War All the Time: A Personal Struggle

The unrelenting hindrances that both the Jewish and Japanese American people faced due to their ethnicity or religion during the wars that enveloped the world did not simply disappear once the firing had ceased, but rather continued on in a different form. A glimpse of such experiences is seen in Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, and the short stories of Hisaye Yamamoto's Seventeen Syllables. While those who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust and concentration camps faced different realities than Japanese Americans who were rounded up and placed in internment camps during World War II, the treatment that both received caused similar identity struggles not only for those who faced the incidents but for the generations that followed as well. A sense of confusion and outrage filled the hearts of many who were targets of unjustified hate and violence, interesting to note that these two vastly different cultures and situations were dealt with by locking them 'out of sight, out of mind.'
Art Spiegelman's account of his father Vladek's experiences before and during the Holocaust illustrate how the struggles and the sacrifices of his father's past shaped who he is in the present. Before agreeing, Vladek is apprehensive, saying 'It would take many books, my life, and no one wants anyway to hear such stories?'?Better you should spend your time to make drawings what will bring you some money' (page 12). There are often scenes in which the reader can feel the distance between father and son, not merely due to the difference in years but on a deeper level, with the difficulty they each have in connecting to one another more pronounced with the Holocaust as the subject of their meetings. One frame in particular, in which Art says that his father is 'in some ways he's just lime the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew' (page 131) reveals the contrast that Art sees between his father and himself. Vladek recounts his life before and during the Holocaust, which we see as Art's only tie to his past and the Jewish culture of which he was born into. It is interesting that the only thing they have in common with one another other than similar DNA is Art's aspiration to learn and write this piece about the Holocaust. This strong desire in writing Maus is for him a way of discovering his past and that of his culture, searching for a clearer understanding of his own identity and relation to those who share his religion, while possibly helping others like him who share similar personal struggles. Life after the terrors of the Holocaust created a much different outlook on life in the Jewish survivors who survived to tell about it, but talking about it was commonly the last thing they wanted to do. The next generation had a different kind of struggle, striving to define themselves and connect to their predecessors who had experienced such traumatic lives. After such events unified the whole of the Jewish community, the difficulties that later generations had in relating to the older members of their culture are illustrated in Art's somewhat troubled relationship with his father, their lack of affection representing these barriers.
Uncertainty of identity is a similar motif in Hisaye Yamamoto's work, her characters facing the challenge of possessing two identities, being both Japanese and American and living in the United States. The first generation did not have too difficult of a time in preserving their culture and traditions, but when it came to the second, children who moved from Japan to America or those who were born in American after their families immigrated, it was for them that the struggle arose. The particular problem here was that it was easier to assimilate into American culture for several reasons, focusing one's attention on this area rather than learning the Japanese language or culture. It was a constant tug-of-war between one and the other, the home typically preserving the Japanese half of their identity, and everything outside of it overwhelmed by American aspects.
In 'Seventeen Syllables,' for example, Rosie's life inside of her home is characterized by her mother speaking Japanese, bathing in a bathhouse, straw sandals underfoot, tea from a 'handleless Japanese cup' (Yamamoto 11), and endless haikus written by her mother. Even though many, if not all, Japanese American children were sent to Japanese school by their parents to learn the language and the culture of their people, the pressure from parents to speak Japanese did not equal that put on them by their American counterparts. As described in 'Seventeen Syllables,' 'The truth was that Rosie was lazy; English lay ready on the tongue but Japanese had to be searched for and examined, and even then put forth tentatively (probably to meet with laughter)' (8). All the more reason so many abandoned their Japanese ancestry and strove toward Westernizing their lives.
While the foes that Japanese Americans had to face were much different from the Nazi terror that confronted Jewish people, their struggles were similar in that it was their identity that came into conflict, not only their personal selves but a larger picture of where they belonged as a people and culture. While Art's fight in Maus was less against real foes such as bullies or pressure to conform, his shares similarities with the plight of Japanese Americans caught between their past and their future. The generations following the concentration camps and the Japanese internment camps had different problems than their predecessors but of parallel difficulty and hardship, there was pressure on both sides to define themselves as one thing or another, and sometimes combining the two was not a possibility. The unifying aspects of the tragedies that so many experienced was no longer present in the generations that followed, caught adrift on a sea of personal discovery.




Works Cited


Speigelman, Art. Maus I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
12-131.

Yamamoto, Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. 3rd ed. New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 2005.