When Catie Fein and her eighth-grader, AJ, heard that the McMinn County school board had voted to ban Maus, they decided to fight back. So, they founded their own book club to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir together in Catie’s home in Franklin.
During their first meeting, parents and kids gathered together to read the school board letter explaining their decision to ban the book because of its “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.”
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Fein said that some of those reasons seemed exaggerated. Picking up her copy of Maus, she flipped through the pages, trying to find one of the two instances of nudity the school board had cited.
“I actually had to look for it,” she said. “I read the whole book knowing why it was banned and just sort of reading it with that in the back of my head, and I missed it. I finished it, and I was like, ‘Wait, what was the problem?’”
Although they live in Williamson County, not McMinn, the school board’s decision felt personal for AJ.
“My father is Jewish. I have Jewish features. It just feels like it was a personal attack to Jewish kids in Tennessee,” he said.
Maus is a Holocaust memoir. The subject matter is heavy, and can be graphic. AJ’s friend Clair is also in the book club and said there were parts of the book that shocked them.
“The brutality towards children surprised me. I read Anne Frank’s diary in fourth grade. And I went to Amsterdam, so I learned a lot about the Holocaust. But I didn’t realize how horrible they were to small children,” they said.
But AJ and Clair also agreed that the horror of it all was kind of the point.
“I felt kind of sick. It was like, this happened. This is real, you know? Realizing that even if it’s anthropomorphic mice, it just makes you feel sick,” he said.
Courtenay Rogers is Clair’s mom. Rogers, who is running for county commissioner in Williamson, said she feels that banning books like Maus that deal with difficult themes takes choices away from parents.
“It’s our job as parents to make sure that they’re not reading something that their brains can’t handle,” she said. “But this is what I’ve been saying about the whole banned book issue. Just because you don’t want your kids to read it doesn’t mean I don’t want my kid to read it. You don’t get to ban it just because you think something’s inappropriate.”
The book club plans to meet again by the end of the month, right in Fein’s kitchen. AJ said he is looking forward to reading the second volume of Maus, and Clair was so excited that they’ve already finished it.
When asked if they planned to keep the club going after finishing Maus, AJ was quick to respond.
“Definitely,” he said.
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