Dawidowicz Reading & Maus I parts 1-2

After all of the work we've been doing in class regarding genres, the Dawidowicz reading intently linked the Holocaust to the information from class. The author states that there are two kinds of documents related to the Holocaust; official records, and private papers. She goes into sub genres for each type with examples such as diaries or letters for private papers, and government archives, and diplomatic reports for the official records. I connected this with our lesson from Tuesday, August 27 where we got into our writing groups and considered the master list of genres and answered questions such as, "what purposes do the different kinds of writing serve?". I was surprised to read about the sheer amount of records that came from the Holocaust and how it surpassed, in quantity and comprehensiveness, the records of any other historical era. The Oneg Shabbat is an excellent example of how genres can play a role in recording history or even the collective effort of an oppressed race. I was impressed at how many people took the initiative and kept diaries of their own accounts of the horrifying actions taken against them in the ghettos and also how these documents were all hidden in hopes of one day being recovered and remembered after the war ended. A connection I found in the Dawidowicz reading and the first two parts of the Maus graphic novel were the key words from the official records kept by the Germans and the key words that Spiegelman chooses to insert into his comic strips. Both of these short, to the point genres are different in their respective ways, and yet all so similar in other ways. The Germans used the key term "final solution" to describe the extermination of the jews in a way that the naked eye wouldn't be able to decipher if glancing over a document, but if the right person were to be reading the same document, they would know what the Germans meant and be on the same page as those who wrote it. Art Spiegelman has to choose his words very wisely in his graphic novel due to the lack of space that he is allotted, and he must get the correct themes across to the reader in order for them to fully understand the plot of the story. Genre used to be a word that I didn't think much about until this class began and now I can't seem to get away from it. Genre is everywhere, in everything I do, and everything I read and write. Reading the Dawidowicz excerpt alongside the first two parts of Maus I, I was able to make connections that I previously wouldn't have been able to make regarding the types of genre they spoke about.