Animals For People

What I read: For this blog post, I've started reading a new book. I'm really enjoying the graphic memoir Maus by Art Spiegelman. I've wanted to read this book for a long time because I had heard of it before and knew basically what it was about.

At the beginning, we see that instead of people, the characters are portrayed as animals.  For example, the Jews are shown as mice, the Germans are portrayed as cats, and the Poles are pigs.  The author Art and his family are mice in this book.  Art's father, Vladek, is a survivor of the Holocaust and the book is mostly the story that Vladek tells to Art about that period in his life.

Vladek's story begins before the start of World War II.  Vladek is a Polish Jew who lives in Sosnowiec in Poland.  Vladek tells his son Art how he met Art's mother, Anja, who is also Polish Jewish.  By the time Vladek tells this story to Art, Anja is already dead.

Vladek works all sorts of odd jobs, especially selling and trading goods.  Anja is from a much richer family than Vladek.  Still, Anja's family likes and accepts Vladek as a new member of their family.  For a while, Vladek and Anja are happy and doing well financially.  They marry and have a son called Richieu.  But things start to get hard.  After Anja has Richieu, she starts feels depressed and even suicidal.  Vladek tries to help her. 

At the same time, there are rumors about what's going on in Germany, especially with the German Jews living under Hitler. This is happening in the late 1930s.  In 1939, Hitler's army invades Poland and Vladek, who has already enlisted in Poland's military, gets called to the front to fight. Poland loses the battle quickly and Vladek is taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans.  There is one very intense moment during the battle when Vladek shoots and kills a cat (a German soldier).  While he is a prisoner of war, Vladek and the other Jews and treated much worse than the non-Jewish Polish POWs.

What I thought about:  When I started reading this book, I already understood the representation of animals. In the animal world cats chase mice.  This is just like the Germans in the book chasing the Jews.  Even though I haven't seen any Americans yet, I already know that the Americans will be represented as dogs because dogs chase cats.  Historically, we know that the Americans beat the Germans in two world wars, so it makes sense that they are shown as dogs. Also, we know that in Nazi Germany, Hitler talked about Jews as if they were rats. He even had anti-Jewish propaganda that portrayed Jews as rats. 

As I read, I realized that Vladek is a really interesting character to think about.  In the book, he tells his son Art about his story in a harsh way.  We also see Vladek being harsh with Art when Art is a little boy.  But when I found out a bit about Vladek's life, I felt like I understood why he's the way he is.  For example, in the picture below, Vladek is already an old man telling the story of his life to his son.  But we can see a glimpse of his left arm in the last frame. On his arm is a number tattoo from when he was in a camp.  This is a constant reminder of what Vladek went through and what he survived.  It's impossible for him to put those memories completely behind him.  His tattoo is a constant reminder of his past.

What I conclude: While there are two books in this series, it's the same story that continues from one to the other.  Therefore, I will be reading and blogging about both books as if they were one. It's all one story, but they were just published as two different books.

I'm really excited to read this book.  So far, it's met my expectations, which were very high.  For me, this book is hard yet interesting because I am Jewish.  Reading about the Holocaust can get me emotional sometimes but some books are worth it to read, and this is one of those.  The mixture of words and pictures make it look realistic despite the fact that the characters are animals instead of people.  I think I'm going to love this series.

Vladek as a mouse and Vladek as a man

The Love that IT Never Had

What I read: This week I finally finished reading A Wrinkle in Time.  Meg's father Mr. Murray tries to tesser away from IT.  He isn't so successful.  He does tesser away from IT, but he doesn't get to earth and Meg gets frozen by the Black Thing.

Suddenly Mr. Murray, Meg, and Calvin realize that they are on a planet inhabited by furry beasts with tentacles. Instead of attacking, the three beasts take Meg to cure her and help her get unfrozen.  One of these beasts becomes Aunt Beast.  She is the one who takes care of Meg while she recovers.  She does this even though she has no eyes and can't see Meg.





Fortunately the three Mrs. are on that same planet as Meg, Mr. Murray, and Calvin.  When they realize that Charles Wallace is not with them, they say that the only way to save him is for Meg to go back to Camazotz alone to rescue him from IT.  She goes back and rescues him by realizing that the only thing that she has that IT doesn't have is love.  She saves her brother with love.

At the end they all return home to Earth and reunite with the rest of their family.  to get home they wrinkle in time so that it doesn't seem like any time has passed to Meg's mother.

