Through this Banned Book Writing Prompts series, Teachers & Writers Magazine aims to push back against the growing movement to censor what students can read and to show what happens when we enthusiastically embrace banned works rather than fear them. You can read an introduction to this series by Susan Karwoska here, and you can find more Banned Book Writing Prompts here.

Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, Maus, remained unopened on my bookshelves for years until I was able to work up the courage to read it. For so long, I was afraid of what I might find in its pages. The book tells the story of how Spiegelman’s Jewish father, Vladek, survived in Poland during World War II, first by passing as a gentile, then in hiding, and then, near the war’s end, in a concentration camp. Written like a documentary on the making of the book, Maus also depicts Spiegelman’s complicated relationship with his father and the weight of generational trauma.

My father is also a Holocaust survivor. His mother, my grandmother—who I called Omama—was a survivor, too. Omama lived with us during my childhood in Long Island, and she had nightmares almost every night, crying out, “Schnell, schnell, zie kommen!” (Quick, quick! They are coming!) I feared the reminders of their trauma I believed awaited me in the pages of Spiegelman’s book, so there it remained on my shelf collecting dust. 

But when I heard about Maus being banned in Russia, and then in 2022 in a Tennessee school district, I decided it was finally time to read it. I devoured books one and two in a single sitting. Spiegelman’s story left a deep impression on me. I appreciated how he managed to be both playfully postmodern and realistic in his creative retelling of his family history. And I was moved by how Spiegelman captured his father’s accent, as it reminded me of my own father’s German Viennese accent. 

But Spiegelman doesn’t romanticize his father, Vladek, nor does he write in a sentimental way about the war and survivors. Spiegelman’s characters have warts and neurosis; they’re damaged human beings, people with deep wounds. He is honest, for instance, about the ways in which Vladek’s past has broken him, showing us how Vladek’s deprivation during the war has made him excessively frugal and a hoarder, and how this damage is passed on to his family. “Mala makes me crazy. Only she talks about money, always about my will,” complains Vladek about his second wife at one point in the story. 

It is for this innovative depiction of history married to a personal story of great emotional and psychological depth that Maus is credited with showing it is possible to create serious literature in comic form.

Spiegelman’s portrayal of Artie, the author’s stand-in in the book, is similarly unsparing. Indeed, the first lines of the book establish that Artie is not the best son: “I went out to see my father in Rego Park. I hadn’t seen him in a long time––we weren’t that close.” It sounds almost like a confession. And then Artie drops an emotional revelation almost casually in the second frame: “He had aged a lot since I saw him last. My mother’s suicide and his two heart attacks had taken their toll.” Throughout the book, Artie continues to wrestle with feelings of guilt and resentment toward his father. Artie’s unease and sometimes self-centered behavior around Vladek reflect the deep discomfort he feels with the weight of his family’s history and with his struggle to document it. When his father tells him, “I don’t want you should write this in your book,” Artie protests, “But Pop, it’s great material. It makes everything more real––more human.”  

It is for this innovative depiction of history married to a personal story of great emotional and psychological depth that Maus is credited with showing it is possible to create serious literature in comic form. The book paved the way for many graphic works that followed, and, in 1992, became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Despite being profoundly moved by Spiegelman’s book when I finally read it, I wasn’t ready to share Maus with my students at that time. I feared it would not move them as it had me, and the story felt too personal to take that risk. As Artie says in the pages of Maus, “My father’s ghost still hangs over me.” 

It wasn’t until I was well into middle age that I could begin to excavate my own parents’ stories about the Holocaust. I remember my Omama telling me, “I am just trying to survive my own survival, Leeza.” She had lost her husband, her brother and his four children, her sister-in-law, and many others in the Holocaust—over 25 of her family members in all. “And here I am, alive,” she would say. 

My mother wanted to protect her only American daughter from dark stories of suffering, so she did not let my grandmother tell me about her experience during the war. But stories have a way of seeping out, and my Omama’s silent austerity during the day spoke volumes about what she had suffered. 

Maus gave me permission to look more deeply into my own family history, inspiring me to go through the photos, notes, and interviews with family members I had collected over the years.

Maus gave me permission to look more deeply into my own family history, inspiring me to go through the photos, notes, and interviews with family members I had collected over the years. I felt an urgency to excavate my parents’ and grandparents’ stories, as Spiegelman had, to better understand them and to ensure these stories were not lost to history.  

Once I started exploring this inheritance, I felt compelled to read Maus with my students. I teach at a large, public, urban university with a delightfully diverse population of students. The semester I chose to teach Maus, my students were a multi-cultural mix, but there were no Jewish students in my class. I was the daughter of Holocaust survivors, teaching a book that was very meaningful to me, and I was anxious that my students wouldn’t be able to connect to the history Maus describes. 

