The school board’s decision thrust McMinn County into the national spotlight, and into the center of a debate about extreme censorship. The rebuke from the public was swift. Public figures, educators, and Holocaust organizations condemned the removal. “Maus” shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list, a professor at North Carolina’s Davidson College offered a free course on the book for the 8th graders in McMinn County, and students across the nation opened up a copy for the very first time.
Despite the public outcry, a representative from McMinn County School Board confirmed with MSNBC that “Maus” has not been added back to the curriculum.
The “showing” here is part of the power of “Maus.” The reader is not just hearing about the depravity of the Holocaust; they’re seeing it. Spiegelman famously depicts his characters as animals: Jewish mice, Nazi cats, Polish pigs, French frogs, and American dogs, a representation of the common racist Nazi propaganda portraying Jewish people as “rats,” “vermin” or “sub-human.” The black-and-white drawings, especially of the mice, masterfully illustrate anguish, love, fear, and brutality. The illustrations serve to create space between the reader and the painful plot, but they do not lesson the effect of the novel.
Removing “Maus” from school bookshelves may not have been the first stone cast in this ongoing ideological book banning battle, but it was undoubtedly one of the most significant at the time, making it an easy and necessary choice to feature in our ongoing “Velshi Banned Book Club” project. For the past year and a half, we have spoken to the authors of dozens of banned and challenged books. The “Velshi Banned Book Club” started as a reaction to the removal of so many crucial titles, including “Maus,” but has become something more substantial. Reading, studying, and understanding the targeted titles is its own form of resistance.
The “Velshi Banned Book Club”…
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