BEFORE WILD THINGS: MAURICE SENDAK AND THE POSTWAR JEWISH AMERICAN CHILD AS QUEER INSIDER-OUTSIDER - Brill
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GOLAN MOSKOWITZ
BEFORE WILD THINGS: MAURICE SENDAK AND THE POSTWAR JEWISH
AMERICAN CHILD AS QUEER INSIDER-OUTSIDER
Abstract the former: stars appear in the open window, and tree
This article analyzes the late Maurice Sendak’s (1928–2012) trunks emerge from the bedposts and doorframe. In his
entry into the field of children’s picture books in the mid- first step toward becoming “King of the Wild Things,”
twentieth century and his contribution to the affective shift Max, with eyes now closed, appears to be walking
in children’s literature. It examines Sendak’s complex social forward, rather than looking angrily backward as on
position and artistic development in the 1940s and 1950s, as the previous page.
well as lesser-known illustrations by Sendak, including col- Preceding this most celebrated book, Sendak’s
laborations with Ruth Krauss and with the artist’s brother, less studied work in the postwar years also drew
Jack. These works began to respond to Sendak’s own childhood from his complex subject position as a queer son of
as a queer son of Eastern European Yiddish-speaking immi-
Yiddish-speaking immigrants mourning relatives lost
grants. They also offered new potential mirrors for midcentury
children—perhaps especially queer and otherwise marginal-
in Europe. This earlier work conveys how Sendak, like
ized children—as they navigated cultural gaps between home Max, internalized a sense of endangerment as a queer
and the public sphere, as well as between personal orientations Jewish child who clashed with public American ideals
and the social pressures of postwar America. of childhood in those years. Advancing an affective turn
in children’s literature, Sendak’s early books comprise
Much has been written on the late Maurice Sendak’s some of the first work in children’s media to connect
(1928–2012) renowned picture book, Where the Wild American children with the emotional position of the
Things Are (1963).1 With its vivid dramatization of insider-outsider—a position with queer resonance
Max’s departure into solitary fantasy, it directly conveys for most children as uninitiated members of adult
Sendak’s own childhood negotiation between private, society. He began this project, consciously or not, at a
queer feelings and his acculturating Jewish immigrant time when Jewish American advocacy groups sought
family’s aspirations and values. Like Sendak, Max is to promote a vision of Jews as “normal” White Ameri-
a hybrid of an all-American child and a “wild thing.” cans, whose feelings were no different than those of
Sendak draws Max standing on a pile of books, nailing “Dick” or “Jane.” By contrast, Sendak reached children
his makeshift fort to the wall and pouncing irreverently by grappling with serious emotional predicaments
in a cartoonlike wolf suit with an oversized hammer related to his own complex insider-outsider position.
and fork extended in his grip. Max defies the preciously Central to his creative work is the vital need to survive
crosshatched, almost Victorian aesthetic of the world social incoherence in a reality that fluctuates between
that surrounds him and the propriety of his middle- secure and dangerous. As the artist asserted, children
class household. His airborne motion interrupts the turn to picture books not only for optimism but also
symmetrical architecture of the wood bannister and for self-preservation, in order to “confront the incom-
horizontally striped wallpaper. Once punished and sent prehensible in their lives—bullies, school, and the
to his room, fantasy turns dejected rage into private vagaries of the adult world.”2 Thus, even before Wild
empowerment, as a single turn of the page sprouts new Things and the onset of the liberation movements of
organic forms in a composition otherwise identical to the 1960s, Sendak addressed those children not yet
1 Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, and a
HarperCollins, 1963). Billie M. Levy Travel and Research Grant.
Portions of this article draw from my dissertation, which was 2 Sara Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak: A Visit with
supported by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the the Most Celebrated Children’s Author of Our Time,” Parents,
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, November 1992, 583, box 6, folder 67, Phillip Applebaum Collec-
tion, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 IMAGES
Also available online—brill.com/ima DOI:10.1163/18718000-12340103
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enfranchised by the dominant social order by engaging based throughout the postwar years. Sendak’s father,
them through the universally affective queer prism of Philip, did not learn to read or write English until
early childhood emotions. later in life; his mother, Sadie, never learned English.
