"Maus" trap

The book might give an adolescent nightmares. But that doesn't make it a bad thing.

Over 30 years ago, a customer brought a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus into my used bookstore, insisting, “You've got to read this.”

There are a lot of books about the Holocaust. I had read too many of them for my own peace of mind. So I had taken a break. But I made an exception for Maus because she asked me to.

Before I finished it, I thought, “This should be in every school library in the world.” That's a little ironic now, considering the news that a Tennessee school board has banned it from its 8th grade curriculum because members say it's too adult for its students.

I do understand what they're talking about. Maus is pretty brutal. Few punches pulled. 

But about 1.5 million children were murdered in the Holocaust, and other children who survived had to witness that. So it's probably not too much to ask today's kids to just read about it.

It’s not possible to teach about the Holocaust without horrifying students, anyway, unless you teach dishonestly.

Maus’ author, according to the New York Times’ Nancy Gross, put it this way: 

After reading the minutes of the meeting, Mr. Spiegelman said he got the impression that the board members were asking, “Why can’t they teach a nicer Holocaust?”

That would be a bad idea. A 2020 50-state survey indicated more than half of adult Americans under 40 believe descriptions of the Holocaust are grossly exaggerated. So what about their kids? Will an even bigger percentage of them think the Holocaust is baloney?

If a graphic novel can communicate the full horror of the Holocaust to a generation that doubts it, bring on the cartoons.

When I first read Maus, I was in an unusual state of mind. I had broken up a robbery, and some associates of the perpetrator thought that was a good reason to kill me. Obviously, they didn’t quite get the job done.

Upon recovery, I was different. I definitely felt the experience made me a better person.

It seemed to me I was so subconsciously grateful for my life that my sensitivity to other people’s tragedies and triumphs was enhanced. 

It showed. The new sensitive me cried easily, in sympathy and celebration and sentimentality. My emotions were closer to the surface than before. 

I didn’t realize until recently that what was going on was probably post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Despite the way I felt at the time, I was able to calmly read Maus, with all its horrible words and pictures. The reason was its form. It looked like a big comic book, and I had been accustomed since childhood to let the violent death depicted in comics wash over me, whether I found it in Spider-Man or Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos or Tales From the Crypt.

In Maus, the story of Spiegelman’s father, the Nazis are cats and the Jews are mice. It’s easier to compartmentalize murder and torture when it comes in a comic book featuring little animals that communicate in speech balloons.

I read Maus and I had PTSD, but Maus didn’t cause the PTSD. The PTSD came from the guys who wanted to kill me.

Negative experiences are prone to negatively affect everybody, but scary stories don’t ruin your life even if you’re a kid. Otherwise, Neil Gaiman, R.L. Stine and Lemony Snicket would be in prison.

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