Art Spiegelman: ’Auschwitz became for us a safe place’ | Books | The Observer
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/23/art-spiegelman-maus-25th-anniversary
My favourite part of the book, though, is the section in which Spiegelman reproduces the rejection letters he received when his agent, Jonathan Silverman, first sent Maus out to publishers. Oh dear. This is embarrassing. Behold New York’s literary taste-makers acting like a bunch of cowardy custards. “Thank you for letting me see Maus,” says Hilary Hinzmann, of Henry Holt. “The idea behind it is brilliant, but it never, for me, quite gets on track.”
The book was acclaimed, but it had its critics, too. “When I first talked about it [in public], there were just these shouting matches with the audience. I couldn’t say anything about Israel, about how nation states are not a satisfactory answer; people would go berserk.” Though his Jewishness was hardly a secret – “or not to anyone who could read my last name” – Maus made him overtly Jewish to the world, and this has been a complicated business because, as he puts it in MetaMaus: “The only parts of Jewishness I can embrace easily are the parts that are unembraceable. In other words, I am happy being a rootless cosmopolitan, alienated in most environments that I fall into. And I’m proud of being somebody who synthesised different kinds of culture – it is a fundamental aspect of the diaspora Jew. I’m uneasy with the notion of the Jew as a fighting machine, the two-fisted Israeli.”