Art Spiegelman’s Bounding Boxes: Mishkan, Midrash, <i>Maus</i>

As vexing questions of Jewish identity and Holocaust memory loom large, this essay asks what it would mean to read Maus as a Jewish text. Thinking, with Hillary Chute’s landmark 2006 essay, “The Shadow of a Past Time:, History and Graphic Representation in Maus,” it uses Spiegelman’s (slippery), metaphor of comics panels as built boxes to link the book to Jewish traditions, surrounding the material preservation and transmission of historical texts., Reconsidering Maus through and as “boxes,” whether humble cardboard or, wooden coffin, reveals Spiegelman’s survivor’s “tale” as a text, commentary, object, memorial, testimony, even a kind of secular phylactery or reliquary, through which the son of survivors negotiates his parents’ trauma and the, push-pull of his own Jewish identity. Ultimately, the essay offers boxes as a, way (back) into Maus as a signal text both for Jewish identity today and for, the reparative work that the comics form can do in approaching the traumas, of history.