Chapter 1 argues that thinking about boxes will allow us to comprehend the reparative work that comics can do in approaching transgenerational Holocaust memory and trauma. What would it mean to read Maus as a Jewish text in our moment of global attention to Jewish identity and Holocaust memory? Building upon Hillary Chute’s landmark scholarship on Spiegelman’s Maus and comics and/as archives, I show how Spiegelman’s slippery, evocative metaphor of comics panels as built boxes links his magnum opus to Jewish traditions surrounding the material preservation and transmission of historical texts. Reconsidering Maus together with boxes, in light of what can – and can’t – be enclosed and contained, illuminates formal congruences between Maus, the architected space of the Mishkan, and the textual practice of Midrash. Unpacking these congruences in turn reveals Spiegelman’s survivor’s “tale” as a text, commentary, object, memorial, testimony, even a kind of secular phylactery or reliquary, through which the son of survivors negotiates his inherited trauma and his own Jewishness.