Editor’s Note: Mr. Singer’s column will now appear every week rather than every other week.
Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) is best known as the creator of children’s literature uniquely characterized by complexity and dark undertones, most famously Where the Wild Things Are (1963), for which he was awarded the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1964. Though his portrayals of taloned monsters and fanged nasties alarmed parents, and his fascination with the forbidden, nightmarish, and subversive aspects of children’s fantasy were deemed highly controversial, Wild Things came to be embraced as a cherished classic in the upper pantheons of children’s literature. Besides illustrating more than one hundred books, many of which he also wrote, Sendak designed sets for many operas and ballets, including Brundibar (which will be discussed below).
As a child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who came to America just before World War II, Sendak grew up speaking Yiddish in a household with strong ties to the “Old Country” which, influenced by his father’s nightly bedtime stories drawn from the Torah, became a mythical and beloved place. When he turned thirteen – literally, on the morning of his bar mitzvah – he and his parents learned that his paternal grandfather (a renowned Polish rabbi), aunts, uncles, and cousins had all been murdered in the Holocaust. His parents made him feel like he was somehow responsible for what happened to his family, which he deeply resented. As he tells it, whenever he was not immediately responsive to his parents’ instructions – for example, to stop playing ball with his friends and come up for dinner – he’d hear something like:
“Your cousins, Leo, you know they’re your age. They don’t play ball. They’re dead. They’re in a concentration camp. You have the privilege of being here. And you don’t come up and eat. They have no food…”
And, rather than attribute blame exclusively to his parents, the young Sendak also blamed the victims:
So, I hated them, I hated those dead kids, because they were thrown in front of me all the time…. I don’t feel responsible for the kids of Auschwitz…. It was so cruel of my parents. It constantly made me feel that I was shamelessly enjoying myself when they were being cooked in an oven.
But his life became clouded by the shadow of the Shoah as he became preoccupied with the realization that children his age could die, and it wasn’t until he was older that he understood how lucky his immigrant family members were to have survived the Holocaust and how lucky he was, through only the purest serendipity, not to have been born in Hitler’s Europe. He remembered the tears shed by his parents as they would receive additional news of atrocities and the deaths of relatives and friends and, as he later told the Associated Press, “my childhood was about thinking about the kids over there. My burden is living for those who didn’t.”
He said that “the shock of thinking of the people I will never know is terrible,” and he later became obsessed with the idea that his work must “retrieve all those lost Jewish souls and return them to the living.” Thus, for example, his illustrations for Isaac Bashevis Singer’s children’s tales Zlateh the Goat (1966) were actually portraits of Sendak’s lost relatives inspired by photos from family scrapbooks: “I tried to give them back to my parents.”
While honoring his deceased relatives through his work, Sendak simultaneously mocked those survivors with whom he grew up. His best-known creations – the beloved monsters of Where the Wild Things Are and Seven Little Monsters – are none other than his maternal aunts and uncles who visited his home in Brooklyn.
Sendak’s work is thus characterized by the tension, horror, and beauty marked by his need to find a way to deal with the Shoah and to somehow come to terms with his own “wild things” which, ultimately, remain untamed. In a 2004 interview with Bill Moyers, he explained how he first came up with the idea for Where the Wild Things Are:
Someone had died. My brother, sister and I were sitting shiva, the Jewish ceremony. And all we did was laugh hysterically. I remember our relatives used to come from the old country, those few who got in before the gate closed, all on my mother’s side. And how we detested them. The cruelty that children …you know, kids are hard.
And these people didn’t speak English. And they were unkempt…. And they’d pick you up and hug you and kiss you…. And we know they would eat anything, anything. And so, they’re the wild things. And when I remember them, the discussion with my brother and sister, how we laughed about these people who we of course grew up to love very much, I decided to render them as the wild things, my aunts and my uncles and my cousins. And that’s who they are…
Sendak characterized Wild Things as “a personal exorcism” and always maintained that the story was essentially autobiographical: “My mother got mad at me all the time. It didn’t seem an extraordinary thing at all. I mean, it seemed to me she was always mad. And in Yiddish, she called me the equivalent of “wild thing” [i.e., a “vilde chayah”] and chased me all over the house.
Exhibited with this column is further evidence that Sendak viewed himself as a wild thing: an original and very rare sketch of Carol – the leading monster character and master of mayhem, havoc, and destructive tantrums from Wild Things – which he has signed “self portrait of Maurice Sendak, Aug. 78.”
Sendak teamed up with Tony Kushner, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his dark drama Angels in America, to create a children’s fable that poses the frightening question of whether the Holocaust could happen again. It began when Sendak, haunted by a CD he heard of an opera written by Jewish composer Hans Krasa for Jewish children in an orphanage in Prague, was stunned to learn that the Nazis, as part of their duplicitous attempt to convince the world how well they were treating their Jews, ordered children incarcerated at Theresienstadt to perform the opera some 55 times. The children put on a special performance for Red Cross representatives (1944), and the final show was filmed for the Nazi propaganda film The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City before all of them – children, composer, and librettist – were sent to Auschwitz and gassed.
The result was Brundibar, first an opera (libretto and text by Kushner and set design by Sendak) and later a book for which Sendak painted the illustrations. According to Sendak, the story was a metaphor for Germany under the Nazis, and he specifically intended for a new generation of readers to read the Holocaust into it. When he put on the opera in Chicago, he befriended one of the attendees, whom he discovered had played in the original performance in Theresienstadt and somehow managed to survive. She confirmed that though she and her fellow actors knew very well that they would likely die, they went on and sang their hearts for every performance. As Sendak tells the story, they sat there together and “cried our hearts out.”
In conclusion, we know “where the wild things are”: they may be found in the nightmares of a child of Jewish survivors whose family and friends were wiped out in the Shoah and whose Holocaust scars never healed.