The present article positions the work of Sendak’s With the help of mentors and years of psychoanalysis,
emergent career in the 1950s against the normalizing Sendak carved his way to professional distinction and
project implicit in postwar American children’s media. personal actualization through an unyielding devotion
As I will argue, Sendak’s early work draws connections to the craft of sublimating his childhood emotions into
between his own subject position as a queer son of universal aesthetic experiences. As a mild-mannered
Yiddish-speaking immigrants and the queer feelings teenager with a rich inner world, he made private
of early childhood itself. It does so in ways that both illustrations for stories like Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy
subverted prevalent ideals of social conformism and Prince” (1888) and Bret Harte’s The Luck of Roaring
helped carve space for unusual and endangered subject Camp (1868). For the former, Sendak visualized the
positions like his own. Speaking more substantially impossible love that Wilde narrates between a princely
to the queer positions of insider-outsiders, the vivid statue and a male swallow whose selfless devotion to
emotional content of the picture books that I examine the statue ends with a kiss on the lips and death at the
draws in part from comic books as well as from the statue’s feet in the cold of winter. For the latter, Sendak
social strangeness and sensitive emotional vitality of depicted Harte’s story of an abandoned, illegitimate
early childhood. infant adopted by a band of lumberjacks.5 These war-
time projects demonstrate the young artist’s primary
Sendak in the Postwar Landscape question of focus: how do emerging individuals survive
insufficient emotional guidance, physical and social
In the 1946–1947 Jewish Book Annual, Fanny Goldstein, danger, and forbidden or impossible desires? By the
a librarian at the Boston Public Library, proclaimed: early 1950s, his picture books drew from recollections
“The 20th Century may well be termed ‘The Children’s of his own Depression-era childhood filtered through
Century,’ for everywhere people are striving to create the perspective of a troubled coming of age. An avid
for their children a more ideal environment and a reader of comics at his after-school job, he became
more secure future.” Stressing the value of literature for familiar with the inner workings of that industry.
children’s character-building, Goldstein insisted that Sendak’s responsibility at All-American Comics was
children needed books to help them develop “normal a mundane one of adapting famous strips like Mutt
emotions and responses” and to learn how to integrate and Jeff for the comic-book format by filling in back-
into “the world at large.”3 Accordingly, children’s lit- ground details such as trees, houses, and puffs of dust
erature portrayed Jews as seamlessly American in the (to indicate motion).6 He once recalled that he would
postwar years, one example being Sydney Taylor’s All sometimes skip school and “take my stack of papers
of a Kind Family (1951), which follows a well-mannered back home, shut the door, make [my parents] believe
Jewish family on the Lower East Side. The book’s uni- I was doing my homework, and what I was doing was
versal tone and wholesome American sensibility led it backgrounds for Scribbly, backgrounds for Mutt and
to become the first Jewish book to be widely read by Jeff, backgrounds for Tipsy and Captain Stubbs.” Sen-
non-Jewish children.4 dak’s future prospects at All-American Comics were
At the time of Goldstein’s pronouncements, Sendak limited by his disinterest in the heterosexual fantasy
was a closeted gay Brooklyn teenager in an immigrant in which women were drawn as “sexy” and men as
family, with an after-school job at All-American Comics. valiant heroes. 7 Most paid work for artists of the
His family remained lower middle class and Brooklyn- time required adherence to a s exually and ethnically
3 Fanny Goldstein, “The Jewish Child in Bookland,” Jewish Book rollingstone.com/culture/news/maurice-sendak-king-of-all-wild
Annual 5 (1946–1947): 85. -things-19761230?page=3.
4 Devra Ferst, “The Twisty History of Jewish Kid Lit,” Jewish Daily 6 Selma Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N.
Forward, November 24, 2010, https://forward.com/articles/133388/ Abrams, 1980), 24–25.
the-twisty-history-of-jewish-kid-lit/. 7 “Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak,” Comics Journal 302
5 Quoted in Jonathan Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All (2013): 57.
Wild Things,” Rolling Stone, December 30, 1976, http://www.
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conservative social order. Postwar goals of reviving a hide “in plain sight.” Children’s literature was a place
unified national culture required a focus on the com- from which to be loud and passionate and emotion-
mon denominators that united most Americans rather ally honest, even when the adult public deemed the
than on the experiences of marginal outliers. In other contents of one’s imagination and desires to be queer,
words, even the subversive, “low art” form of comics excessive, or deviant.
maintained clear boundaries in the 1940s when it came In more ways than one, the theme of hiding evokes
to gender and sexuality. Sendak’s childhood. He once relayed that his mother,
The summer after graduating high school in 1946, Sadie, was “always mad and in Yiddish she called me
seventeen-year-old Sendak lived for a time in a first- the equivalent of ‘wild thing’ and chased me all over the
floor studio on 10th Avenue by 49th Street in the house. I used to hide in the street and hope she forgot
heart of what was, according to historian George before I crept up in the evening.”13 As an emerging gay
Chauncey, “a less wealthy gay enclave” that devel- son of parents embarrassed by sexuality in general and
oped “in the Forties west of Eighth Avenue, as large homosexuality in particular, he claimed, “I had to hide
groups of poorer gay men, often youths, crowded into every feeling I had from my parents, and every normal
flats in the old tenements of Hell’s Kitchen.”8 Almost feeling was condemned by me as abnormal and inap-
two decades before Max donned his wolf suit in Wild propriate … You’re riddled with lies and questions that
Things, Sendak may have learned about the “wolves” of never got answered about yourself—your body, your
Manhattan in the 1920s and 1930s, a coded term used mind.”14 Sendak struggled to actualize as a social being,
for men who, unlike “fairies,” maintained masculine juggling his family’s old-world mentalities and tenuous
social personas while engaging discreetly in homo- middle-class aspirations, wider American social expec-
sexual activity.9 During those years, the New York City tations, and his own private, queer feelings, like the
police and governing authorities continued to harass crush he had on the male Hebrew school teacher who
and persecute gay and queer people and the estab- prepared him for his bar mitzvah.15 A sickly, “indoors”
lishments that served them.10 A meek new employee boy whom others called “sissy,” Sendak was a dramatic
at his first full-time job—at the warehouse of Timely storyteller with few friends, spending much of his time
Service, a Manhattan window display company for with his siblings. He was, in his own words, “a terrified
which he helped build models for store windows out child, growing into a withdrawn, stammering boy who
of chicken wire and papier-mâché—Sendak described became an isolated, untrusting young man.”16
this period as “one of the best times in my life. I was in Sendak’s enduring internal experience of his child-
Manhattan, I was meeting all kinds of people I’d never hood memories shaped the emotional worldview
met in Brooklyn. They were people who felt they were and visual language that pervaded his early work.
