The Nation February, 2025
At many points in his life Art Spiegelman has tried to escape his family’s past—and who can blame him? His parents were survivors of Auschwitz, and vast swaths of his extended family had been murdered in the Shoah. The ghosts of this horror have always hovered nearby. Spiegelman, born in Sweden in 1948, was an only child since his older brother perished in 1943.
Spiegelman grew up in Rego Park, in Queens, New York, but the genocide was never far away. He could see it on the numbers tattooed on his parent’s arms, as well as the arms of their friends. He could hear it in the stories his parents and their circle of intimates told and the offhand allusions they made. The burden of pain proved too much for his mother, Anja Spiegelman, who committed suicide in 1968. After Anja’s suicide, Spiegelman’s relationship with his father, Vladek, always fraught, became even more tense.
