“Just wanted to let you know that Nirvana Comic Store in Knoxville is providing a copy of Maus to any middle and higher school student that requests a copy. Their Facebook post garnered hundreds of responses from people offering to purchase the books. They also started a gofundme and have raised $77,000. My daughter and seven and 9-year old grandsons shop at Nirvana and read age-appropriate comics and graphic novels. My daughter will read Maus with them and answer their questions when they are older. Ray Bradbury is turning over in his grave.” — Deb in Tennesse

 

I’m happy to report that as of 7:30, the Nirvana Comic Maus GoFundMe, which Deb is referred to, is offering copies of Maus to any middle or high school student who wants to read the book. The book store fund has raised more than $96,000 as of 8:30 this morning.

This is a beautiful thing to see. People will fight very hard for their freedom.

This is not an issue that I wish to argue about with people. One is either upset or outraged about banning this lovely book or not. I’m not looking to change people’s minds, but to ask for people who see the great injustice here to help fight back.

And they are fighting. Maus became an Amazon best-seller almost immediately after it was banned by a Tennessee school board last month.

The gofundme I mentioned yesterday, started by journalist George Edmondson, hopes to raise $11,000  to send copies of Maus to every library in Tennessee. They’ve raised $6,000 in just a few days.

The resistance to banning this Pulitzer Prize-winning and landmark book has been swift and dramatic. There is tremendous opposition to what the school board did in Tennessee. They banned Maus from the McKinn county schools curriculum. They said the book contained nudity violence and was too “heavy” for children.

The McKinn County school board members are a disgrace to the very idea of educating the young. God help those children.

There is very little dialogue between people in America on issues like this in 2021. People who care about this have to speak with their votes, money, and actions: mostly, commitment to a kinder and more compassionate country.

Feel free to support one or both or none of these gofundme projects if you can and desire. I think they both are lovely and essential.

 

George had $500 in his gofundme yesterday; he has more than $3,000 this morning.

That leaves $8,000 to go. I hope he gets there, and I hope to help get him there. The Nirvana Comic store is reaching the disenfranchised young, considered by extremist school board officials to be too fragile to survive reading this gentle and wise book about the Holocaust.

Each one is taking a different approach, I will support them both.

Between these two fund-raising projects, the censors and politicians will be defeated. Everyone in Tennesse who wants this book will get one. There is already more than $90,000 ready to go.

This book is a historical, an important work. Spiegelman’s very unusual tale – the Nazis are cats; the Jews are mice, the Poles are pigs – changed forever the way serious readers think of graphic narratives. He made the graphic novel a vital part of the literature of the young.

Wrote Kirkus Reviews: “For his unforgettable combination of words and pictures, Spiegelman draws from high and low culture, and blends autobiography with the story of his father’s survival of the concentration camps. In comic book fashion, the all-too-real characters here have the heads of animals, a start Orwellian metaphor for the dehumanized relations during World War II.

Most of Spiegelman’s plotline concerns his struggle to coax his demanding father into remembering a past he wanted desperately to forget. This is a story of courage and survival, not violence, nudity, and “heaviness,” as the McKinn School Board claims. Valdek survives by random luck, cleverness, and bravery.

It is difficult for me to imagine a more important, educational, or valuable story for a young person to read.

I don’t want to belabor the point. This is a famous and brilliant historical work. Many people are already fighting for its survival and for extremist politicians and timid parents to get out of the classroom and get back on Reddit where they belong.

With all of his many doubts, Art Spiegelman pushed on, believing that his graphic work deserves a place in the ongoing struggle between memory and forgetting.

The book is striking for its hard-earned humor and pathos; Maus took my breath away when I first read it with its stunning visual style, reminding us that while we can never forget the Holocaust or the many other genocides in our world,  there are new and better ways to remember them.

This story was in a comic made it easier for me to read and absorb, even as an adult.

The book was troubling and exhilarating at the same time.

If you can, please contribute to one or the other, or both of these gofundme projects. This will be a significant victory for the resistance. It looks like George Edmonson’s could use some help. I’ll be mentioning this every day; you can contribute here. 

Thank you, as always, for your support.