really artists.”11 But when he first entered children’s The artist described his childhood neighborhoods in
publishing in the early 1950s following struggles with Bensonhurst and Gravesend as tree-lined Brooklyn
his mental health, he did so because he thought it was ghettos comprised of Jews and Sicilians. The survival-
a good place to hide: “I didn’t have much confidence in ist orientation of Sendak’s parents is reflected in the
myself … never,” he told Bill Moyers in 2004. “And so, artist’s descriptions of their old-world memories, as
I hid inside … this modest form called the children’s well as in the concerns of their Brooklyn community
book and expressed myself entirely.”12 Children’s litera- in the years of Sendak’s adolescence. As in many
ture, like certain comics enterprises and other genres Yiddish-speaking immigrant households, Philip and
deemed at the time to be “low art,” offered a way to Sadie sought to prepare their children for potentially
8 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and 13 Ibid.
the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic 14 David Drake, “Born to Be Wild: Interview by David Drake,”
Books, 1994), 159. September 1999, Poz Magazine, 89, ONE Archives Foundation.
9 Chauncey, Gay New York, 86–90. Los Angeles, CA.
10 Ibid., 352. 15 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American
11 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 29. Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. American Jewish Com-
12 Bill Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’” mittee. New York Public Library. New York, NY.
PBS NOW interview, March 12, 2004, http://www.pbs.org/now/ 16 John Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of
arts/sendak.html. Maurice Sendak (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995), 79.
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dangerous situations and to protect them at all costs. Nordstrom had already begun to publish revolution-
Sadie’s mother, Minnie, who sometimes lived with ary picture books by Jewish American author Ruth
them, told Sendak about the pogroms in her Polish Krauss with illustrations by Krauss’s husband Crockett
shtetl (little town), Zakroczym, during which “the Johnson and by Mischa Richter, who, like Sendak,
Jew-haters would come into her little grocery store” was a cartoonist and child of Eastern European Jew-
and she “would push her children down into the ish immigrants. Empowering children’s immediate
cellar” to hide as the Cossacks ransacked their store experiences of the world against the lofty, removed
above.17 Philip’s mayseles (little stories), as Sendak expectations of adult society, Krauss’s The Carrot Seed
called them, included “villagers frightened of Cossacks (1945), which Johnson illustrated, made early waves
and of Polish peasants who came with clubs studded in children’s literature. This picture book offered a
with nails.”18 These stories also sometimes featured profound and straightforward message to children:
children who lost their parents, succumbing to fatal peers and elders may teach one how to participate
sleep in the snow, or who failed to be recognized by in society, but socialization should not negate one’s
their parents after a period of separation.19 Following innermost talents and desires. The following year,
his Depression-era childhood, Sendak’s adolescence Krauss’s 1946 picture book The Great Duffy, which
was split between competing and contradictory social Richter illustrated, used a comic-book superhero motif
realities—on the one hand, a traumatized local com- to validate children’s desire for unbridled freedom
munity mourning its destroyed European shtetlach and while still remaining materially dependent on adults.
