THE COMPLETE MAUS (graphic novel) by Art Spiegelman

 

Originally published in serial form in Raw magazine from 1980-1991.
Originally published in book form in 1991 by Pantheon Books.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

Years ago, the high school where I used to teach had a daily silent reading time. We were encouraged to build a classroom library and I had a great one. Two stand alone shelves (one tall, one short) and a little rug in the corner with a chair. I had a lot of books from a lot of different genres but the star books were Of Mice and Men and the two volume paperback version of Maus. Kids kept on stealing Of Mice and Men (If a kid likes it so much that he doesn't want to return it - fine by me) but so many students read Maus that the paperback binding broke and the pages fell out. It was held together with binder clips and big rubber bands. 

What I remember about that book is that every student reverently took off that ridiculous clip and the big rubber band, spread the pages out and just read. Students who "hated to read" read that book. Afterwards, they carefully put it back together again - in order - when they were done. These two books had power and painful truth. They knew it and they respected it.

I'd forgotten all about Maus, the binder clips, and the big rubber bands until I heard about a school board in Tennessee dropping this book from their curriculum due to rough language, nudity and a suicide. Funny how war, genocide and untreated PTSD from having almost all of your family and friends systematically murdered leads to a bit of cursing.

Missouri joined in as well. School districts banned the book because they think it fits the definition of "explicit sexual material." State law would punish them for exposing minors to "explicit sexual material" even though state law also mandates the teaching of the Holocaust. There is nudity, but it is rare and it is certainly not racy stuff.

The arrival at Auschwitz

The book is the story of the author's father during World War II. He was a recently married Jewish businessman in Poland before World War II. He had a young son. Their community is forced to move, go into urban ghettos and eventually into the death camp at

Auschwitz. Some hide, some run but they almost all end up in the camps. Most of his father's family and friends die, including his little boy - the older brother that the author never knew.

Spiegelman illustrates his father's story as a series of flashbacks. You can see that his father is miserable and his mother killed herself years earlier. 

There are no "people" in the book. The Jews are mice, the Nazis are cats, the Poles are pigs, the French are frogs and the Americans are dogs. I like the last bit since Hitler regularly referred to Americans as a mongrel people.

This is a powerful book - it is also a tough book. The war still reverberates through our world. We can recognize it and educate our children or we can ignore it.

I rate this graphic novel 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE COMPLETE MAUS (graphic novel) by Art Spiegelman.