But books like Maus must never stop telling it.
I was raised by a single father who liked to read books, mainly about history. He loved World War II movies inspired by real events, too. On Sunday afternoons, his only downtime, he had us watch “The World at War.” I grew up absorbing the Second World War through archival news footage. Pop was born in 1930, and the war was the background to his childhood and defined, in many ways, his life as a Jewish American. Most of his extended family was murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in Warsaw and Ukraine.
I’m betting he would’ve hated Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman drawn from his family’s experience as Polish Jews before WWII, during the Holocaust, and as immigrants in America. The subtitle for volume one, published in 1986, is My Father Bleeds History.
Even with that evocative line, I imagine Pop would have pushed aside Maus in the same way he stepped over my stacks of Superman and DC comics. He was fine with me reading them. He believed in reading. But he was raising four rambunctious kids, working two or three jobs, and didn’t have time for comic books.
Pop is gone now, so I can’t ask him about Maus. I think I remember him well enough, though, to say that he would’ve defended my right to read it, and even more, encouraged me to do so. When I was 11 and declared that I’d read all the books in the children’s section of the White Plains Library, he handed me his library card and said to go get anything I wanted from the adult section.
In today’s complicated (especially for Jews) world, he would’ve wanted me to read Maus just because others said I couldn’t; the starkly drawn black-and-white work is one of the most frequently banned books in the nation. Pop was a blazing contrarian. He was observantly nonobservant in his religion and in so many other things, and were he here now, I know he’d be encouraging my 19-year-old daughter to read Maus.
The book is targeted not for its depiction of Jews as mice and Nazis as cats but — as many school districts have charged — for its brutal rendering of a brutal place, the death camp Auschwitz, where Spiegelman’s father was sent in 1944.
In 2022, after a school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, voted to ban Maus, Spiegelman countered their arguments, stating in the New York Times, “This is disturbing imagery…But you know what? It’s disturbing history.” The piece continued, “After reading the minutes of the meeting, Mr. Spiegelman said he got the impression that the board members were asking, ‘Why can’t they teach a nicer Holocaust?’”
Maus has been banned by other school systems ostensibly for its single image of a mother drawn with exposed breasts in the upper corner of one panel. The trauma of war is captured in that panel. After World War II, many who bore witness to the vicious Nazis could not bear the weight of what they’d seen and ended their own lives. Spiegelman’s mother was one of them.
That controversial panel’s title? “Hitler Did It.”
These are terrible facts, but Pop always urged me not to be afraid of facts. He encouraged me to think critically about them. To question them. To discuss them as we worked in our vegetable garden together, planting or pruning.
He would’ve known, like I know, that graphic novels are a way to get younger generations to read — and hopefully, at school, to explore many of the difficult themes that are all too relevant today.
I’m also sure Pop would want his granddaughter to read Maus because antisemitism is rearing its ugly head again in America. It flared up on her campus at Temple University in Philadelphia in the defacing of a Jewish fraternity house this summer. (I thank the good sense of the administrators, who unequivocally and publicly condemned this act of violence, hate, and lawlessness.) There must be a place for debate, for lawful protest. However, when debate is all pathos and no logos, we bend toward old hatred instead of new understanding.
Now, one might say that, at 19, my daughter is old enough to read anything she wants, and that banning books is about protecting young children. Well, I’m not proposing Maus be read in elementary school.
On the other hand, I’m a horrible mother: I didn’t encourage my daughter to read it when she was in high school, either. (She was too busy plowing through her own stack of comics and YA novels.) We did watch “Schindler’s List” and my favorite World War II movie, “Defiance,” about Jewish resistance. And one year, for Mother’s Day, I requested a family trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. I suspect I might be my father’s daughter.
In 1974, the summer before I started sixth grade, Pop was reading a just-released book he’d checked out from the library, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. So I read it, too. Pop’s uncle Willie survived many years as a political prisoner in a Siberian gulag like the ones detailed in the book. I know it sounds odd, but some of the best moments I ever had with Pop were delving into the darkness of those Soviet gulags as we prepared supper and cleaned up afterward.
I’m going to see if my daughter will read Maus with me this fall. There is darkness in it, yes, but also strength and the power of knowledge. We should’ve done it long ago.
Caroline Bock writes stories — from micros to novels. She is the author of the novel The Other Beautiful People, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in summer 2026. A graduate of Syracuse University, she studied creative writing with Raymond Carver and poetry with Jack Gilbert and Tess Gallagher. In 2011, after a 20-year career as a cable television executive, she earned an MFA in fiction from the City College of New York. She has short fiction forthcoming in the Hopkins Review. She is the co-president and prose editor at the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She lives in Maryland with her family.