slaughtered families, and, on the other hand, the pull It follows a boy named Duffy, who is frustrated by the
of an optimistic, forward-looking American dream, limitations of his young age; he is not allowed by his
which idealized childhood innocence and the con- mother to walk to school by himself. Duffy imagines
ventional, suburban family, and encouraged ignorance wearing a tight blue shirt and pants, a bright red cape,
about difficult recent pasts. Accordingly, the artist’s a black belt, boots, and a golden badge: “The good
books visually dramatize dualities of inside-outside, muscles of his shoulders and the good muscles of his
darkness-light, and fantasy-reality. legs showed plain beneath the shirt and pants. The
red cape hung from his shoulders like a flag.” His desk
Early Publications turns into a superhero’s headquarters, and suddenly
the boy, dressed in Superman’s colors, speeds off in a
In the spring of 1950, Harper editor Ursula Nordstrom car, commands a submarine, and parachutes out of a
first discovered Sendak as a mild-mannered twenty- plane to save an endangered puppy, a figure that might
two-year-old working as an FAO Schwarz window well be a projection of his own helplessness. Like Max’s
decorator. A revolution was already brewing in retreat to where the Wild Things are in Sendak’s later
children’s publishing, and Nordstrom was its leader. vision, this imaginary adventure gives Duffy solace to
Appointed director of Harper & Brothers’ children’s return to the reality of his small, dependent position
book department in 1940, she took the side of unruly as a mid-century middle-class child.20
children against what she perceived as a desensitized Nordstrom wasted no time in introducing Sendak
adult world designed to reproduce itself. She hoped to Krauss as a potential new illustrator. Krauss col-
to put an end to “bad books for good children”—the laborated with him on several works, liberating him
moralizing, vapid Dick and Jane stories—and begin to express his creativity with less self-consciousness,
a culture of “good books for bad children,” a culture especially around sexuality and gender. She spoke
of work that acknowledged and supported children bluntly to the young artist about the human body
through their frustration and emotional needs as and the naturalness of sexual desire. Sendak later
real, imperfect human beings. Upon meeting Sendak, recounted:
17 Emma Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence,” 19 Muriel Harris, “Impressions of Sendak,” Elementary English
The Believer, November/December 2012, http://www.believermag. 48, no. 7 (November 1971): 825–832, repr. in Conversations with
com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak. Maurice Sendak, ed. Peter C. Kunze (Jackson: University Press of
18 Sendak in John Burningham, ed., When We Were Young Mississippi, 2016), 41.
(Bloomsbury: London, 2004), 122. 20 Ruth Krauss, The Great Duffy, illustr. Mischa Richter (New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1946).
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Ruth—to me, timid Brooklyn boy—her ability to talk to stereotypically gendered behaviors, leading the
about the body and its orifi[ces] was an amazing adven- artist to alter, for the final publication, the sexes and
ture. I was both shocked and so elated that my thoughts gender expressions of some of the children in the book.
were not sick and putrid, as I thought they were, as I As he later joked: “There are, alas, some suspiciously
suspect most young people of that generation thought hermaphroditic-looking kids lurking in the pages.”27 In
that what they were thinking was sick. Because how
one image, for example, beside the caption “A mus-
could you know? No one else talked about it. No one
would confirm your fantasies or answer your questions.21
tache is to wear on Halloween,” a child in an oversized
blazer stands beside a child in a skirt, each wearing a
Krauss had studied anthropology under Margaret Mead dark mustache and extending a limp wrist into the air.
and reassured the young, repressed Sendak with her In another scene, we see a boy wearing an apron tied
openness about sex and the human body. Sendak con- with a large bow as he diligently washes dishes. Sendak
trasted Krauss with his own mother, noting that Krauss also included a smiling boy pushing a stroller of kittens,
was very interested in sex. She loved things of the body. a girl valiantly leading a processional march, and girls
She was very unusual in that department, too, in her and boys working together to build a wooden structure.
ability to talk about such things. I was stunned. I lived in The book sold over eighty thousand copies by its fifth
Brooklyn. I didn’t know women knew what happened to year in publication and, Leonard Marcus writes, first
them until it happened because that was what my mother established Sendak as “a talent to reckon with.”28 To
always said—that men were plunderers and pigs, and write the book, which was published as a sequence of
one had to endure it. That was part of what the marriage definitions that exude children’s logic, Krauss studied
thing was all about—a woman’s endurance. God forbid children at the progressive Bank Street School, col-
she should enjoy it. And then to meet Ruth Krauss who lecting definitions offered to her by the toddlers and
boasted of her sexuality.22
preschoolers on three-by-five-inch index cards.29 Lack-
Krauss’s sensibilities shaped Sendak’s aesthetic and ing a plot, the book was an “anomaly” in children’s
taste. He once stated: “I think my entire training was literature; it was also the first modern children’s book
Ruth Krauss, working with her.”23 Sendak absorbed to come directly from the mouths of children.30 Marcus
her frank demeanor and aversion to prudishness and identifies “the keynote of Sendak’s vision of childhood”
“middle-class” inhibitions, freeing himself to access the as an “ultimate faith in the resilience of children.”
monstrosities and animal passions of childhood, which The “stumpy, dark-haired unattractiveness,” “quirky
were then taboo in American children’s publishing.24 He proportions,” and weighty line quality of his drawings
later confessed: “I’ve taken on so many of her traits and of children in A Hole Is to Dig, as well as the chil-
Ursula’s traits. These were my models. And I will not tol- dren’s “rambunctious, self-absorbed, generally unruly
erate oblique language. She taught me how to say ‘fuck behavior” and the “anarchic spirit” of his design, which
you.’ I never said things like that until Ruth said them.”25 placed figures on the page in a “freewheeling” manner,
Sendak’s first collaboration with Krauss, A Hole Is “signaled a radical departure from the sun-splashed ide-
to Dig (1952), helped him first put into practice some alization of picture-book convention.”31 Commenting
of the queer liberation he experienced through her on his drawings of Brooklyn children, Sendak said:
mentorship.26 Krauss corrected drafts of the artwork “They’re all a kind of a caricature of me. They look as
in which, she felt, Sendak constrained boys and girls if they’ve been hit on the head and hit so hard they
21 Philip Nel, “‘Don’t Assume Anything’: A Conversation with 27 “Eulogy for Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak,” 1993, 3, GEN MSS
Maurice Sendak,” from interviewer’s private collection, June 28, 1199, box 1, Lillian Hoban Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manu-
2001, repr. in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 133. script Library, Yale University. New Haven, CT.
