You can't go through what your parents went through.

Art Spiegelman's graphic novel "Maus" has had a complex fate. There are at least several known instances when it was banned or removed from shelves in various countries. The most recent incident occurred in January this year, when a school district in Tennessee, USA, removed "Maus" from the school curriculum due to the presence of obscene language in several places and an image of nudity.

Much can be said about banning a Holocaust comic in a country where the idea of Victory prevails above all else, but the essence is not there—Spiegelman's "Maus," the first comic to receive a Pulitzer Prize, still attracts attention not only from readers around the world but also from guardians of "morality" and "laws."

In "Maus," Spiegelman portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. He has said that he found the metaphor of the mouse to match Hitler's rhetoric about extermination and his references to Jews as parasites. The comic, or rather, the graphic novel, tells the story of how Spiegelman's Jewish parents survived the Holocaust in Poland. In 1987, Spiegelman gave an interview to NPR, where he talked about creating the comic. I noticed that the interview is still relevant today.

ART SPIEGELMAN: People usually get very upset when they first hear that I made a comic about the Holocaust. Like, it's an oxymoron, and people just don't want to hear anything after that.

But I think comics, on one hand, are very straightforward media. On the other hand, it's very, very abstract media. You need to do a lot more work to decode a comic than to understand a movie or even read a book.

When did you first realize that your parents had survived [in the concentration camp]?

Well, I can't remember a time when I didn't know that, but on the other hand, I can't remember it ever being significant to me. It was just another thing I knew about my parents. When I was a little kid, my mother had a tattoo with a number, and from time to time my friends would ask, "Mrs. Spiegelman, why do you have a number tattooed on your arm?" And she would answer that it was a phone number that she didn't want to forget, or something like that. So it was woven into the fabric of our lives. On the other hand, many of their friends, and therefore their friends' children, were also aware. So it wasn't so abnormal.

But before you sat down and told your father, "Tell me the story of how you survived, did he really tell you anecdotes about his survival during the war?"

Oh, yes, but just as their parents might tell them about life during the Great Depression, you know? Oh, it was very hard then. And the anecdotes just popped up in conversations between topics about taking out the trash or doing homework.

Did you ever have dreams about the Nazis?

I think one thing that haunted me growing up was an enlarged photograph. Originally it was about two inches by two inches, but in the dream, it was a large portrait photo of what my brother would look like if he had survived the war. So I remember seeing him in the dream, although I had never met him and knew nothing about him except a couple of anecdotes and this photograph.

And I remember one recurring dream about a school lesson where the principal, instead of just saying "Good morning!" over the loudspeaker, asked all Jewish students to come out to the schoolyard.

When you approached your father, sat him down, and said, "You know, tell me in chronological order all the details you can remember about the war and how you survived the Nazis, was it difficult for him to talk about it?

Not particularly, although, as I grew up, my mother spoke about it more volubly than my father. And actually, he didn't even realize that I was recording him on tape or something until almost the end. Conversations with him consisted of important pieces that represented a mosaic that needed to be assembled and processed later. And sometimes I felt like I was playing a pinball machine, trying to avoid the penalty holes because I would ask a question, and he would return to an anecdote he had told a thousand times. And there's no way to knock him off it until you listen all the way through.

I keep thinking about how just when you're feeling particularly tender towards your father from understanding what hell he went through, he does something manipulative in the spirit of a parent, like throw out a coat that you love or something like that. How did you reconcile with that? I mean, after you learn your father's life story more deeply, do all his hostile actions from the past get erased, does tenderness prevail or not?

Actually, this leads to a serious problem associated with feelings in such literature. This is one of the curses of so-called Holocaust literature. When you read it, you literally hear violins in the background and soft, mournful sobs from a choir. I've met some survivors who felt that way, but I've met other survivors who, in a sense, were much braver. And manipulating the reader in this way seems banal and cheap. My life with my father was not tender. My life with my father was, well, probably as ambivalent as anyone's life with their parents. I just wanted to make an accurate portrait of these relationships.

Your father always complains about money, that his second wife only wants his estate, she wants to rewrite his will, everyone wants to use him. In some ways, he resembles a racist caricature of a stingy Jew. Have you ever thought about trying to present him in a more positive light?

Oh, sure. But I would never do that. But, of course, I thought about it—not just change him, but fit the story to my ideological leanings or interests. And... that would be too dishonest. I mean, one of the things that was important to me in "Maus" was the truth. And the truth isn't helped by retouching portraits. I found that talking about real things makes the book much more effective, so my father is not a caricature of a stingy old Jew. He is a stingy old Jew.

I find much more richness for building a story in that than if I had a model father, because otherwise, I would have written a book whose moral would be something like: if you lead a virtuous, exemplary life, you too could have survived the Holocaust. And that's not the point. The point is that everyone should have survived the Holocaust. There should never have been a Holocaust.

In some of your works, you describe yourself as imprisoned in your own home. Have you ever thought about how that's not quite fair, since you were never in a concentration camp?

That's right. But actually, I was very interested in literature about the psychological consequences for children of survivors. And one common denominator that emerged in these studies were children who ended up in psychiatric hospitals or prisons. And I have been there in the past. In psychological literature, this is called an "anniversary reaction." According to the literature, at about the same age as their parents were in concentration camps, their children ended up in psychiatric hospitals or prisons. And I think I found a safer way to deal with all this, just by drawing a comic.

You have to understand that you can't live through what your parents lived through. And you're supposed to be happy about it, but you can't. This can give rise to a very perverse envy of your parents, who survived something that proved they were strong enough to live.

So... I don't think it's a complete coincidence that I really started working on this very long project at the age of 30, which is about the same age my father was when he was in the camps. Because to draw "Maus," I had to reproduce every place present in those memories. Fish it out of my head, pack it into neat little boxes, you know?

And to do that, as I said, I needed to do some photographic research, look for drawings of survivors, many records—to get an idea of what it was like. I went back to Poland. I traveled to Auschwitz to look around, tried to find my parents' hometown—all part of the same attempt to understand and understand what happened. And I honestly say that I still don't fully understand. But I'm trying."