![]() ![]() And the message is the teachable moment explaining what loss and grief and horror felt like to a child of survivors, showing readers emotions that words could never convey. ![]() The “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” section is particularly picture-specific. This is not vulgar nudity - and the rejection of of the book based on these images suggests that the McMinn County school board has not understood what Spiegelman did with these books, or what it means to be ongoing witnesses to horror.Īccording to a taxonomy outlined by Scott McCloud, graphic novels can be “word-specific,” “picture-specific” or “duo-specific” based on what element of the page is carrying the information the reader needs to understand the story. The comic includes images of his mother slitting her wrists with a razor and of Anna Spiegelman’s naked body in a tub filled with her own blood. “Maus” was first serialized in 1980 and published in book form in 1986. His mother died in 1968, when Spiegelman was 20, and he drew “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” in 1972. “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” was the initial comic Spiegelman drew to process his mother’s suicide, which its distraught narrator cannot separate from the horrors she endured under the Nazis. The minutes of the school board meeting suggest that the images they’re reacting to are from the interstitial comic “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” an earlier Spiegelman cartoon that appears midway through the graphic novel and uses a different graphic idiom. But it was not nude mice that spurred this criticism. A great many mocking responses to this have pointed out that the characters in the book are anthropomorphized animals, including the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, who are depicted as mice. The McMinn school board says its decision was based on “rough language” and depictions of nudity. Having to catch students up on “Maus,” for me, would mean losing other extraordinary titles such as Joe Kubert’s “Yossel” or Amy Kurzweil’s “Flying Couch,” and would substantially change the narrative arc of the semester. Having to begin the course with a basic introduction to sequential art and Jewish themes would cost not only time, but also the ability to engage in more sophisticated conversations. The idea that with each passing year fewer and fewer students may not have had the chance to wrestle with “Maus” is deeply troubling. A text that has had such a positive impact on untold thousands of students, and that I count on a plurality of my students to have encountered before they arrive in my college classroom, is under threat. This is why the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board’s unanimous decision to remove “Maus” from the district’s eighth-grade curriculum concerns me as an educator. It prepares students to have so many important conversations and sets them up to jump into the canon of Jewish graphic novels. Instead I teach about the entire industry built, in large part, on the legacy of “Maus.” The reason I feel comfortable excluding “Maus” from that syllabus is that every year, without fail, almost every student has already read it, many in an educational context. When I began teaching Jewish graphic novels I referred to the course as “The House that ‘Maus’ Built,” because I do not teach “Maus” in the course. I chose “Maus.” I had to convince people it was a worthy text, but convince them I did. I wrote my final paper on “Maus.” For my PhD comprehensive exams I needed to choose a text to study for one of my exams. In college I took a class on the Holocaust. ![]() If a picture is worth a thousand words, then “Maus” may as well be Proust, because it contains words in the millions in under 300 pages. Spiegelman took a genre that many could not see as literature and turned it into a medium that could tell stories in a way no other book could. It is also a second-generation story about the legacy of the Holocaust on Spiegelman, a survivor’s child. ![]() The very fact of “Maus,” the fact that I could hold in my hand something so simple and yet complicated, changed the way I thought about how we tell stories.Īrt Spiegelman’s nonfiction graphic novel uses the conventions of comic books to tell the story of his parents’ experiences as Polish Jews before, during and after the Holocaust. It was the first graphic novel I had read, and like many 12-year-olds I was just starting to think of myself as a person able to have independent ideas and opinions. I was 12 when the second volume of “Maus” was published, and I read both volumes in one long afternoon. But unlike many people, I can say that it set me on a direct path to my eventual career - as a scholar of religion, especially Judaism, and popular culture. ( JTA) - Like many people, I encountered “Maus” as a middle schooler. ![]()
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