I need not have worried. Nearly all of my students fell in love with Maus, reading beyond the suggested number of pages and coming to class raring to delve into the book. They appreciated, as I did, the complex character of Artie’s father, Vladek, and Spiegelman’s “warts and all” portrayal of him. The book held their attention not for its history lessons, though it gave them that as well, but because they found the story so compelling. 

That is precisely the magic that Spiegelman creates with his pioneering graphic novel. He lets the story unfold, frame by frame, sentence by sentence, building a masterpiece of form and content. My art students admired his craft. My writers admired his ear for dialogue. My history students were captivated by how he wove history into story. Even my business majors, who were delving into creative writing with this read, appreciated the attention Spiegelman paid to how corporations profited from the war. My psychology students were moved by his depiction of his mother’s suicide and Artie’s therapeutic ventures to understand his own inherited trauma.

I was anxious about teaching Maus, but to teach is to make oneself vulnerable.

For me, sharing the book with this group of students restored my faith in readers, particularly during a time when AI threatens to read and write and think for us. The students embraced the messy, complicated story Spiegelman depicts. They appreciated that the book doesn’t try to whitewash history or turn life into a neat battle between good and evil. 

I tell my students during the first week of classes that part of the mission of a liberal arts education is to make what’s familiar foreign. But we can forget that this applies to teachers and teaching as well. I was anxious about teaching Maus, but to teach is to make oneself vulnerable. Teaching Maus reminded me of this: to be vulnerable and uncomfortable is the precondition for growth and learning. 

On the final day of class, we had a round of show-and-tell. When it was my turn, I shared with the class a little about my own family’s history. The students told stories that day about dealing with schizophrenia, about being trans, about growing up bi-racial, and we all shed some tears within the safe space of the classroom. It was a singularly enriching teaching and learning experience. 

Spiegelman’s Maus speaks truth to power on the personal and political level, from the tension-filled relationship between father and son to the politics of hate that fueled Hitler’s murderous regime. But it’s important to note that the book refuses to provide an easy-to-digest message. “I never thought of reducing it to a message. I mean, I wasn’t trying to convince anybody of anything,” Artie says to an interviewer in Maus II, after his first book becomes famous. 

I think my students, who are savvy and skeptical readers, appreciated that about Artie’s character—how he just wanted to tell his father’s story without preaching. After we read Maus, my students were curious about the reasons it had been banned. We live in a time when students expect that their stories should be represented in the public sphere—through narratives, poems, articles, and social media. For my students, the idea of banning books is antidemocratic and even anti-American. After all, as many of them told me, it was through literature and writing that they’d found their own voices. At one point, some of these students asked if I’d be interested in designing a whole class focused on other banned books. I told them I thought that was a wonderful idea, and I’m working on it.

Writing Prompt 1

Part one of Maus is entitled “My Father Bleeds History.” Here, we meet Artie’s curmudgeonly, frugal, traumatized father, who survived Auschwitz and is trying to tell his son the story of how he survived the war. 

“But this––what I told you about Lucia and so—I don’t want you should write this in your book,” the father says to his son, Artie. 

“What? Why not? The son asks. 

“It has nothing to do with Hitler, with the Holocaust!” his father says. 

“But Pop,” Artie answers, “it’s great material. It makes everything—more human.”  

How do you bleed history? Write about how your body bears the scars, literal or figurative, of your own history. Do you have a scar from an operation or a fight? Do you have a tattoo that tells a story about your life? Or maybe you have a scar that’s not visible to anyone else, a memory or feeling that has become a part of you. Tell us the history of your scar. Describe it in vivid detail. How has your relationship to the scar or tattoo changed over time? 

Writing Prompt 2

Spiegelman researched his parents’ story by visiting Poland and the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

The crew helped me find my parents’ house in Sosnowiec. We found people who remembered my family. In Auschwitz, we were able to hook up with the curator of the visual archives of the museum, and he helped me find the pictures I needed for my visual reconstruction. . . . The first time I went, we went to Auschwitz I, which is where my father was incarcerated. And that looks fairly benign in some bizarre way. It’s paved. It’s got trees. So in that first trip, I spent a lot of time in Auschwitz I, which was a rather sanitized place, set up like a museum or a world’s fair display. And that kept it at a peculiar distance. . . . [Birkenau] stretched as far as the eye could see in any given direction. And then in the back is the rubble of where the killing apparatus was. We walked in, and it was nearing dusk when we found Birkenau. And that was frightening. It was one of the only places I’ve ever walked where one really does believe in ghosts. It felt like every step was walking on ashes.

— Art Spiegelman

History is often left to historians. But ordinary people who have lived through momentous historical events have much to contribute to our understanding of history. Interview a member of your family or community about their memories of a particular historical event. Did your grandfather participate in the civil rights movement? Was your great aunt a feminist? Record their experiences and discuss any related photographs and documents that they may have. You could even do some library research for background information and supporting visual documentation. Select a part of your interview to portray in a five-to-six panel graphic story. Do a rough layout of the words and images for each page before doing the final drawings.