“This is about othering … and control … .”
That was one of several impactful things Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” said Monday night as he pushed back against banning books, including his own in January by the McMinn County Board of Education.
The book, presented in comic-book style with a serious message, tells of his parents’ survival and recollection of the Holocaust, depicting the Nazis as cats and Jews as mice. The work grapples with the mass murder of Jews in Europe, as well as the ways in which the members of Spiegelman’s family dealt with the atrocity.
It was a horror leaving survivors like his father to often advise him to “always” have his bags packed and be ready to move at any moment. It was the kind of barbarity that left some, including his mother, vulnerable to suicide.
Until last year, McMinn school officials had deemed the book OK reading for eighth-graders. But suddenly this year they cited language and nudity in the book – the word “damn” and a naked mouse in a bathtub.