Being Upset Is Not Fatal

 I responded with some combination of outrage and slight sympathy when I read last week that the school board of McMinn County in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban Art Spiegelman’s two-volume work, Maus, from its eighth grade classrooms. Outrage, because there is something grotesque about the notion that it is more important to shield fourteen-year-olds from some foul language or the depiction of some hand-drawn nudity in one of the books’ most searing scenes than to exploit the brilliance of Spiegelman’s work to bring home to young readers the brutality and depravity that characterized the Germans’ treatment of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. But there was an ounce of sympathy in my response too: to want to shield young people from the truth about the depths to which human beings can sink when they embrace depravity, wickedness, barbarism, and an absolute degeneracy of the spirit feels natural to me. When I was a young parent, I wanted to shield my own children from those truths as well! Fortunately, I got over it. And the gatekeepers in McMinn County need to get over it as well.

The first volume of Maus came out in 1986. The term “graphic novel” was not yet in use; the book was mostly referenced as a comic book, including by people who found the use of the word “comic” to describe a book about Auschwitz as tasteless as it was slightly amusing. The second volume came out five years later and it was the year after that, in 1992, that Spiegelman won a special Pulitzer Prize for his work.

By any reasonable yardstick, Maus is an unusual book. I was drawn to it, at least in part, because it is set in Rego Park, the Queens neighborhood adjacent to Forest Hills where I grew up. And the people in the book—in the part of the book set in Queens—were all familiar types to me, people who resembled—some with almost remarkable precision—the parents of friends of mine from back then or friends of my parents. But most of the book is an extended flashback to pre-war Poland and then, once the war begins, to the series of ghettos and labor camps in which the author’s parents were interned before being sent to Auschwitz.

The McMinn Board of Education issued a clarifying statement to address the huge brouhaha their initial decision prompted. They were not opposed, they said, to teaching “about” the Shoah, only to Spiegelman’s “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.” In other words, they were okay with Anne Frank—whose diary ends before she and her family were sent to Auschwitz and which therefore has no scenes in it that depict the fate the people sent to there or to any of the other camps (including Bergen-Belsen where Anne and her sister died)—but not with a book like Maus that is depicts graphically (for once to use the word literally) the noose tightening around the Jews of Poland as the day-to-day brutality intimated, albeit mutely, what the Nazis had in mind as the “real” solution to the Jewish problem in Poland. Also making the book confusing—at least to some, I imagine—is the fact that Spiegelman does not depict any human beings in his story: the Jews are mice, the Germans are cats, the Poles are pigs, the French are frogs, and the Americans are dogs. Fans of Aesop and George Orwell’s Animal Farm will get the point easily: when describing a situation in which most of the players behave like animals—either hunters or the hunted—it feels natural to depict them that way. But it does require an extra dose of interpretative effort to follow the story without being distracted by the animals. And there was another point to the animal symbolism: in an interview published in the New York Times in 1991 (click here), Spiegelman said that his use of animals was “a way to distance myself from this intensely personal material so that I could understand it better, so that the reader could come closer to it.” Nor is it unimportant to note that one upshot of Spiegelman’s decision to populate his book solely with animals is that the nudity that so offended the gatekeepers on McMinn County consisted, therefore, solely of naked mice.

The response to the school board’s decision has been interesting to watch. A bookstore in Knoxville negotiated a special deal with Random House to procure 500 copies of the book at a very low price so that the owner could just give them away to high school students. Effort are underway to procure another thousand copies, all to be given away for free to Tennessee teenagers. The book is currently no. 23 on the amazon.com bestseller list, which is amazing given the fact that the books are more than thirty years old. Most meaningful of all, at least to me, is the response of one Scott Denham, a professor of German Studies at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, who has launched a free online course about the book specifically aimed at eighth graders and older high students who live in McMinn County. How many young people are signed on, I don’t know. But the fact that the ban has effectively been thwarted by one single individual possessed of the strength of his own convictions is very moving to me. I can’t help adding that if the late Irving Roth were here to put his two cents in, he would surely applaud Professor Denham’s effort personally to stand in the breach and personally to make a difference. That one individual can make a profound difference was the guiding principle of Irving’s life and this would just have been another example, and one he would have liked very much, of how that can work when someone is simply not prepared to look away.

Not all books are appropriate for young people of all ages. I get that. And I support that idea as well: like every parent, I also controlled the books my children read when they were very young or I tried to. But—and this is key—the criterion in place when deciding if a child should or shouldn’t read a book should be whether the child will be able to understand the book without being confused or overwhelmed. Being upset by upsetting things is part of becoming an educated person, part of preparing to live in the world by learning more of what the world is, of what its people are capable of, of what it means—positively and negatively—to be a human being. There are no books that accurately depict the lives of slaves in our nation before the Civil War that aren’t by their very nature upsetting. There are no books about the Lodz ghetto or about Treblinka that aren’t upsetting. There are no books about the Rape of Nanking or the Rwandan genocide that are not violently upsetting. Nor should there be! And from that come some basic truths about education. Being upset is not fatal. Knowing terrible things about the world is part of engaging with the history of humankind. Understanding Nazism is the greatest and most effective bulwark against the kind of mindless fanaticism to which Germany fell prey…and to which every country risks falling prey if fails to teach its children the lessons of the Shoah, the lessons of slavery, the lessons of Nanking, the lessons of Rwanda, etc.

I close with a personal story. When I was a child, I attended Hebrew School at the Forest Hills Jewish Center, a huge synagogue on Queens Blvd. known to many of my readers. The school entrance was on the side of the building: you entered and went up a flight of stairs, then either turned left to enter the Sanctuary or right to enter the school wing. But also to the left was a small room that served as the synagogue library. And it was there that I hung out and read when I came early to school. (The alternative was playing foosball in a much larger room called “The Game Room” that also featured an ice cream machine. But I liked the library more.) The books were organized by subject. Most were in easy reach, but the books about the Shoah, deemed too terrible for children to chance across, were kept on the top shelf where no young person could reach. But there was also a step ladder in the room and I, then as now attracted to books people try to keep me from reading, used to wait for the librarian to absent herself for a moment, then use the stepladder to reach for the books on that forbidden shelf. And so I entered the world in which I still live by reading, first of all, The Black Book of Polish Jewry, written by Jacob Apensziak and several others and published in English in 1943. The Shoah was still in progress as the book was written. They missed a lot. (Auschwitz-Birkenau is not mentioned.) But the authors knew enough of Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor to present a remarkably accurate description of the death camps, plus a very accurate account of the so-called Holocaust of Bullets describing the mass murder of entire Jewish communities across Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States. I was a little boy, just 11 or 12. I was a good reader. And I understood all too clearly why this book and the others on that top shelf were kept out of the reach of children. I never could read more than three or four pages before the librarian returned. It took more than a year for me to read the whole thing. (You can read the whole book online if you’d like: click here.) I had nightmares for years because of that book, some passages of which I came eventually to know almost by heart. No one ever found out: not the librarian, not the principal, not my parents. Only me…and now all of you. But to be shaped by history is not be ruined or wrecked by the past: it is to be made aware of what the world is so that you can find your place in it not accidentally but purposefully and meaningfully. That is how I became who I am now, the Jewish man I grew into, the rabbi I trained to be, the father I eventually became. Eventually I read Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg’s parallel volume, The Black Book of Russian Jewry, written in 1944 and, if it were only possible, even more hair-raising than the book about the Jews of Poland. I hated reading both books, but I survived the experience. Exposing children to the world through books is the ultimate step towards setting them on the path to becoming civilized adults. Being upset is not fatal. It’s being ignorant that is.