6 | FEBRUARY 24 • 2022 

1942 - 2022

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essay
Misrepresenting Maus
W

hat a story greeting readers 
of the New York Times on Jan. 
27, International Holocaust 
Remembrance Day: Jenny Gross’s report 
on a sad spectacle transpiring at a school 
board meeting in McCinn County, 
Tennessee. Proving that foolishness 
loves company, the board’s 
10 members had voted 
unanimously to remove 
Art Spiegelman’s Maus: 
A Survivor’s Tale from the 
district’s eighth-grade 
curriculum.
Their reasons for this 
action ranged from the 
specious — PG-13 cartoon 
nudity and some mild swear words — to 
the grotesquely obtuse: Spiegelman’s daring 
to depict the deaths of a handful of the 
millions murdered during the Holocaust. 
“It shows people hanging, it shows them 
killing kids,” said one board member at 
the meeting: “Why does the educational 
system promote this kind of stuff?”

Of course, the internet blew up in 
response, as evidenced by the emails, 
newsfeeds and Facebook posts filling 
my screens. Statements from the 
Anti-Defamation League and the U.S. 
Holocaust Memorial Museum were 
issued, and comments were solicited 
from Spiegelman. The usually loquacious 
Pulitzer Prize-winner was almost at a loss 
for words, underscoring the staggering 
nature of the entire affair.
Because I research, write and teach 
about the Holocaust, I was as outraged 
as any of my colleagues in the field; but 
the English professor in me was also 
dismayed by the language used to label 
Spiegelman’s ground-breaking text. The 
Times piece is titled “School board in 
Tennessee Bans Teaching of Holocaust 
Novel Maus.” Prompted by this report 
and continuing across the virtual media 
landscape, Spiegelman’s haunting and 
original memoir has been persistently 
mislabeled as a fiction, a novel. And the 
editors of the “newspaper of record” did 

not bother to review their own record 
with this issue. They have been taken to 
task before.

NOT A WORK OF FICTION
In December 1991, when the second 
volume of Maus reached the lofty heights 
of the best seller list, Times editors placed 
it among best-selling fiction, occasioning 
a memorable letter from the author. 
“The borderland between fiction and 
nonfiction has been fertile territory for 
some of the most potent contemporary 
writing,” Spiegelman admitted; but he 
soon explicated his objection: “It’s just 
that I shudder to think how David Duke 
— if he could read — would respond to 
seeing a carefully researched work based 
closely on my father’s memories of life in 
Hitler’s Europe and in the death camps 
classified as fiction.”
Despite all the justifiable outrage aimed 
at the McCinn County school board and 
the amazing blowback it provoked — in a 

PURELY COMMENTARY

Robert 
Franciosi 
Grand Valley 
State 
University

continued on page 9