22 Ibid., 131. 28 Leonard S. Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work: Fear-
23 Sound recording, “Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak,” ful Symmetries: Maurice Sendak’s Picture Book Trilogy and the
1973, box 2, folders 8–9, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Making of an Artist,” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist
Authors and Illustrators, Loyola Marymount University Archives and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
and Special Collections. Los Angeles, CA. 2013), 18; Philip Nel, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an
24 Jennifer M. Brown, “The Rumpus Goes On: Max, Maurice Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Chil-
Sendak and a Clan of Bears Pay Tribute to a Lifelong Mentorship,” dren’s Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 166.
Publishers Weekly 252, no. 16 (April 18, 2005): 19. 29 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 18.
25 Nel, “Don’t Assume Anything,” 133. 30 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 40, 42.
26 Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak, A Hole Is to Dig (New York: 31 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 18.
Harper, 1952).
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weren’t ever going to grow up anymore.”32 Thus, in spoke and behaved with sanitized propriety. Moreover,
addition to being sometimes ambiguously gendered, during his first years with Harper Sendak also illus-
these Brooklyn kids were “old before their time … Most trated books for Jewish organizations in a manner that
of them were Jewish, and they may well look like little contrasted with Taylor’s prim stylizations. He rendered
greenhorns just off the boat. They had—some of them, Jewish youth as quirky, emotive, and anxiously inward.
anyway—a kind of bowed look, as if the burdens of A first example was Good Shabbos, Everybody by Robert
the world were on their shoulders.”33 Sendak did not Garvey, which was published by the United Synagogue
intend for the children of his early books to look like Commission on Jewish Education in 1951, the same year
anxious, elderly people, as critics described them. He that Taylor’s bestseller was released. Using a scratchy,
was simply depicting the way he and his Brooklyn peers spare line that leaves forms disconnected, almost evap-
looked to him—vastly different from the normative orating from the page, Sendak draws a young brother
children of earlier picture books, children from “other and sister contorting and flailing their bodies as they
neighborhoods and planets.”34 As I will continue to roller skate, twist and turn, and move through their
argue, Sendak drew children not as idealized young surroundings. The content of the pictures emphasizes
citizens, but as queer survivors—a revolutionary act closeness between family members in an ethnically
in the United States of the 1950s. Jewish atmosphere. The children stand beside a table
For Krauss’s I’ll Be You and You Be Me (1954), for set with an ornate Kiddush cup that towers over them;
example, Sendak visualized “Skippy” and “Hoppy” as their grandfather appears bald and corpulent with a
two boys holding hands. To illustrate the line “You large nose and slanted eyes—his countenance more
take my name and I’ll take yours,” Sendak again drew childlike than patriarchal as he scratches his nose
two boys, this time leaning their heads against each and slouches in his chair.36 Following this work, Sen-
other. A draft of the illustration for the line “We’d be dak’s drawings for Little Stories on Big Subjects (1955)
like twins” renders two girls clasping arms, their heads by Gladys Baker Bond, which was published by the
resting against each other. These visual moments com- Anti-Defamation League (ADL), continued to visually
prise the first depictions of same-sex affection in any convey the queer sensitivities of child outsiders. His
of Krauss’s published work, and possibly in American images of Johnny, a bullied protagonist of one story,
children’s books more broadly. In Janice May Udry’s reveal a boy with dark hair and a downward-gazing,
Let’s Be Enemies (1961), Sendak also placed two boys meek expression. Johnny is tricked by a group of other
cheek-to-cheek with arms wrapped around one another boys, whose staring “blue eyes and gray eyes and green
followed by a scene in which the two become cozy in eyes” make him “uncomfortable” and warn him of the
a narrow bed together with satisfied smiles. In another danger that awaits him. In another image, Sendak
pencil study for a scene in which the boys reconcile, draws Johnny, still gazing downward, knees bent, with
Sendak wrote himself a note to move their bodies his hands tenderly placed on the shoulders of another
closer together.35 Perhaps the artist was thinking purely boy, a new friend who, unlike Johnny, stands tall with
of spatial layout, or maybe these minor decisions reflect lighter hair, his legs and neck straightened as he gazes
a conscious desire to reach young people s truggling— warmly into Johnny’s eyes; crosshatched like the aes-
as he had—with queer feelings amid oppressive social thetic of Max’s domestic surroundings in Wild Things,
constraint. the scene is almost romantic in the unusual tenderness
While Sendak’s mid-century Harper illustrations that it allows between two boys, one of them marked
lacked the explicit Jewishness of Taylor’s All of a Kind explicitly as an ethnic outsider.37
Family, their lovable awkwardness, flamboyance, and Beyond these early illustrations, Sendak channeled
wild expressiveness offered a more inclusive emotional his own personal vision into work that was not nomi-
landscape than did Taylor’s, whose Jewish characters nally Jewish or queer but exuded feelings and dilemmas
32 Quoted in Nat Hentoff, “Among the Wild Things,” New 35 Pencil draft, Maurice Sendak, “Let’s Be Enemies,” Maurice Sen-
Yorker, January 15, 1966, https://www.newyorker.com/maga- dak Papers, Kerlan Collection, Elmer Andersen Library, University
zine/1966/01/22/among-the-wild-things. of Minnesota Libraries. Minneapolis, MN.
