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From Maus. Art by Art Spiegelman
Eerily echoing Hitler's vow to "burn out the poison of immorality (from) LIBERAL excess," a Tennessee school board in all their unholy wisdom has banned Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus, which uses cartoon animals - Nazis as cats, Jews as mice - to tell the searing story of his survivor parents and the horror, carnage and enduring trauma of the Holocaust. Alas, he also uses 8 swear words, 1 naked (mouse) image and "unnecessary violence." So no go. It's fine for kids to learn about genocide, insists the Board; they should just do it without, you know, the bad stuff.
Eerily echoing Adolf Hitler's vow to "burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of LIBERAL excess," a Tennessee school board in their unholy wisdom has banned Art Spiegelman's singularly searing, brutally tender, Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus, which uses cartoon animals - Nazis as cats, Jews as mice, Poles as pigs - to tell the harrowing story of his survivor parents and the carnage, horror and enduring trauma of the Holocaust. Unsparing and multi-layered, Spiegelman merges personal and historical devastation by documenting the lives of his father Vladek and mother Anja, Polish Jews who survive Auschwitz deeply scarred, and his own struggle to unspool their painful stories. Disquietingly, there is no redemptive arc, no real justice in the end, just a dark history that must be put on record. Anja committed suicide in 1968, when Spiegelman was 20; Vladek, who lost a six-year-old son and most of his extended family during the war, emerges as a controlling, cranky, shut-down old man. The fraught father/son relationship leads Spiegelman to a pitiless conjecture - "Unimaginable suffering doesn't make you better - it just makes you suffer" - as Vladek harshly, repeatedly resists his son's inquiries into a past whose losses still haunt him. "It would take many books, my life," he says bitterly, "and no one wants anyway to hear such stories."
Ultimately, improbably, Spiegelman turns to cartoon animals to tell such stories - perhaps, writes one critic, "because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason." Maus' portrayal of mice resonates - the Nazis often referred to Jews as vermin - while helping create enough psychic space to make their stories bearable; when he's writing or quizzing Vladek, Spiegelman wears a mouse mask that places him in both past and present. In 1992, his "genre-bending" work became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer. But even with success, he remained tormented by the same survivor's guilt as Vladek and many others: He tells his therapist, "Mostly, I feel like crying... No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz." Vladek died in 1982, shortly after Maus was published. Despite his grief and rancor, he left behind his stark, indelible testimony. On laboring in Auschwitz' gas chambers, alongside an image of screaming mice: "And the fat from the burning bodies, they scooped and poured again so everyone could burn better...You heard about the gas, but I'm telling not rumors, but only what I really I saw." On friends in the camp found and lost: "Abraham I didn't see again - I think he came out the chimney." On crimes at first unfathomable: "People came back and told us. But we didn't believe."
If they ever read history, of course, they'd know the best way to get teenagers or anyone else to read a book is for one dimwit little school district to ban it. Maus is now topping bestseller lists - previously, it wasn't within the top 1,000 - and several groups, including a comics store in Tennessee, have offered to donate copies to however many kids request it. Spiegelman, now 73, has said he's "baffled" by the board's move, calling it "Orwellian," "obviously demented" and "daffily myopic." "I've met so many young people (who) have learned things from my book," he lamented, adding that after reading the meeting's transcript he sorrowfully realized the problem is "bigger and stupider" than he thought, so "I'm trying to wrap my brain around it." Bottom line: "I'm trying to be tolerant to people who possibly may not be Nazis, maybe." One final, awful, surreal, little-noted irony: While the board acted a few weeks ago, news of the ban happened to surface on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the liberation of the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp where Vladek, Anja and so many others were imprisoned. Of the 1.3 million people held there, the Nazis murdered an estimated 1.1 million. They, in turn, were part of the over six million who ultimately died in the Holocaust. Six million. Not mice. Human beings, often naked. Goddamn.
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Eerily echoing Adolf Hitler's vow to "burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of LIBERAL excess," a Tennessee school board in their unholy wisdom has banned Art Spiegelman's singularly searing, brutally tender, Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus, which uses cartoon animals - Nazis as cats, Jews as mice, Poles as pigs - to tell the harrowing story of his survivor parents and the carnage, horror and enduring trauma of the Holocaust. Unsparing and multi-layered, Spiegelman merges personal and historical devastation by documenting the lives of his father Vladek and mother Anja, Polish Jews who survive Auschwitz deeply scarred, and his own struggle to unspool their painful stories. Disquietingly, there is no redemptive arc, no real justice in the end, just a dark history that must be put on record. Anja committed suicide in 1968, when Spiegelman was 20; Vladek, who lost a six-year-old son and most of his extended family during the war, emerges as a controlling, cranky, shut-down old man. The fraught father/son relationship leads Spiegelman to a pitiless conjecture - "Unimaginable suffering doesn't make you better - it just makes you suffer" - as Vladek harshly, repeatedly resists his son's inquiries into a past whose losses still haunt him. "It would take many books, my life," he says bitterly, "and no one wants anyway to hear such stories."
