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Rose stares at me in disbelief "You no jew. You can't be. " In our discussion of Art Spiegelman's Maus, we have been reading about Vladek and Anja's experience of the escalating persecution of the Jews in Poland, and I have just referred to my father's experiences as a Jewish student in Hitler's Germany. Audible whispers pass around the circle of seats.
"She is, I could've told you all that!"
"She is not, she can't be!"
"Why can't I be a jew?"I ask Rose, a thirty-nine-year-old woman from Guyana, who feels a special closeness to me after having shared her struggles as a single mother of a special needs child during several office hours.
"Because you're down to earth, "she answers. "Because you-have feelings!"A few students giggle with embarrassment, while others rush in, trying to reassure me.
"Rose is right, you not like them."
"You talk with us.... We laugh in here. "
"You not all formal. "
"That's right. And you don't look like no Jew either. "
"I just assumed you knew I was Jewish," I tell them, trying to catch my breath, "because of my last name. That's why I never mentioned it. Anyway, " I ask the class, "what does a Jew look like? What does a Jew act like?"
During the four years I have taught at Medgar Evers, a four-year college of the City University of New York, I have often assigned Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale. In this article, I will concentrate specifically on the experience of using this text with one class which met in the spring semester of 1996. For those readers unfamiliar with it, Maus is a two-volume, 269-page narrative in comic strip form whose primary subject is the experience of Vladek, Art Spiegelman's father, in Nazigoverned Poland and during the time he spent imprisoned in Auschwitz. All the humans in the text are portrayed in comic-book animal form; that is, Jews are human-like mice, Nazis are cats, Poles are pigs, the French are frogs, Americans are dogs, and so on. The narrative, which unfolds through over 1500 captioned drawings, alternates between two time periods: the more distant past of the Holocaust and the more recent past. The scenes from the more distant past...