33 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 26. 36 Sendak also illustrated Hyman and Alice Chanover’s Happy
34 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Hanukah, Everybody (1954), which was also published by the United
Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. American Jewish Com- Synagogue Commission.
mittee. New York Public Library. New York, NY. 37 Gladys Baker Bond, Seven Little Stories on Big Subjects (New
York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1955).
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Fig. 1. Golan Moskowitz, Author's Sendak Collection, 2019, photograph. (Collection of Author).
of internalized otherness. The same year as his ADL name painted on it by the mast, a visual prototype for
work, Sendak conceived of Where the Wild Thing Are Max’s later vessel, which is also labeled with the child’s
initially as Where the Wild Horses Are, a vision gener- first name. When we first meet Kenny’s “lonely horse,”
ated in therapy of “something, or someone, or some however, he appears on Kenny’s roof and is depicted in
little animal, getting out of some enclosure.”38 He first a muted wash and a scratchy, unresolved line similar
pictured it as “a sequence of drawings without words to that of Good Shabbos, Everybody, eliciting a tone of
of a little boy who stumbles almost haphazardly into irresolution and vulnerable exposure. The scene is an
a strange place where wild horses are running tem- outdoor composition in which Kenny steps onto his
pestuously about. And he tries his best to stop the balcony to peer upward toward a moon and starry
stampede.”39 At the end of Kenny’s Window (1956) sky. The horse sits on top of Kenny’s roof, leaping
(fig. 1), the first book that Sendak both wrote and moonward on the next page. A distanced composi-
illustrated, Kenny rides an imaginary horse, which is tion of lamppost-lined brownstones cues the viewer
rendered in shaded watercolor to produce a level of into Kenny’s longing for his departed companion and
anatomical realism and muscular heft. Standing on the secret nature of their bond. An isolated Kenny
his hind legs, the horse takes Kenny forward to an decides: “I won’t tell mama or papa. They’d say it was
empowered future symbolized by a boat with Kenny’s a dream.”
38 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 20. 41 Maurice Sendak, Kenny’s Window (New York: Harper and
39 Sound recording, “Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sen- Row, 1956), 42.
dak,” 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and 42 Ink study, Maurice Sendak, “Wheel on the School,” Maurice
Illustrators, Loyola Marymount University Archives and Special Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadel-
Collections. Los Angeles, CA. phia. Philadelphia, PA.
40 Typescript draft, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” Maurice
Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection, Elmer Andersen Library, Univer-
sity of Minnesota Libraries. Minneapolis, MN.
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via free access92 Golan Moskowitz
If this moment fails to elicit recognition of displaced Kenny’s Window reflects the mid-century tension
queer feeling, Sendak immediately follows it with an between, on the one hand, idealizing a generic child
image of two toy soldiers facing each other against a image to symbolize a strong, unified national future,
snowy sky. Drawn in a cylindrical shape surrounded and, on the other hand, the desire for children to
by negative space, their interaction appears as the democratically cultivate and communicate their own
object of an illicit telescopic gaze. The soldiers, we read, individual voices, however pained or “other.” Sendak
whisper to each other, evaluating Kenny’s love for them draws Kenny as slender and blond, like the idealized
and recalling when Kenny wrapped them “warm in his American children of his time; however, unlike that
blanket,” as well as when Kenny shut one of them out ideal, he allows Kenny to erupt in moments of vindic-
on his windowsill. Their concerns are about exposure, tiveness, anger, and greed. The book is dedicated to
concealment, and acceptance—“He hides us under his Sendak’s parents, to Nordstrom, and to his therapist,
pillow and pretends he doesn’t know where we are,” Bertram Slaff, who was also gay and Jewish. It took
one reminds the other. “Let’s run away,” the other inspiration from psychoanalyst Dorothy Baruch’s
suggests. Ultimately, Kenny tenderly rubs his finger clinical study of an apathetic and seemingly autistic
over their “chipped places” and promises to take care boy named Kenneth (“One Little Boy”).43 Sendak was
of them “always.” “blindsided” by Kenneth, “by his inability to commu-
One might read Kenny’s toy soldiers and imaginary nicate,” admitting, “Kenny’s troubles suggested my
horse as stand-ins for his friend, David, a more concrete childhood to me. I had been that lonely.”44 Kenny’s
object of the boy’s affection. The book begins with Window pushed the boundaries of the time by allowing
Kenny’s dream about a garden in which he longs to a child to express anger, to be unfair, and to be cruel
live, and earlier drafts include David in this longing. in his struggle, through fantasy play, to gain control
A four-legged rooster who serves as gatekeeper to over his anxieties and fears.
