maus reflection

Mrs. Wertz-O, I do hope that you took the time to enjoy my genre recreation project. The idea was a very spur of the moment decision, and came to me quite suddenly in the middle of Michael’s craft store. My original thought was to create a scrapbook of a certain characters’ life, and make a sort of collage of events surrounding them. Alex Galvin took me to Michael’s the Monday before the project was due, and I spent hours (or so Alex feels) looking around the craft sections at all the different scrapbooks and pages and stamps galore. I picked up almost everything I needed when I wandered over to the woodcraft section- and there it was: a beautiful wooden shadow box. I immediately dropped everything into Alex’s hands and dashed over to it. As I was looking at it I thought, how original… no one else will think to do this, and a brilliant idea formed in my head. Much to Alex’s dismay, I had him put all of my other supplies back where they came from so that I could start on this new idea.
My new vision, to create a memorial to Richieu, definitely challenged me to think outside of the (shadow)box. Get it? When taking notes on Richieu, I never learned much about his personal hobbies or what he liked to do as a child, so I could only put general items in the box. I put myself in Anja’s shoes and really thought about what a mother would want to remember about her son.
The aspect that challenged me the most was to really think about the pain of losing a child, and if I were in that position, what would I want the memorial to really symbolize? I debated on the newspaper article the longest- did I want to relive the year or Richieu’s birth, or the year of his death? I chose a New York Times page from the year of Richieu’s birth, because it is always better to honor the happiness of birth rather than the death day. Now, you are probably wondering why I chose New York Times instead of a newspaper from their hometown, and you bring up a good point. My thought process for