and the legends involved in each story. Unfortunately, the fanciful cannot erase the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. There are atrocities galore in this book. Jews and Germans alike die in some very intense ways. Artist Andres Vera Martinez portrays the horrors with realism without being overly graphic. Amazon, which is currently doing pre-orders, rates this a book for readers aged 12 and up. I think that's a completely fair assessment.

A powerful book that was fun and intense at the same time. I loved how fantasy and tall tale were brought together to make a story that ponders 'What If...' while dealing with traumas and discrimination both past and present. Each story reminded me of the classic version of The Twilight Zone, entertaining and thought-provoking and very mystical.

If the subject matter is something that parents and guardians balk at, read this book along with the young reader in your life. Use the background features at the end of each story to discuss these complicated and uneasy subjects. 

A near perfect read. If only that first story had a more definitive ending or tied-in with another tale...

Courage to Dream goes on sale on October 31, 2023.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (2022 Comic Book and Graphic Novel Reading Challenge)

Though Art Spiegelman's Maus and Maus II are several decades old, both graphic novel accounts of the artist's parents Holocaust ordeal have reentered public consciousness recently. In the past several months, several state and local school districts have waged war on allowing the award winning books on library shelves.

I had read Maus many years ago. I got all the way through Vladek and Anja Spiegelman's attempts to flee the encroaching Nazi forces into Poland and Eastern Europe. Their story ended with the pair taking some bad advice about where to escape from the Germans and ended up as their captives. 

For one reason or another, I didn't read Volume 2 for another 7 years. At first I was misinformed. A so-called comic and graphic novel expert told me that the edition I read was a combination of both books. I thought it odd that we never learned about the final fate of the Spiegelmans, but I went with the advice. By the time I figured out that whomever told me what they did about the complete Maus didn't know what they were talking about, the pandemic hit and more comfort food type reads took my priority. Thankfully this reading challenge and recent current events sparked renewed interest in completing the story.  

I both love and loath this book. I hate the accounts of Nazi atrocities, rampant carnage and needless death. But I love this record of endurance, redemption and forgiveness. This book hits very hard for me. My wife is a Polish Jew. Her family too is from Lodz. Her immediate family immigrated around the turn of the century. But knowing that her family lost contact with numerous branches of her family treat after World War II and just visualizing her or her relatives having to face this- it just killed me.

In 2017, I went with my wife's family to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington. It was a soberly powerful experience. They say that smell is the biggest trigger of memory and I am a super recognizer. I'm great with faces and I can recall smells from memory with incredible detail. So when I read the account of Videk spending countless days on end in a train car with other Auschwitz prisoners left to die, my brain went back to the train car at the museum. There was the odd smell of meat that could have been appealing if not for my knowledge of what happened in that vehicle. And last night, recalling all that, I just lost it for a little bit. 

In book one, Art Spiegelman's exploration of his parent's time during the Holocaust helped him to process his mother's suicide. In this volume, Spiegelman comes face-to-face with his surviving father. Vladek's abusive nature toward his second wife, his constant need have his son under his thumb and obsessive hoarding of materials and food are all brought about from the trauma of life in a concentration camp. Being as I use my exploration of pop culture and history to journal through my personal foibles, I can understand why Spiegelman completed these accounts, no matter how terrible those family histories were. Writing is therapeutic. 

For this part of my reading challenge, I chose this book because I needed to read something that was on the New York Times Graphic Novels bestsellers list. As of April 13th, Maus is currently at #2. This book is #13. I wonder if Art Speigelman had any idea when this edition was published in 1991 that 31 years later, we would not only still be reading these books, but fighting for the right to carry them in both public school and community libraries. I don't think he expected there to be such a ruckus over these graphic novels. According to a scene in this book, people called for the original Maus to be banned as early as 1979-80. But unfortunately, the controversy behind the right for this work to be published, let alone read, continues to this day as well.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 10 out of 10 stars.

Completing this review completes Task #6 (Currently on NY Times Best Sellers List) of the 2022 Comic Book and Graphic Novel Reading Challenge.

Maus (Book I: My Father Bleeds History)

This is it! The book that literally put graphic novels on the map- at least in terms of finding a place on your local library's shelves. Originally published by Art Spiegelman in the pages of his groundbreaking Avante Garde comic, RAW. This first volume collects the first six chapters that Spiegelman, researched, wrote, and illustrated from 1980-86.

  
  Maus is a factual account of the author's father and his time spent in Nazi-occupied Europe. Though the Jews are portrayed as mice, the Nazis as cats and non-Jewish Poles are drawn as pigs, this in NOT a funny animal comic. Even though Spiegelman crafted the characters to reflect Hitler's view that the Jews were vermin to be exterminated, deep down there's a more powerful purpose behind the use of animals in this account of the early days of the Holocaust.

   Think about movies such as Bambi or the Lion King. What's the saddest moments of those classic films? It's when the parents die. For some reason, humans are torn to shreds when anthropomorphic animals die in cartoons. I for one cried like a little girl when Fry’s dog died alone on Futurama.

  I have seen the terrible pictures of Jews rescued from Allied forces at the end of the Holocaust. But nothing in the entire Museum of the Holocaust got to me as a full page splash of several Jewish mice being hung to death for trying to survive in the ghettos of Poland. (One thing did literally destroy me at the museum in Washington DC. It was an actual train car used to transport Jews to the concentration camps. The thought of my wife (who is half Jewish) and our children being put in those death wagons because of something beyond their control (their heritage), was a feeling beyond words.)

   Until finally reading this volume did I learn that this was only the first of two books about Spiegelman's family during World War II. I knew of Maus II, but I thought it was about Art and his father coming to grips with the suicide of his mother. But, all of that actually builds into Art convincing his dad to agree to an account of his time in war-torn Europe in framing sequences set in New York around 1978. Maus II will examine what happened after Art's dad was captured by the Nazis and placed in Auschwitz. I will be reading that volume as well!

This is a classic that must not only be read- but it's memory must not be forgotten! The book's lengthy censorship struggle is the reason why I finally got around to reading it. During last month's Banned Book Week, I was encouraged to pick out a banned graphic novel in a post by the CBLDF. I'm very glad that I finally did read this riveting account of the horrors of the ghettos during World War II. It's hard to read at times and not for kids who are not old enough to read the 'Diary of Anne Frank'- no matter how friendly those mice look on the cover.

Worth Consuming

Rating: 10 out of 10 stars.