the garden appears on an oversized toy train, which Sendak’s early depictions of queer longing reflected
moves across the page into a darkened section in which not only a covert sexuality but also a heightened,
the clear lines of its form dissolve into crosshatching almost romantic investment in familial bonds that
beneath a crescent moon and starry sky, motifs and reflected his Eastern European Jewish background and
visual language also evident in Wild Things. While early appeared unusual in a culture of American individual-
drafts have Kenny pleading with the rooster for a life ism. In the aforementioned Good Shabbos, Everybody,
shared with David in the garden, the published version the sibling pair clumsily clutch each other’s bodies
leaves David out of the dream—an omission that both in an anxious, off-kilter embrace, their eyes gazing
simplifies the story and offers clues about the queer distractedly and almost sadly into the distance, the
longings that may have helped motivate the work.40 softness of their expressions clashing with the urgency
Toward the end of the book, Sendak draws Kenny of their physical postures. The younger brother’s mouth
and David in a romantic pose that is reminiscent of is obstructed by his sister’s imposing elbow as he lifts
Romeo and Juliet: David, with a gaping mouth, looks his back leg like an Old Hollywood starlet swooning at
upward at Kenny from the sidewalk and across the a kiss. Sendak’s voice as a queer Jewish artist continued
page’s text; Kenny leans over his window ledge with a to reveal itself in collaborations with his brother, Jack,
gentle expression.41 The tenderness of this image recalls for Harper in the later 1950s. Reflecting their father and
an earlier illustration by Sendak for Meindert DeJong’s maternal grandmother’s Yiddish bedtime stories, the
Wheel on the School (1954) two years earlier; Sendak Sendak brothers’ collaborations convey otherworldly
draws a moment of bliss shared between two boys in folk traditions and celebrate positions of affective
an open field—one reclines on his back, smiling, while difference and peculiarities of intuition. In an early
the other rests his hand on his friend’s abdomen, gazing example, The Happy Rain (1956), which was written by
downward at him with a familiar warmth.42 Jack and illustrated by twenty-eight-year-old Maurice,
43 Dorothy W. Baruch, One Little Boy (New York: Julian Press, 45 Jack Sendak, The Happy Rain, illustr. Maurice Sendak (New
1952). York: HarperCollins, 1956), 8–9.
44 Cynthia Zarin, “Not Nice” and Kenneth Kidd, “Wild Things and 46 In Yingl Tsingl Khvat, a Jewish boy brings snow back to his
Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picture-Book Psychologist,” in The rainy village, which cannot function properly in the rain and
Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, ed. Lynne Vallone and mud during the winter. He does so with the help of a Christian
Julia Mickenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213. nobleman, who rescues Yingl from a muddy ditch and offers him
a magic ring and a horse.
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via free accessBefore Wild Things: Maurice Sendak and the Postwar Jewish American Child 93
children grow up in the fictional village of Troekan, In Circus Girl (1957), which was also written by Jack
in which it is the norm for the skies to pour rain that and illustrated by Maurice, Flora, the protagonist, is a
drenches their clothes and muddies the streets. The social outsider who ventures away from the circus in
villagers are traumatized when the rain suddenly ceases which she was born. Spying on people in a residential
and the sun comes out to shine: neighborhood, Flora learns about “how the outside
people live.” Sendak draws her as a dramatic but self-
Can you imagine how it would be if the sun suddenly
disappeared? Or if the moon disappeared? Or the stars? possessed figure, her posture elegantly self-conscious,
Or the sky altogether? Well, so it was with the people of her eyes often closed. Any sensitive or emotionally
Troekan and their rain … The people of Troekan were endangered child might relate to Flora when she
certain that it indeed was the end of the world. They tightropes across the neighborhood street to spy on
shut their shutters tight. They shook with fear. And they “normal,” uncomplicated people. Naomi Prawer Kadar
wept, and they wailed, and they wrung their hands…. even uses a tightrope metaphor to describe the specific
The comforting dark clouds were gone; now there was plight of first-generation American Jewish children as
only the harsh, glaring sun. And the soft, warm mud had their parents’ Yiddish language waned in Jewish Ameri-
become hard, and difficult to walk on…. Very wisely, to can institutions of the 1940s and 1950s: “Walking the
protect themselves from the terrible sunny weather, most tightrope of becoming integrated into American society
of the villagers carried umbrellas.45
while maintaining a close connection to the Jewish
Attempting to bring back the rain, the villagers of roots and linguistic heritage of the immigrant genera-
Troekan follow various misinformed advisors and pro- tion ultimately proved to be an impossible task.”47 In
ceed to fire canons into the sky while standing upside one image of Circus Girl, the viewer stands outside with
down and wearing paper bags over their heads—all Flora, looking through a window into a warm, domestic
to no avail—until Raymond and Yolande, a young dinner scene in which adults prepare the meal and a