Ultimately, improbably, Spiegelman turns to cartoon animals to tell such stories - perhaps, writes one critic, "because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason." Maus' portrayal of mice resonates - the Nazis often referred to Jews as vermin - while helping create enough psychic space to make their stories bearable; when he's writing or quizzing Vladek, Spiegelman wears a mouse mask that places him in both past and present. In 1992, his "genre-bending" work became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer. But even with success, he remained tormented by the same survivor's guilt as Vladek and many others: He tells his therapist, "Mostly, I feel like crying... No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz." Vladek died in 1982, shortly after Maus was published. Despite his grief and rancor, he left behind his stark, indelible testimony. On laboring in Auschwitz' gas chambers, alongside an image of screaming mice: "And the fat from the burning bodies, they scooped and poured again so everyone could burn better...You heard about the gas, but I'm telling not rumors, but only what I really I saw." On friends in the camp found and lost: "Abraham I didn't see again - I think he came out the chimney." On crimes at first unfathomable: "People came back and told us. But we didn't believe."
If they ever read history, of course, they'd know the best way to get teenagers or anyone else to read a book is for one dimwit little school district to ban it. Maus is now topping bestseller lists - previously, it wasn't within the top 1,000 - and several groups, including a comics store in Tennessee, have offered to donate copies to however many kids request it. Spiegelman, now 73, has said he's "baffled" by the board's move, calling it "Orwellian," "obviously demented" and "daffily myopic." "I've met so many young people (who) have learned things from my book," he lamented, adding that after reading the meeting's transcript he sorrowfully realized the problem is "bigger and stupider" than he thought, so "I'm trying to wrap my brain around it." Bottom line: "I'm trying to be tolerant to people who possibly may not be Nazis, maybe." One final, awful, surreal, little-noted irony: While the board acted a few weeks ago, news of the ban happened to surface on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the liberation of the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp where Vladek, Anja and so many others were imprisoned. Of the 1.3 million people held there, the Nazis murdered an estimated 1.1 million. They, in turn, were part of the over six million who ultimately died in the Holocaust. Six million. Not mice. Human beings, often naked. Goddamn.
Eerily echoing Adolf Hitler's vow to "burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of LIBERAL excess," a Tennessee school board in their unholy wisdom has banned Art Spiegelman's singularly searing, brutally tender, Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus, which uses cartoon animals - Nazis as cats, Jews as mice, Poles as pigs - to tell the harrowing story of his survivor parents and the carnage, horror and enduring trauma of the Holocaust. Unsparing and multi-layered, Spiegelman merges personal and historical devastation by documenting the lives of his father Vladek and mother Anja, Polish Jews who survive Auschwitz deeply scarred, and his own struggle to unspool their painful stories. Disquietingly, there is no redemptive arc, no real justice in the end, just a dark history that must be put on record. Anja committed suicide in 1968, when Spiegelman was 20; Vladek, who lost a six-year-old son and most of his extended family during the war, emerges as a controlling, cranky, shut-down old man. The fraught father/son relationship leads Spiegelman to a pitiless conjecture - "Unimaginable suffering doesn't make you better - it just makes you suffer" - as Vladek harshly, repeatedly resists his son's inquiries into a past whose losses still haunt him. "It would take many books, my life," he says bitterly, "and no one wants anyway to hear such stories."
Ultimately, improbably, Spiegelman turns to cartoon animals to tell such stories - perhaps, writes one critic, "because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason." Maus' portrayal of mice resonates - the Nazis often referred to Jews as vermin - while helping create enough psychic space to make their stories bearable; when he's writing or quizzing Vladek, Spiegelman wears a mouse mask that places him in both past and present. In 1992, his "genre-bending" work became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer. But even with success, he remained tormented by the same survivor's guilt as Vladek and many others: He tells his therapist, "Mostly, I feel like crying... No matter what I accomplish, it doesn't seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz." Vladek died in 1982, shortly after Maus was published. Despite his grief and rancor, he left behind his stark, indelible testimony. On laboring in Auschwitz' gas chambers, alongside an image of screaming mice: "And the fat from the burning bodies, they scooped and poured again so everyone could burn better...You heard about the gas, but I'm telling not rumors, but only what I really I saw." On friends in the camp found and lost: "Abraham I didn't see again - I think he came out the chimney." On crimes at first unfathomable: "People came back and told us. But we didn't believe."
If they ever read history, of course, they'd know the best way to get teenagers or anyone else to read a book is for one dimwit little school district to ban it. Maus is now topping bestseller lists - previously, it wasn't within the top 1,000 - and several groups, including a comics store in Tennessee, have offered to donate copies to however many kids request it. Spiegelman, now 73, has said he's "baffled" by the board's move, calling it "Orwellian," "obviously demented" and "daffily myopic." "I've met so many young people (who) have learned things from my book," he lamented, adding that after reading the meeting's transcript he sorrowfully realized the problem is "bigger and stupider" than he thought, so "I'm trying to wrap my brain around it." Bottom line: "I'm trying to be tolerant to people who possibly may not be Nazis, maybe." One final, awful, surreal, little-noted irony: While the board acted a few weeks ago, news of the ban happened to surface on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the liberation of the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp where Vladek, Anja and so many others were imprisoned. Of the 1.3 million people held there, the Nazis murdered an estimated 1.1 million. They, in turn, were part of the over six million who ultimately died in the Holocaust. Six million. Not mice. Human beings, often naked. Goddamn.