6 | FEBRUARY 24 • 2022
1942 - 2022
Covering and Connecting
Jewish Detroit Every Week
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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