brother-and-sister pair, save the day by considering seated boy engages with a happy puppy. Casting an
the clouds’ feelings and sending them a note. Drawn elongated shadow against the white house, Flora the
similarly to Kenny of Kenny’s Window, Raymond balletic loner stands in contrast to the relaxed child
is depicted peering out his window with Yolande inside. Her feet parted in fourth position, with a bow
huddled on the bed by his side; this close sibling pair on her waist and a band constricting her head, she is
share not only a bedroom but also a secret imaginary a child who is poised to work and perform in order to
world. Troekan, in its drastic communal reaction to a belong. Unlike the children depicted in All of a Kind
change in the weather and in its ultimate reliance on Family, Flora and other children Sendak visualized in
the emotional directness of children, recalls the village his early work did not seamlessly fit into their wider
in Mani Leib’s Yiddish children’s book Yingl Tsingl surroundings. However, they exhibited genuine curios-
Khvat (1922), which was illustrated by El Lissitzky.46 ity, frustration, loneliness, and imagination in ways that
Like Lissitzky, Sendak clothes his characters in modest spoke to the untapped emotional experiences of most
Eastern European fashion, the women in long skirts children in a cultural era that emphasized assimilation
and headscarves, the men mostly bearded and wearing and social conformism.
hats. The last illustration depicts the happy villagers
in a joyous hora, holding hands in a circle beneath the Conclusion
rain, their feet kicking in the rhythm of a grapevine.
In the center of the circle, Sendak draws Raymond As postwar children’s media and the Jewish American
and Yolande smiling with eyes closed, heads leaning establishment sought to shape a unified, optimistic
one against the other. These siblings find solace and generation by extolling the virtues of democracy
comfort in each other amid a family and community and equality across social barriers, both also implic-
that feels uneasy about sunny optimism and prefers itly reinforced norms of heteronormative bourgeois
heavy, emotive rain—a possible stand-in for the tone Whiteness that alienated queer, non-acculturated,
of Jewish Brooklyn in the wake of the Holocaust. and other minority children of the 1940s and 1950s.
47 Naomi Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools
and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917–1950 (Waltham,
MA: Brandeis University Press, 2016), 235.
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via free access94 Golan Moskowitz
While Sendak’s work, too, favored White (albeit often to these early experiences of becoming aware of the
Eastern European Jewish) depictions of children social order, which encroaches and separates one from
through those years, it also spoke to the frustrations primary caretakers and basic comforts, leaving one to
and desires of excluded and hybrid subjects. His work manage alone through wild, raw emotion and instinct.
emerged through recollections of his own Depression- To varying extents, all children are forced to come to
era Brooklyn childhood feelings in a Yiddish-speaking terms with and survive the external forces that carve
family, which were filtered through the perspective into one’s physiology, orientations, and relational status
of a covert gay youth in a homophobic society. His in order to suit a seemingly nebulous social system.
own marginalized subjectivity separated him from Taken together with mid-century efforts to empower
dominant social meanings in an era that prized het- and unite American youth through normalization
eronormative social conformity and thus threatened across social divides, Sendak’s increasingly unyield-
his vitality. Children’s literature initially appealed to ing devotion to the emotional authenticity of the
him as a place to express his creativity in “hiding,” and endangered, uninitiated child encouraged forming
it helped solidify his identification with children as subjects to honor their inner worlds and intuitions,
socially uninitiated, creative sufferers. As an artist, he even against pressures to unify around establishment
sought to bridge his multiple worlds by exploring how visions of social progress. More importantly, Sendak
any child, but especially the frustrated or emotionally offered hope to those who failed to belong, or were
neglected child, manages to comprehend and survive barred from belonging, in dominant mid-century social
the social order, the source of exclusion and danger. visions—hope of finding meaning and self-possession
In his work, peculiar and sensitive children tightrope through embodied persistence and brave creativity.
across limbo realms situated between ethnically oth-
ered family members and a society that seeks to impose Golan Moskowitz is currently a visiting scholar at the
demands of assimilation upon them without meeting Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and a visiting lecturer at
them where they are. These children move “from the Tufts University, where he teaches “Queerness and Jew-
inside out,” experiencing the world through emotion ish Identity.” He holds a PhD in Near Eastern & Judaic
and sensation in ways that evade dominant social Studies from Brandeis University and has taught Jewish
conventions. All people, minorities or not, might relate studies courses at Smith College in Northampton, MA.
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