What I thought about:  While I was reading this book, I thought a lot about good and evil.  I thought about representations of evil, and this was especially true the week that I looked for images of evil online and came across the GIF from Fantasia's "A Night on Bald Mountain."  It's hard to think about how to represent evil in words and in pictures and I think that Madeleine L'Engle and Disney both did it well.

Another impotrant idea that I thought about was how important it is to be unique.  It's also equally important to accept your uniquness.  Meg has trouble doing this until the end of the book when she is happy to be different.  She has to go to Camazotz, though, to appreciate that it's okay to be different.  It can be hard to feel this way sometimes, but it's important to accept yourself for who you are and for all your differences.  

The last thing I thought about was the triumph of love.  In the end, Meg beats IT because she is human and is able to love.  That makes her more powerful than a super advanced brain like IT.  This is a theme that we can find in many books, movies, and stories.  I think that this one is well done and it made me like the book a lot.

What I conclude:  I liked how this book combined sci-fi and drama.  For example, tessering through time and space is one of the main sci-fi themes.  The dramatic parts are the emotional relationships between the characters.  I especially liked the relationship between Meg and Calvin because they are both dorky and intelligent.  They make a cute couple.

I recommend this book for people who like science fiction and would like to read a classic.  This book is considered a classic and has been read by many generations of children and adults since it was first published in 1963.  I also recommend this book for youngsters younger than me.  Although some of the ideas in it are complicated, they are easy to understand because the author does such a good job explaining it.

ITs Sameness

What I read: Calvin O'Keefe thinks he can handle things on his own.  He decides to go into a building called CENTRAL Central Intelligence Building, and he wants to go alone.  Meg and Charles Wallace don't agree and go with him.  Once inside, they find that every person inside is exactly the same.

There is one person who is different though, and that is the man with red eyes.  Meg tells the man that she and her brother want their father back.  As Meg tells him this, the man doesn't understand why they want their father to return home.  They eat a dinner, but all the food tastes like sand to Charles Wallace, who can't taste it unless he opens his mind to IT, which he won't do at this point.

But later, Charles Wallace seems to give in to IT.  IT has a rhythmic beating that is almost impossible to resist.  Meg tries really hard to think of other things, but IT is slowly starting to control her.  By the end of the chapter, Calvin says that they all need to tesser to escape IT and the entire building.

Meg sort of loses consciousness and when she wakes up again she can't move because she is frozen.  While Meg is frozen she hears Calvin and her father talking about how Mr. Murray ended up at Camazotz.  He explains that one of his colleagues tried to tesser from Earth to Mars.  But after he tried they couldn't tell if he was alive or not.  So Meg's father was the second to try to tesser and her ended up at Camazotz.

Meg tries to make a sound and let them know that she can hear them.  They finally realize that Meg can hear them and she starts asking where her brother Charles Wallace is.  When she finds out that they left him behind on Camazotz, she is really sad and angry about it.  Then Mr. Murray tells his daughter that "all things work together for good for them that love God" (190).


What I thought about:  I was really struck by the quote above and when I looked it up, I found out that it comes from the Holy Bible.  In the Bible, there is a quote from Romans that says, "All things work togther to those who love God."  This is interesting to me because this probably shows that Madeleine L'Engle was a religious woman.  Even if she wasn't really religious she at least knew a lot about the Bible, at least enough to put this in her own book.  This surprises me because it looks like Madeleine L'Engle is trying to put religious content in a book that is supposed to science fiction.  Most people think that science and religion have to be at opposite ends but this author seems to be into both, or at least she knows about both.  It makes me wonder how many other people are into both science and religion even though most people think they don't mix.

The other issue that I thought about a lot is how scary it would be to have something else controlling your mind.  It made me think about brain washing and how hard it would be to not be brain washed if someone was doing that to you.  

It made me think about the movie Star Wars when Anakin Skywalker gets brainwashed and turned into Darth Vader.  He turns to the dark side because of this, and it's a lot like Meg and Charles Wallace trying to resist IT, but having a hard time do it.

What I conclude: Reading these chapters I have to think about how hard it would be to face the problems that Meg and her family are facing.  If I was in this situation I might give up to IT and not be able to resist.  I think that this is what makes these characters unique in their own ways,

The other thing I realized is that no matter how tough you were, this situation would be so hard to deal with.  Meg is sure that she is right to go back for Charles Wallace, and it is hard to do the best for your loved ones but then also save yourself.  It seems like that's what Mr. Murray is doing in these chapters when he leaves his son behind.  Meg feels this is wrong but she isn't the one who gets to make the decision because she is still young.  When she talks to her father about it, he says that he is only human and that he makes mistakes too.