Banned Book 'Maus' To Be Donated To 19th Ward Schools

CHICAGO — Copies of the most banned book in 2022 are being donated to public and private schools in the 19th Ward to combat the growing tide of antisemitism in Chicago and across the country.

The campaign is being initiated by Jews of Beverly (a Facebook group for Jewish neighbors), Bookie’s bookstore, and 19th Ward Mutual Aid, which are accepting donations to buy copies of “Maus” after the book was banned by a school board in Tennessee.

In January, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, graphic novel “Maus” joined the ranks of such challenged books as “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Beloved” and “Ulysses,” when the McMinn County school board unanimously voted to remove the book from the eighth grade curriculum. “Maus” tells the story of Spiegelman’s relationship with his father and the suicide of his mother — both who survived the horrors of the Holocaust. The graphic novel depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.

“[The school board] objected to a picture where one of the characters is naked,” said Tim Noonan, a member of 19th Ward Mutual Aid. “There are curse words. Let’s face it, we’ve seen a lot of naked cats and mice over the years.”

The controversial ban drew outrage from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP and other groups. Spiegelman told NPR he got the impression that the board members were asking, “Why can’t they teach a nicer Holocaust?” Prior to the book being banned in Tennessee, “Maus” — which originally appeared in serial form — was banned in 2015 by Vladimir Putin.

The decision by the Tennessee school board had the opposite effect, in that it inspired libraries and groups around the United States to get the banned book into the hands of school children and adults alike.

“[The censors] are whitewashing history,” Noonan said. “We saw that this is an area where people needed to be familiar with the history of what happened in Germany during the 1940s. Children are not that familiar with the Holocaust. ‘Maus’ is the perfect book for them to have that access to history.”

The 19th Ward Mutual Aid is a group of volunteers formed in 2020 to help neighbors left unemployed by the global pandemic through food giveaways, meal delivery, mask making, a free toiletry store and education.

“We felt uniquely positioned to do something like this," Noonan said. “We felt uniquely positioned to do something like this and tried to figure out what our neighborhood needed.”

A recent report stated that 2021 was the worst year in a decade for antisemitism around the world. The Hate Crime Dashboard for Chicago also showed that 2021 was the worst year for hate crimes. Last month in Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood on the North Side, a synagogue, Jewish school and Jewish businesses were vandalized with swastika images and antisemitic graffiti.

Beverly, Mount Greenwood and Morgan Park have also not been immune to antisemitism. In March 2019, stickers promoting a white nationalism group were found on light poles along the South Side Irish St. Patrick’s Day Parade route.

“We hope that this will be the beginning of a campaign to deliver books to our school’s libraries that honor, promote and celebrate the diversity that makes this ward strong,” Noonan said.

Jews of Beverly, Bookie’s and 19th Ward Mutual Aid are seeking donations to provide five paperback sets of “Maus” graphic novels to every middle school and high school library within the 19th Ward. Bookie’s can barely keep the books in stock, as 50 more copies are due in March. The complete series of “Maus” will cost $3,000 for 105 books. Online donations are being accepted on 19aid.com/donate.

“We’d definitely entertain expanding into areas outside the 19th Ward and also other books,” Noonan said, “A book about slavery or other things in our history that people need to know or think about.”