Ryan Nadel knows hes part of the end of an era in Jewish history.
As president of 8 Leaf Digital, the self-described digital hustler is in the business of future-forward projects, but the one that stands to establish his company as a digital innovator is a vital link to the past one thats personal. I had a teacher in Grade 1 who had a number on her arm. The next generation of Jews will never experience that, says Nadel, 28, in his sparse and airy studio on Granville Island.
Like a lot of kids who went to Jewish school, Nadels reading list during his tenure at Vancouver Talmud Torah included Maus, the 1986 Holocaust memoir by graphic artist and author Art Spiegelman. The book won high critical praise, a Pulitzer Prize and a reputation as an instant classic in the canon of Holocaust literature. It also raised eyebrows with its graphic novel treatment and use of zoomorphic characters the Jewish mice to the German cats to tell the story of the authors father, Vladek, a Polish Holocaust survivor.
As modern as the comic book treatment may have been in 1986, by 2010 Maus was in dire need of a digital update to ensure it stayed relevant and accessible for generations to come. Enter Nadel, now a graduate of the masters program at the Centre for Digital Media and a former journalist with the Jerusalem Post and NowPublic.com.
Attempts to digitize Maus had been made before a CD ROM produced in the 90s is now a relic of a bygone technological era and Spiegelman had been working with the Centre for Digital Media to produce a digital companion of the book in time for its 25th anniversary in 2011. But the scope of the project, which included digitizing hours of cassette tape interviews with Vladek and organizing countless sketches, letters and other source materials, had overwhelmed them.
Looking for a project to kick off his new company, Nadel asked to take it on in early 2010.
Next thing he knew he was in Spiegelmans smoke-filled New York studio tackling the mammoth task. It was a bit of a struggle at first when it didnt look like much, Nadel admits, noting Spiegelman, a relentless perfectionist and world-renowned maker of things, was skeptical that Nadel and his team could pull off the feat. The first time that I went to see him in New York it was almost 10 hours straight of him saying this is crap, its not going to work, you guys dont know what youre doing, but maybe six hours in hes like oh, I get it now, and we started working together. That was really the turning point.
Nadel took pains to ensure the DVD portion of MetaMaus, the 25th anniversary special edition released in October, had the look and feel of a Spiegelman book rather than a slick digital rendering. And once the author began to understand the possibilities of creating a digital archive he began to add more personal artifacts including home videos of his trip to Auschwitz in the 80s, his original thumbnail sketches and an arresting visual representation of his family tree before and after the Second World War.
As much as the Holocaust played a significant role in Nadels own family history his grandmother lost all her first cousins during the war the full weight of the content on the DVD didnt hit him until after the project was complete.
I sat back and started looking through all the stuff that wed been working on I realized I hadnt been reading it. Id just been seeing it. And then when I did take those moments to reflect on what I was working on it was... tragic.
His current project, Biba, is an interactive mobile game designed to encourage kids to get off the couch and play in the real-world. Yet the personal and historical significance of his original project remains a source of pride, even if its impact is only beginning to be felt for the young entrepreneur.
To be able to work on a project which preserves both the creation of Maus, but also [Vladek Spiegelmans] live story and to preserve it in a form that isnt going to fade ... is really significant on a personal level for me. To be able to pass on this story in a complete fashion I think is essential for us as a society for reminding ourselves of whats so easy to forget.
