Worrying if children should be reading Maus doesn’t make school board bigots
The board objected to its ‘rough, objectionable’ language
Maus says as much about America as it does about its subject
V LAST WEEK, the board of education in McMinn County, Tennessee removed Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize winning graphic novel Maus from the English curriculum for eighth graders (that’s 13 year-olds in the US system). Some board members objected to what Lee Parkison, McMinn County Director of Schools, called “rough, objectionable language” and the depiction of Spiegelman’s mother naked after cutting her wrists.
After considering what Parkison called “the values of the county”, the board voted 10-0 to drop Maus and replace it with a less offensive account of industrial murder.
“I’m trying to, like wrap my brain around it,” Spiegelman told CNN. “I moved past total bafflement to try to be tolerant of people who may possibly not be Nazis, maybe.”
Yet as Spiegelman admitted, there is no evidence of the McMinn County board being racists or Holocaust deniers. They don’t like the way in which Spiegelman represented the Shoah, and they don’t think it’s constructive in a schoolroom.
Were the board within their legal rights, and were they ethically right? The first question is easy. Unlike centralised Britain, American schools are funded by state and local taxes. Citizens elect school boards just like they elect sheriffs or mayors.
This is grassroots democracy, and it allows a vast and various nation to contain its local variations.
The board members may have arrived at the wrong conclusion, but the minutes of their meeting show them doing their conscientious best.
Spiegelman’s hint they are “maybe” Nazis was unfair. They considered retaining Maus but editing out offending images, then found that runs afoul of copyright law. They remain determined to teach the Holocaust to eighth-graders. They just want a book that reflects their values. This is red-state, Christian Tennessee.
Haredi Jews might also object to images of a naked woman.
It’s admirable that the Shoah is on the curriculum even in Tennessee. But is fiction, let alone a graphic novel, really the best medium?
The eighth-grade US primer on the Shoah used to be Elie Wiesel’s Night. Wiesel was there, his use of language is an education in itself, and he tells it without pictures.
Fiction simplifies human motivations and experience. To me, Maus is of a piece with Jewish Americans’ belated and not always smart reckoning with the Shoah. Admirers tell me it’s a masterpiece. But then, novel-readers said that about Sophie’s Choice and moviesgoers of Life is Beautiful. To me, both of these are goyishe naches. They are prurient and exploitative. But that may say more about me than them.
Maus says as much about America as it does about its subject. That is an argument for including it on the curriculum: we need to speak to children in a language they understand.
That is also an argument for excluding it: translating a European story too smoothly into American taste risks introducing a new kind of falsity.
Debating the controversy on television, Whoopi Goldberg saw it through the lens of today’s racial politics, pronouncing the offensive verdict: “Well, this is white people doing it to white people. Y’all go fight amongst yourselves.”
Goldberg has apologised. Like the missteps of the McMinn County school board, her outburst shows the complete assimilation of the Shoah into the American mentality.
These statements reflect how successful America’s programme of Shoah education has been, and, in a sense, how profoundly it has failed. Either way, the real engine of public education in America isn’t the schools. It’s Hollywood and social media.
I wonder whether it might be better for US schools not to teach the Shoah than rely on dumbed-down narratives.
Meanwhile, the fuss drove Maus into Amazon’s top-ten bestselling items last week.
I doubt that all the buyers are Jews: as far as I can tell, most of the Jews in America already have multiple copies of Maus and think it’s a masterpiece.
Perhaps the buyers are stirred up by the further Americanisation of the Maus debate in the culture war.
As Jewish observers first said in the Seventies, when Americans were making movies, building memorials, and starting to consume an endless diet of semifictional narratives of murder, there’s no business like Shoah business.