Of Mice and Women: Miriam Libicki’s “Sheretz”

In a free-associative game, to the clue “Jews and mice,” any comics aficionado would respond: Maus. The world of modern theriomorphic tales is still ruled by Art Spiegelman’s biography of his father Vladek during the Holocaust, in which Jews appear as likable mice hunted down by mean-looking cats, the Nazis. From title to form to content, Spiegelman exploited the murine metaphor at all imaginable levels: maus (a reminder of the German roots of the genocide), mice (Holocaust Jews), mouse-masked people (post-Holocaust Jews), Mickey Mouse (the Holocaust money industry), and rats (a literal signifier). But sometimes a mouse is just a