A Tennessee school board voted to remove Art Spiegelman’s graphic book Maus from its 8th grade syllabus, a couple of weeks before Holocaust Remembrance Day, an irony surely too heavy to be intentional.

Maus is a Pulitzer prize-winning graphic book about the writer’s parents, who survived the Holocaust, lost a child and carried the scars forever. His mother died by suicide. The book depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, a device that redirects your attentiveness to the meaning, not just the fact of a story, you think you already know. The apparent ordinariness of family dynamics —irritation, resentment—becomes stark, illuminated by a blaze of cruel history.