O PINION
‘Maus’ Is Not ‘Auschwitz for Beginners’ — and That’s Why it
Needs to be Taught
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
ART SPIEGELMAN once
complained that “Maus,”
his classic memoir about his
father’s experiences in the
Holocaust, was assumed to
be intended for young adults
because it took the form of a
comic book.

“I have since come to
terms with the fact that
comics are an incredible
democratic medium,” he told
an interviewer.

“Adults” seemed to agree:
“Maus” won a Pulitzer Prize
citation and an American
Book Award and remains 36
years aft er its fi rst appearance
in hardcover one of the most
searing accounts ever written
of the Shoah and its impact on
the children of survivors.

I remembered Spiegelman’s
concern aft er a Tennessee
school board voted last month
to remove
“Maus” from
middle-school classrooms,
citing its use of profanity,
nudity and depictions of
“killing kids.” Th e reaction to
the ban from outside McMinn
County was swift and angry.

Booksellers off ered to give
copies away. A professor off ered
local students a free online
course about the book. Sales
soared. Th e fantasy writer and
graphic novelist Neil Gaiman
tweeted, “Th ere’s only one kind
of people who would vote to
ban Maus, whatever they are
calling themselves these days.”
But the debate over “Maus”
has in many ways done a
disservice to Spiegelman and
his epic project. Because to read
some of the comments from
defenders of the book, you’d
think “Maus” is a challenging
but ultimately tween-friendly
introduction to the horrors of
the Nazi years — a sort of
Shoah textbook with mouse
illustrations. However, “Maus” is not, as
Spiegelman once pointed out,
“Auschwitz for Beginners.” It
is not — or not just — a book
about “man’s inhumanity to
man,” the phrase that actor
Whoopi Goldberg got in
trouble for using to explain the
Holocaust. It is infi nitely wilder
and woolier and more unset-
tling than that. It is about the
complex relationship between
a father who has experienced
the worst a person can experi-
ence, and a son raised in
relative middle-class comfort.

It is about mental illness and
how a mother’s suicide haunts
the child who survives her. It
is about guilt in many forms,
and how it can be transmitted
through generations.

I hadn’t looked at a copy
of the book in years before
the current controversy, yet I
could still recount by memory
its opening almost frame by
frame. A 10- or 11-year-old
Artie is playing with friends in
his neighborhood in Queens,
when they abandon him on the
way to the playground. Artie
comes home to fi nd his father
Vladek in their driveway and
explains through tears that
his friends had skated away
without him.

“Friends? Your friends ...,”
says Vladek. “If you lock them
together in a room with no
food for a week… THEN you
could see what it is, friends!”
With this little slice of
childhood trauma, we are
suddenly deep into the world
of “Maus,” where, as the fi rst
chapter proclaims, Vladek
Spiegelman “bleeds history.”
Art Spiegelman does not deliver
saintly characters oppressed by
cartoon villains. His father,
like his son, is deeply human
and anguished, buff eted by
his time in the camps and his
wife’s suicide and consumed
by his own ingrained if under-
standable prejudices.

At one point in the second
volume, Vladek complains to
Spiegelman and his wife about
the “coloreds” who he says used
to steal from their co-workers
in the Garment District. It’s
an unfl attering version of his
survivor father that Spiegelman
could easily have left out of the
book, but there is nothing easy
about “Maus.”
Th is week a writer asked
me to consider publishing his
essay about “Maus,” in which
he objects to the portrayal of
Vladek’s miserliness, both
Spiegelman’s “narcissism” and
the book’s examples of “Jewish
self-loathing.” He’s not wrong, exactly.

But the triumph and tragedy
of “Maus” is its veracity —
a commitment to the facts
of Auschwitz matched by its
honesty about the complexities
and ambiguities of its victims
and survivors. In an interview
for the book “MetaMaus,”
Spiegelman explains that his
book “seems to have found
itself useful to other people
in my situation, meaning
children of survivors. … Th e
mere idea of a child of survi-
vors resenting and resisting his
parents was breaking a taboo
that I hadn’t expected.”
I for one don’t see the harm
in exposing children to books
that may be beyond their years.

And given the fl ood of content
that comes the way of any child
with a cell phone, laptop or
television set, I fi nd the idea of
“protecting” kids from violent
and sexual imagery in the
name of education incredibly
quaint. But let’s not pretend that
“Maus” is ready-made for the
teen market. “Maus” is “adult”
not because of its depiction
of corpses, its nudity and the
acknowledgment that people
have sex. It is adult in that it
refuses to sugarcoat not just
the horrors of the Holocaust,
but the personalities of its
victims. It is not, in short, a book I’d
give to a tween without hoping
to discuss it, before and aft er
— to help them understand
not only what they might not
understand, but to confront
the things that none of us
understand. In short, it is a book that
should be taught, and taught
well. ●
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor-
in-chief of The New York Jewish
Week and senior editor of the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Be heard.

Email your letters to the editor.

letters@jewishexponent.com 14
FEBRUARY 10, 2022
JEWISH EXPONENT
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM