Wild Outside in the Night: , Queer American Jewishness, and the Child

A Dissertation

Presented to

The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University

Near Eastern & Judaic Studies

ChaeRan Freeze, Advisor

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

by

Golan Moskowitz

May 2018

The signed version of this form is on file in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

This dissertation, directed and approved by Golan Moskowitz’s Committee, has been accepted and approved by the Faculty of Brandeis University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of:

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Eric Chasalow, Dean Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Dissertation Committee:

ChaeRan Freeze, Dept. of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies

Jonathan D. Sarna, Dept. of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies

Ellen Kellman, Dept. of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies

Kenneth Kidd, University of Florida (Gainesville), English Department

© Copyright by

Golan Moskowitz

2018

Acknowledgements

It is difficult to know how to sufficiently thank ChaeRan Freeze, my graduate advisor and dissertation chair, who has also been a champion of my work over the past seven-and-a-half years. I am indebted to ChaeRan for her belief and investment in my perspective and abilities; for her critical readings of my work-in-progress, recommendation letters, stimulating feedback, generous professional invitations, scholarly opportunities, countless pep talks, and comforting words; and for the incredible example she has offered me as a scholar, leader, educator, and human being. Thank you, ChaeRan, for taking such a central and dedicated role in my training and development, as well as in this dissertation. In the spirit of Maurice Sendak, whose work developed in part through the mentorship of bold and sensitive visionaries like and , I dedicate this dissertation to you.

I am also so grateful to those professors, mentors, and colleagues who met or corresponded with me, suggested sources, recommended and invited me for grants and other professional opportunities, and helped me to think through my theoretical and historical framework for this project: Jonathan Sarna, Sylvia Fuks Fried, Eugene Sheppard, Ellen Kellman,

Sylvia Barack Fishman, David Ellenson, Kenneth Kidd, Doris Bergen, Laura Jockusch, Ellen

Smith, Ilana Szobel, Jonathan Krasner, Antony Polonsky, Jehuda Mirsky, Ben Ravid, John Plotz,

Paul Morrison, Mark Davila, Marc Michael Epstein, Samantha Baskind, Spencer Keralis, Dawn

Skorczewski, Susan Lichtman, and Robin Miller. Early in my research stage, Jeffrey Shandler was also kind enough to speak over coffee in the and to discuss ideas with me.

iv Joshua Lambert also spoke with me in Boston during the early stages of my writing. Thank you,

Jodi Eichler-Levine, for sharing a draft of your article on Sendak before its publication, as well as for offering steadfast moral support in our passing interactions.

As a graduate assistant at the Tauber Institute from 2010-2017 I also benefited much from working in an office beside Sylvia Fuks Fried and Eugene Sheppard. During our many office chats and car rides, Sylvia shared powerful wisdom from her expertise within academic writing, editing, and publishing, and she constantly challenged me to ask good questions and to think critically about how to locate sources, frame data, and tell a captivating story. She also located and shared several articles on Sendak, children’s literature, and graphic narrative.

Offering research and editorial assistance to Jehuda Reinharz during my time at Tauber also provided important early archival experience and exposure to high-quality scholarship in various stages. I thank him, as well as Sylvia, for respecting my work and instilling confidence in me as a writer and editor. I also thank Jonathan Decter for supporting my work over the years and providing opportunities to gain further freelance experience as a proofreader. Miriam Hoffman and Joanna Gould also offered moral support, warm friendship, and a constant, listening ear during my research and writing process. Additionally, I am grateful to Joanne Arnish and Jean

Mannion of the Department of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies, who repeatedly guided me through crucial administrative processes with grace and generosity, as well as consistently boosted morale in the department throughout my years as at Brandeis.

I am grateful to Jonathan Weinberg, long-time friend of Sendak and his late partner,

Eugene Glynn, as well as Consulting Curator and Director of Research at the Maurice Sendak

Foundation, for speaking candidly with me, permitting me to quote him in this study, and for discussing my approach and recommending secondary sources that helped shape my theoretical

v framework. I also thank Christopher Mattaliano, general director of the Portland Opera, for allowing me to quote his memories of Sendak, as well as Katrina Galka for putting Mr.

Mattaliano and I in touch. James Bohlman, a long-time friend of Sendak’s, was also kind enough to correspond with me by email about his memories of Sendak.

I thank the research librarians and archivists at all of the archival locations listed in my bibliography for lending their assistance and invaluable knowledge in support of my research.

Linnea Anderson of the Social Welfare History Archives in Minneapolis was especially generous, speaking with me in depth about the Comics Project files. Lyudmila Sholokhova at

YIVO also deserves my gratitude for meeting with me to discuss my project in relation to research on Yiddish children’s literature and the holdings at YIVO. I owe thanks to Melissa

Watterworth Batt and Kristin Eshelman at the Dodd Center in Connecticut for kindly facilitating my research on Sendak’s relationships and collaborations with Ruth Krauss and .

Patrick Rodgers was immensely helpful at the Rosenbach Archives and by email, sharing ideas, comprehensive knowledge of Sendak’s life and work, and contacts, including Ben Ross, a distant relative of Sendak’s, whom I also thank for conversing with me by telephone. Elizabeth Anthony of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum deserves my gratitude for generously searching the museum’s ITS records for information on Sendak’s relatives. Thank you also to

Dienke Hondius for offering me a tour of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and sharing guest books from the year of Sendak’s visit there.

Additionally, I thank Sylvia Fuks Fried for inviting me to present a draft of Chapter Two at the Jewish Studies Colloquium of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry; I also thank the participants of that meeting – including ChaeRan Freeze, Jonathan Sarna, Ellen Smith,

Ilana Szobel, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Ellen Kellman, Jonathan Krasner, David Ellenson, Laura

vi Jockusch, Jonathan Decter, Jon Levisohn, Eugene Sheppard, Sabine von Mering, and Eva

Gurevich – for offering useful and supportive feedback that informed my writing. I am also grateful to Shulamit Reinharz, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Debby Olins, and others at the Hadassah-

Brandeis Institute, which has supported my work both through research awards, as well as by featuring me as a speaker within their visiting scholars series. I began my graduate school experience as an intern at HBI and remain indebted to the institute for propelling my career and offering support throughout the years.

The preparation of this dissertation was made possible by a grant from the Memorial

Foundation for Jewish Culture. An Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Year Fellowship also offered the time, academic community, and professional guidance necessary for me to complete the dissertation by this spring; I am grateful to Gregory Freeze and Sara Shostak, who led the fellowship meetings and offered critical feedback and helpful sources, as well as to the other

Mellon fellows in my cohort for offering their careful reading, reactions, and suggestions to portions of the dissertation-in-progress. This project was also supported by a Billie M. Levy

Travel and Research Grant, graduate research grants from the Tauber Institute for the Study of

European Jewry, grants for travel to conferences and research sites from the Brandeis Graduate

School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies, and travel grants from the YIVO Institute and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry to present work-in-progress at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference.

Thank you to Lynn Caponera for granting me permission on behalf of the Maurice

Sendak Foundation to quote recordings and transcripts of Maurice Sendak’s interviews and public addresses. I also thank Jennifer Crow of the Arne Nixon Center for permission to quote the correspondence between Sendak and Arne Nixon; Wendy Hagenmaier and the Georgia

vii Institute of Technology Archives for permission to quote from the Benjamin Hirsch materials;

Loyola Marymount University for permission to quote Sendak’s interviews with Edna Edwards; and the National Human Services Assembly for permission to quote materials from the Comics

Project files housed at the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of .

Lastly, I owe much credit and gratitude to my family and friends. I am thankful for the meaningful solidarity and thought-provoking conversations I have enjoyed over the years at

Brandeis with fellow graduate students, including Aviv Ben-Or, Eva Gurevich, Tom Frydel,

Orah Minder, Rachel Bernstein, Noam Sienna, Iddo Haklai, Allyson Gonzalez, Karen Spira,

Amber Taylor, Alexandra Herzog, Geraldine Gudefin, Kendra McKinney, Celene Ibrahim,

Mostafa Hussein, Emily Fine, Courtney Fields, Blossom Cohon, and Zachary Albert. I am especially indebted to my loving and hardworking parents, Sarit and Mark Moskowitz; to my incredible sisters, Tamar Moskowitz Jacobson and Elior Moskowitz; to my inspiring, courageous grandparents, Esther and Moshe Signer, and Marilyn and Herb Moskowitz; and to Trey Pratt, whose dedication, love, and generous spirit have helped me to see the many labors of this project to fruition.

viii ABSTRACT

Wild Outside in the Night: Maurice Sendak, Queer American Jewishness, and the Child

A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts

By Golan Moskowitz

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), widely credited for “wrench[ing] the out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plung[ing] it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche,” was perhaps the most emotionally profound and widely beloved children’s book artist of the twentieth century.1 Born a sickly child to Polish Jewish immigrants in , Sendak’s work helped revise conceptions of modern American childhood by drawing from his experience of first-generation American acculturation, his alienation as a closeted queer person before the advent of mainstream “gay” identities, and his emotional proximity to WWII losses.

Drawing from his own boyhood, which was suffused with his parents’ memories of Old

World Poland, the social conservatism of the Depression years, the frenetic energy of emergent popular culture and mass media, and the news of his relatives’ deaths in Nazi Europe, Sendak’s work embodied a perspective that challenged midcentury American culture’s ideas about childhood. He insisted that children, like other marginalized people, were not as simple or

1 Margalit Fox, “Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83,” Times, May 8, 2012. ix frivolous as they were painted by the mainstream; rather, they were suppressed human beings capable of great seriousness, insight, emotional intensity, and perspective; and they deserved greater dignity in the wider culture.

Based on Sendak’s children’s books, interviews, and extensive archival materials, this dissertation explores his artistic investment in the figure of the alienated, disenfranchised, and endangered child into whom he channeled his own emotional stance of apartness as a closeted, queer, first-generation Jewish American marked by coming of age in a socially conservative era and by secondhand experiences of WWII traumas. It seeks to illustrate how Sendak’s work revised the image of the “generic child” with what Susan Sontag has identified as two important shapers of modern cultural sensibilities: Jewish moral seriousness (a concern for maintaining justice, honesty, and empathy) and gay irony (attention to the constructed and performed nature of seemingly natural social realities). Speaking from his own childhood experience, Sendak insisted on the artificiality of middle-class childhood ideals and proclaimed that children are not blank, innocent angels on whom to project adult aspirations, but real people who face difficult emotional and material challenges in a sometimes hostile, competitive world. To better understand and contextualize Sendak’s vision, this interdisciplinary study situates him in the broader histories of modern Jewish immigration and acculturation; the evolving American-

Jewish family in the twentieth century, which invested greater resources toward its children; the evolution of mainstream Holocaust memory; and the popular culture of New York from the

1920s through the early twenty-first century. It represents the first study to explore the intersectionality of Jewish, American, and queer subjectivities in Maurice Sendak’s children’s books, as well as the contribution of these factors to evolving ideas about modern childhood.

x Contents

Acknowledgements………………………………………….…………………………………....iv

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...ix

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter One: Between Mourning and Optimism: Sendak and American Childhood at

Midcentury……………………………………………………………………………….44

Chapter Two: “The Boy of Today Loves Speed”: Sendak on Interwar Jewish Childhood in

Flux……………………………………………………………………………………..103

Chapter Three: “Not for Children”: Child’s Play, Social Stigma, and the Creative Artist……..155

Chapter Four: “The Price of Love is Terror”: Sendak’s Interiority and Self-Preservation…….206

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...265

Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………273

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………345

xi Introduction

There is a truism that claims that the worst thing a teacher can do for a child is to paint a picture of the world in which that child cannot imagine existing. Until the second half of the twentieth century, American children’s books conveyed a world centered almost exclusively on angelic,

Anglo-Saxon Protestant children. Boys were boys, girls were girls, and the occasional depictions of Jewish and other ethnically or racially othered children were highly curated and sanitized for general audiences. In 1950-1951, Jacob Golub of the Jewish Book Annual wrote, “We are neglecting our children. […] almost as many books go out of print every year as are added. Thus we are barely holding our own in a land and at a time when we are supposed to become the cultural leaders of world Jewry. It must become someone’s duty to see to it that new forces are drawn in and that our children’s literature expands.”1 It is remarkable, given these circumstances, that the most renowned picture-book creator of the twentieth century would be a queer Jewish son of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European immigrants raised in Brooklyn during the Depression and WWII.2 With limited representations of children like himself, Maurice (Moishe) Bernard

Sendak (1928-2012) needed to create the personal mirrors unavailable to him in the books and teachers of his youth. He did so with such palpable levels of passion, obsession, and care as to become perhaps the most beloved and powerful picture-book artist of our time. Indeed, at the time of Sendak’s passing in 2012, his books had sold almost thirty million copies in the United

States alone, Where the Wild Things Are (1963) having sold over nineteen million copies

1 worldwide. As one obituary declared, Wild Things had offered “a turning point not only in his own career but in the history of children’s books.”3

Though the picture-book form grew as a modernist innovation, Sendak’s contributions to it drew from the anti-modernist emotional seriousness of his own social-historical position, a position he experienced as a permanent state of question and endangerment, an endless problem to solve by diving inward. Sendak’s biography offers the perspective of a social outcast estranged from both parents and peers. For an unusually sensitive, artistic child like Sendak, school was an especially detestable site – he recounted suffering attacks on his creative character and pressure to conform to a climate of impersonal, aggressive competition. Whenever he caused a teacher stress, he wrote, his parents took the side of the teacher, “out of a deep respect for educated people.”4 A misfit within a system that acculturated children into American democracy through enforced conformity to rigid behavioral rules and cultural norms of the Anglo-Saxon middle class, the young Sendak yearned for creative outlets for his serious and “different” inner world. “School fundamentally destroys,” he claimed. “Life, living, and working at your art are the only answer for artists.” He saw the art of as an affirmation of his belief that society misunderstands, mistreats, and hurts children by socializing them into zombies through their schooling.5 Muriel Harris describes Sendak’s impulses as those of a Renaissance-era artist, preferring apprenticeship and immersion in the artist’s trade over dutiful participation in a system designed to “civilize” him and subdue his passions.6 Sendak remained a misfit focused on serious emotional pursuits, rather than giving in to social pressures to conform to the popularized

American styles of casual ease.7 “Precocious” is a word often attributed to children whose serious attributes and needs are deemed inappropriate, exceptional, or unseemly by a culture that asks children to be quiet and to mold themselves to a way of being that is easier and safer for the

2 adults interacting with them. Sendak developed serious, artistic tendencies that would lead him to defy the social forces that asked him to feign qualities like innocence, boyish athleticism, and wholesomeness for the sake of an impersonal public that did not suit him.

In cases like Sendak’s, sitting on the margins of a cultural turning point, the artificial boundaries placed around bourgeois childhood stood in tension with the familial norms of working-class homes, acculturating immigrants, and those marked by war traumas. For weeks at a time, Sendak’s maternal grandmother, Minnie Schindler, a sharp and religiously devout Polish

Jew who spoke only Yiddish, lived in the Sendaks’ home, recounted memories from the Old

World, and insisted on heeding folk superstitions, such as dressing the sickly infant Sendak in white to ward off the Angel of Death. Like other immigrants and survivors, Sendak’s parents,

Sadie (Sarah) (1895-1968) and Philip (Pinchas) (1896-1970), did not shield their children from the harsh realities of life and its accompanying dangers, especially as Jews. Philip told his children bedtime stories that involved children losing their parents and dying in the cold snow.

Sadie recounted memories of hiding in the cellar from murderous Cossacks. Accordingly, Tony

Kushner describes Sendak as having “a Yiddische kopf, a large, brooding, circumspect, and contemplative mind” with an “enduring sense of displacement, yearning for and not securely possessing a home […a] conviction, passed through hundreds of generations, that true home is elsewhere, promised but not attained, perhaps not even attainable.”8 A youngest child and a queer Jewish boy struggling to survive a difficult urban childhood in a difficult period of

American and Jewish history, Sendak cultivated a sensitive relationship with his surroundings – both within his Brooklyn home and within the urban popular culture of New York in the 1930s, in all its mechanical public spectacle and its mass-produced, individualist culture of comic books, movies, and dime novels.

3 The present interdisciplinary study is not a biography of Sendak or a survey of his works, neither is it a comprehensive study of American or Jewish American children’s literature. Rather, it critically explores Sendak’s subjectivity as an American-born but ethnically and sexually queer artist, who channeled his emotional stance of apartness from mainstream American culture through the figure of the alienated, disenfranchised, and endangered child. It sheds new light on how he employed the contested space of childhood to articulate new cultural sensibilities and survival strategies for endangered subjects in hostile environments. Drawing on the developing fields of the history of emotions and queer studies, as well as contributing to Jewish American social and cultural history, this study of Sendak offers new ways of understanding Jewish difference in America in relation to the Old World, the Holocaust, and to wider shifts in mainstream American culture of the twentieth century.

Foundational to a project that contextualizes and analyzes Sendak’s subjectivity is a consideration of the changing conceptions of childhood in Yiddish, Jewish, and American spheres, as well as in relation to the rise of literacy, public education, and children’s literature.

The following pages offer this backdrop, as well as a discussion of the emerging queer history and queer theoretical approaches to children’s literature. I end the introduction with an outline of the dissertation’s methodology and theoretical contributions, its sources, and the organization of its chapters.

Contextualizing Sendak within Jewish and American Childhood

Stemming from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century exaltations of “reason” and the coinciding reconceptualization of both the human body and the child, in particular, as a “tabula rasa,” malleable but also irrational and prone to disruption, children’s physiological drives were

4 increasingly deemed “unreasonable” by Enlightenment thought and “pathological” by early nineteenth-century science: “Evidence was interpreted to illustrate that the body of the child was particularly unstable and almost by definition, to be a child was to be at least partially, ‘ill.’”9

Moral and natural philosophers like Montaigne, Locke, and Rousseau had envisioned the child as

– rather than an inevitable copy of parents, carrying original sin – shapeable matter from which to mold an ideal future within a changing society. Accordingly, the late nineteenth century saw a golden age of children’s literature in England, inventing the modern picture book by bringing text and image into “a kinetic new relationship.”10 The modern picture book drew on Art Nouveaux, commercial art, Victorian illustration and decoration, among other elements.

By the end of the nineteenth century, forces of industrialization increasingly separating public and domestic spheres, the concept of all children’s innocence and malleable potential, protected and nurtured in the private home, came to transcend class, gender, and other social signifiers. Jews met opportunities and pressures to join and conform to wider secular-Christian society. For European and American Jews, modernization happened differently and unevenly, negotiating between models of childhood developed in self-governing Jewish corporal societies, maskilic intellectual circles, and within wider non-Jewish societies. For most non-Orthodox

American Jews, the kheyder system – in which a melamed paid by parents and the Jewish community taught male children Hebrew and Torah, often in Yiddish – gave way to co- educational secular systems of education that, in addition to teaching mathematics, English, physical education, and sciences, instilled American-Protestant ideals of order, work ethic, high standards of cleanliness, self-discipline, and patriotism.11 Shifting family structures, acculturation, and conceptions of romantic love in secular modern societies promoted emotional

5 individualism and painted attachments to the Old World as outdated, condemning such communal-based Jewish Eastern European social practices as arranged marriages and kest (the agreement of the bride’s or groom’s parents to support and sometimes house a young couple for a given period of time).12 Urban immigrant parents of the early twentieth century saw their children participate in developing a fluid, commercially inspired popular youth culture that broke with established traditions, as I explore further in Chapter Two.13 Generational tensions were further exacerbated by parents’ lack of control during the economic hardship of the Depression.14

In contrast to the wealth of studies on American childhood, there is a dearth of comprehensive works on the topic of modern Jewish children.15 Scholars have covered Jewish childhood in the broader context of education and family: male education in the kheyder system, female domestic education and schooling in certain modernizing contexts, early marriage, the convention of kest, and conscription of Jewish boys (cantonists) in the Russian military.16 A number of studies on Jewish parenting and the family describe the changes experienced in mothering and fathering over the course of the last century or so, offering some foundations for the study of the American Jewish child’s home life.17 Memoirs, select social histories, fiction, and graphic narratives have conveyed the tensions and specific struggles managed by the

American-born children of Jewish immigrants in New York.18 Generally these accounts express guilt and ambivalence about losing touch with traditional Jewish realities but ultimately embrace mainstream, middle-class American lifestyles. Immigrant writers like Mary Antin, who wrote

The Promised Land in 1912, lauded the public school system as a treasured path to American socialization and success. Historians like Eli Lederhendler, however, call for greater understanding of unusual or “queer” first-generation Jewish Americans who carved their own paths and contributions through talents cultivated in embodied Jewish difference, rather than

6 following mainstream routes of American acculturation and embourgeoisement. Complicating the established narrative of Jewish immigrants’ rise to comfortable American middle-class statuses via public education, acculturation, and suburbanization, Lederhendler takes interest in cases of the Jewish American “prodigy” and “orphan.” My study contributes to this complication of mainstream historiography by illuminating a significant Jewish American’s path to success and his creative vision through analyses of his experience of difference as a discreetly gay and emotionally isolated prodigy with serious perspectives about childhood, social disenfranchisement, and survival.19 Sendak painstakingly carved his own unusual, largely solitary path toward American success and belonging with the help of powerful, sensitive mentors, including Ruth Krauss (1901-1993), Ursula Nordstrom (1910-1988), and his therapist,

Bertram Slaff (1922-2013), who was also Jewish and gay.

To contextualize Sendak on a broader scale, it is important to consider some differences across the experiences of twentieth-century Jewish American children. In terms of cultural and familial life, those raised in working-class, Yiddish-speaking immigrant milieus cannot be uncritically lumped together with those who belonged to the mainstream, middle-class Jewish

American establishment, most of which arrived to the U.S. before 1880 and drew largely from acculturated, intellectual traditions of Reform Judaism in Central and Western Europe. Since the late nineteenth century, the latter offered books and youth periodicals to their children mainly in

English. Publications like Sabbath Visitor, created by Reform Rabbi Max Lilienthal in 1874, spoke to the “rising middle class of Jews from Central Europe” and helped children understand their Jewish heritage as a noble faith, a set of rituals, and a history, to be synthesized with the proper mores of respectable American society.20 Jonathan Sarna’s study of the Jewish

Publication Society notes that JPS struggled to obtain high quality work to publish for children in

7 its early years. For example, responding to a lack of Jewish youth fiction, in 1895 JPS advertised a $1,000 competition for the best Jewish story for young readers, ultimately designating no winner. One of the first Jewish children’s books printed in English and in color for child readers in the U.S. was Katherine Myrtilla Cohen’s A Jewish Child’s Book (1913), published in

Philadelphia for kindergarteners and focusing on religious observance.21 JPS published this book in its twenty-eighth year of existence and described it as “a twenty-eight page little volume containing twelve full-page illustrations in color of ceremonials in the Synagogue and Home,” noting that “every detail has been planned to the delight of Jewish children of kindergarten age.”22 In 1917, JPS also published The Breakfast of the Birds, Emily Solis-Cohen’s translations of children’s stories by the Russian maskil Jehudah Steinberg, illustrated in color by Deborah

Kallen (Horace Kallen’s sister).23 The press would continue to publish didactic children’s books in English “with some regularity” through the 1920s, to mixed reception.24 Focusing increasingly on scholarly publications in the first decades of the twentieth century, JPS saw children’s books as “somewhat undignified.” After WWI, however, a new industry of Jewish textbooks for children emerged, different denominations initiating their own editions through various publishers.25

Discouraged by the lack of recreational reading among Jewish children who preferred movies and other popular entertainment, Stephen Wise urged parents in 1922 with the statement,

“I do not know of a truer service that parents can render their children than to foster a taste for worth-while books.”26 Three years later, in 1925, librarian Fanny Goldstein at the Boston Public

Library established Jewish Book Week (later Jewish Book Month) in the image of Children’s

Book Week, promoting Jewish books to “arouse interest in reading and book ownership.”27

Supporting a united American Jewry by avoiding divisive, controversial perspectives and

8 focusing on educational work that suited both conservative and liberal Jewish mindsets, JPS created children’s books in the 1920s and ’30s that, Sarna writes, “dripped with syrupy didacticism” and that “told children what the Society’s authors, in good parental fashion, thought they should know and do [namely, Bible stories and ritual instruction], rather than appealing to children’s own sense of fantasy and imagination.”28

Most of New York’s Eastern European, Yiddish immigrants arrived later than their

Central and Western European coreligionists, often after the 1880s, and they were thus closer to experiences of Jewish persecution and migration, which heightened tribalism and internalized feelings of collective endangerment. Sendak’s mother, for example, had been sent to America in the first decade of the twentieth century as, in Sendak’s words, a “sixteen-year-old girl, alone.

She was told that there would be a pushcart dealer and his wife who would rent her a room and she would have someone to talk to. But shortly after she arrived, he was killed in an automobile accident. I don’t know how she survived. I mean, of course she went nuts. They were all nuts.”

Sadie was expected to earn enough money to afford the rest of the family’s passage to join her there.29 Yung-kuznye, a journal for young Yiddish workers, founded in 1924, constituted one attempt to create a literary community for those young Jewish immigrants psychologically alienated in capitalist New York by their recent experiences of war, pogroms, and revolution.30

These communities often imbued their children with highly emotional, familial attachments rooted in survivalism, and they stressed the importance of in-group loyalty, even as they pushed their children to achieve American successes. As Jewish American playwright writes, Yiddish Brooklyn children of the 1930s “were loved while at the same time inculcated with ghetto-bred tribal fearfulness and insecurity.”31 The domestic space of the home – with its special foods, songs, and rituals – remained a site for cultivating particular cultural values and

9 emotional investments, even as the home uneasily balanced Old World traditions and contemporary American bourgeois expectations.32 Gennady Estraikh’s recent work on Yiddish children’s literature notes that nineteenth-century Yiddish communities and kheyders “largely ignored children’s interests, abilities and environment.”33 Before the early twentieth century, children almost never read secular literature in Yiddish. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did Yiddish literature for children appear – beginning with Yontevdike dertseylungen (holiday tales). Mirroring the German before them, Yiddish writers like I.L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and the maskil Ayzik Meyer Dik collected folklore, some relating to children’s experiences, in efforts to preserve the culture. This began in the

1890s, with a period of increased activity after 1905.

Sendak’s parents, Philip and Sadie, both immigrated alone from shtetlakh near Warsaw,

Poland, as teenagers shortly before WWI. They both enjoyed Yiddish authors known in part for their children’s writings, such as Sholem Aleichem. As Sendak recalled it, they had met due to

Sadie’s involvement in a public reading of Sholem Aleichem at a fundraiser in the Lower East

Side for friends with tuberculosis.34 The Sendaks, like others in their milieu, encouraged their youth to soberly understand their social and political surroundings, as well as to remain astutely aware of potential dangers. Thus, as early as the interwar decades, Yiddish children’s literature, published in Europe and the U.S., handled difficult themes of war, violence, and death.35

Reflecting generations of oral storytelling in Eastern Europe, parents like Philip also shared tales with their children that handled serious, gruesome, and frightening subject matter. Philip recalled his grandfather’s transparency with him about mortality as a child and his linking of death with storytelling and family memory; he had spoken frankly with Philip in his childhood

10 about the transience of human life and the importance of telling grandchildren stories as a means of creating a positive legacy.36

Yiddish literature for children flourished with the growth of Hebrew and Yiddish modern secular schools for Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, created as Jews sought to reshape and enliven their culture.37 Naomi Prawer Kadar writes that Yiddish children’s literature was largely born of Eastern Europe’s modern secular Yiddish schools and the children’s magazines they produced, as well as Yiddish children’s magazines published in the U.S. by various social movements.38 Yiddish children’s publishing houses became successful in the 1900s-1920s in

European cities like Warsaw, Vilna, Kiev, and Berlin.39 Yiddish critic Shmuel Niger (1883-

1955) considered Yiddish children’s literature, which was a central component of Yiddish secular schools, as crucial to the survival of Yiddish culture in the early twentieth century.40

Accordingly, Kadar describes the child hero in Yiddish children’s literature as twofold: a

“diminutive stand-in, bearing the dreams of generations of forebears” and a “surrogate” for the child readers, “empowering them to confront the world around them and change it to conform to the principles that they have absorbed from their parents and teachers […,] the hopes of the older generation for the transmission and survival of their progressive Jewish cultural life in

America.”41 Yiddish children’s literature before WWI was created mainly by teachers, later also by Yiddish cultural groups. It saw its golden age between the 1917 revolution and the onset of communism in the early 1920s. Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky illustrated modernist prose and poetry composed for children by Yiddish writers like David Hofstheyn and

Der Nister.42 According to Estraikh, Chagall and Lissitzky helped develop a new avant-garde visual style in these books that “placed children’s literature at the very centre of artistic vision” in the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Based in Kiev, the Yiddishist Kultur-Lige

11 renewed the aesthetic form of children’s literature as creations in which modernist art could be integrated more organically with narrative text.43 The producers of this literature, aligned with the goals of the Kultur-Lige, “saw children’s literature as an integral part of the comprehensive project of creating a new secular Yiddish culture” during the interwar years across non- communist Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the U.S.

Internationally distributed Yiddish books like Mani Leib’s popular Yingl Tsingl Khvat

(1922), illustrated by El Lissitzky and published by the Warsaw branch of the Kultur-Lige, offered stylized, avant-garde artwork by important artists and preserved shtetl narratives of

Jewish children playing outside, studying around a single table in kheydr, and heeding physical dangers. Reflecting a childhood like that of Philip, who recalled ice skating with friends and was the son of a wealthy lumber merchant with Christian business contacts, Yingl Tsingl Khvat, which Lissitzky illustrated in a stylized manner resembling Chagall, conveys winter sports and friendly interactions between Jews and gentiles, even if the latter were depicted as physically stronger and more resourceful; in one scene, a burly Christian nobleman arrives on horseback to rescue a Jewish boy, Yingl, from a muddy ditch. In this particular story, however, the meaning of the boy’s Yiddish last name, Khvat, implies a brave and capable person; Yingl is indeed assertive enough to ask for what he needs from the gentile nobleman, requesting the man’s horse, as well as his magic ring, which Yingl uses to restore order, bringing snow back to his village, which cannot function properly in the rain and mud. The shtetl celebrates the return of snow, and

Yingl’s parents celebrate their son’s homecoming.44

For the wider American public in the early twentieth century, reading offered an important component of domestic, family culture, while also serving the needs of acculturation and embourgeoisement. A culture of children’s reading had sprung up with increases in library

12 funding, an optimistic new generation of editors, and the creation of the Newbery and Caldecott awards for excellence in writing and illustrating children’s books. ’s children’s department, where Sendak would rise to fame, originated in 1926 in response to the growing demand for specialized services for children in public libraries across .45 Before the twentieth century, many libraries had notoriously warded off children with the policy of “No dogs or children allowed.”46 But by the early twentieth century, children’s rooms were established in public libraries, and the American Library Association created the John Newbery

Medal for best children’s book in 1922, followed by the for best illustration in

1938.47 Growing demand for quality children’s books led publishers to create children’s book departments and to hire specialist editors.48 In 1924 in Boston, The Horn Book Magazine began as the nation’s first periodical review of children’s literature. It would take until 1928, the year of Sendak’s birth, for the first American picture book to appear, fully integrating text and image; this was Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.49 Nine years later,

Dr. Seuss published his first picture book in 1937: And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street.50

Sendak personally recalled his mother taking him and his siblings to choose library books to read during the Sabbath as children in the 1930s; he also recalled liking Yom Kippur best of all holidays, as he was permitted to stay up late reading by candlelight.

Jewish children’s literature in America began to undergo significant changes only after the publication of Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s The Adventures of K’tonton (1935) by the Women’s

League of the United Synagogue, based on a S.Y. Agnon’s tale of Rabbi Gadiel Hatinok, a tiny hero who rescues the Jews from a blood libel.51 Boston librarian Fanny Goldstein would write in

The Jewish Book Annual, “The general pattern of the Anglo-Jewish juvenile book up to about

1930 was in the main dull, drab, prosaic, and unappealing. About 1935 the Jewish juvenile

13 commenced to take on a more modern and artistic note. The former style and content matter of writers who had never been exposed to an American childhood were outmoded.”52 Thus, JPS moved away from “watered-down religious textbooks” of the interwar years to instead address the developmental and social needs of American-born Jewish children. The Jewish Book

Council, founded in 1944 as an affiliate of the National Jewish Welfare Board, helped improve the standards of Jewish children’s books in libraries by publishing lists and reviews, certifying those libraries that met its standards.53 Up until this point, all of JPS’s children’s books related to the Bible or Jewish history and were weighted with “romance, overt didacticism, and inspirational messages” similar to Christian children’s literature and, in their pious simplification of good and evil, “far removed from the realities of twentieth-century American life.”54

In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, one of Sendak’s childhood neighborhoods, the Orthodox

Congregation Sons of Israel’s 1947 Yearbook emphasized the role of the Jewish child for the future, rebirth, and destiny of American Jewry. Rabbi Benjamin Morgenstern’s letter in that publication asserts, “When we behold children of seven and eight studying Chumesh, then indeed we hear the youth saying to us, ‘Do not despair, a brighter dawn awaits us on the morrow.”55 The synagogue’s president, Dr. Meyer Cohen, further emphasized the role of the child in the community’s symbolic future: “We are told further that the faces of the Cherubim bore the features of youth, of children; meaning that the only guardians of the Ark—the only guardians to the Tables of the Law within the Ark—were the children, the ones who would see to it that the Ark and all it stood for were handed down to future generations.”56 But in an individualist culture rooted in the “American Dream,” it was difficult to win the hearts and minds of children without appealing to personal aspirations and emotional dimensions. Even as late as

1947, in Goldstein’s assessment, no Jewish writers or illustrators had “yet produced a first-class

14 picture book for the wee-age Jewish child. […] We do have a few Jewish illustrators but they are not lending their ability and energies to this effort.”57 Yiddish children’s books and their readership also declined by the late 1940s due to Nazi genocide and immigration quotas.58

We do not know whether Sendak read Yiddish literature as a child, though, at the very least, it is likely that his maternal grandmother, who spoke only in Yiddish, told him stories during her extended stays at the Sendaks’ home. It is also clear that Sendak collected some

Yiddish verse later in life; his rare book collection contained “a 1917 anthology covering 500 years of Yiddish poetry.”59 Sendak also grew up with his father’s shtetl stories, some of which are recorded in In Grandpa’s House (1985), Philip’s orally dictated Yiddish tales, published and illustrated by Sendak. One of the included tales seems to project antisemitic stereotypes – of greed, hording, physical smallness, and cowardice – onto a group of dwarf-like people, who imprison the protagonist and his parents in a cave lined with precious gems.60 Shepsel, another character in the story, also reflects antisemitic notions, embodying the Shylock stereotype of the cruel, dishonest moneylender who takes advantage of others’ desperation and ignorance – he has

Mendel unknowingly sign an unfair contract by collecting his signature on a blank piece of paper. Shepsel is accordingly sentenced to Hell by the presiding judges, his tongue burned out.61

These characters may draw from northern European legends of trolls, dwarves, and moneylenders – small, cap-wearing creatures that hoard gold and silver underground, manipulate others in moments of weakness, and emerge only at night. Early twentieth-century Yiddish children’s writers like Der Nister drew from these folk motifs, sometimes in their depictions of demons.62 They may also convey ’s disavowals of antisemitic accusations against members of his own boyhood Jewish community. During the industrializing interwar years, at a time when youth and visual beauty were increasingly commodified and glorified, Jews were

15 imagined in some stereotypes of the era as, on the one hand, an outmoded, ghostly people, and, on the other hand, as infantile dwarfs, like children. Traditional practices like early marriage and the kest system had leant to the latter image of Jews as prematurely aged, stunted adults, perhaps most strikingly visualized in the drawings of Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew murdered during

WWII. Schulz drew exasperated tiny Jewish men huddled together and contrasted with tall, emotionally indifferent, and fashionably dressed women. As explored in Chapter One, Sendak, too, would depict squat figures struggling to survive, as well as infants with strained, adult countenances. Sendak described babies as “enormous kvetches with those mean little faces –

‘Give me this!’ – and at the same time there’s a look that they get that makes them so vulnerable, poignant and lovable.”63 Early critics would complain that his children looked like “little old people worrying away their childhood.”64

Sendak’s seemingly prophetic conception of children as closer to adulthood than

American childhood ideals had allowed may have drawn from his heritage. Generations of

Sendaks were raised in Yiddish-speaking communities, educated in the kheyder system, which, according to Estraikh, “like the community as a whole, had no conception of children as essentially different from adults.”65 As Estraikh notes, Shmuel Niger described the traditional conception of a Jewish child in a 1935 survey of Yiddish children’s literature with the following quote about a child in Mendele Moyker Sforim’s Dos vintshfingerl (the wishing ring) of 1865: “a miniature adult: distracted, depressed, with a careworn face and all the mannerism of the adult

Jew with a family to support. All he needed was the beard.”66 This conception of the Jewish child as prematurely aged corresponded with a societal reality for certain Jewish populations, especially in Eastern Europe – the difficulties of being poor and persecuted left little freedom for indulging in the protected, cherished pastimes and mentalities associated with modern childhood

16 and the cultivation of children’s optimal physical health. Sendak, raised in a lower-middle-class household during the Depression, and by a mother whose childhood was compromised in Poland by threats of antisemitic violence and economic struggle, unsurprisingly learned to take his own childhood years more seriously than many of his American peers. He experienced difficult feelings and travails early in life, which led him to see the human pain of children, which sentimental notions of childhood actively denied.

Widespread American social conservatism spanning the 1930s through the 1950s policed the category of childhood and sought to shield middle-class children from certain realities, sometimes even from their own internal ones; queer children were not allowed to recognize or understand their own emotional or physiological rhythms beyond the matrix of heterosexuality rooted in an Anglo-Saxon culture of social manners and emotional restraint. In 1939, Rival

Simon & Schuster published the first book by after , his previous publisher, declined it due to the fact that the heroine was “a tad too naughty.”67

Children of immigrants and ethnic or racial minorities were also made to look down upon their parents’ language and cultural mores, as accounts of Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their children attest.68 Building on a discourse that saw mass media as an immigrant-pervaded field of corruptive values, the 1940 White House Conference on Children in a Democracy would condemn popular culture and mass media as forces threatening to undermine proper ethical inculcation of all American children. The conference made the recommendation that

“representatives of the press, radio, and motion picture,” as well as all adults working with children, ought to evince “Whole-hearted recognition and appreciation of the fundamental place of religion in the development of culture” and should treat religion “frankly, openly, and objectively as an important factor in personal and social behavior.”69 The 1950 White House

17 Conference on Children would warn about the possibility of “the standards of the lowest class” infecting “the boys and girls of other social groups” through the intermixing of children.

Historian Joseph Illick reads in such words a race-infused antagonism against “the spread of lower-class culture.”70 The creation in 1954 of the Comics Magazine Association of America and its Code of criteria – such as forbidding profanity and obscenity, ridicule of police, parents, racial and religious groups, and the excessive exaggeration of the female anatomy – mitigated youth exposure to these elements. Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German American psychiatrist and author of

Seduction of the Innocent (1954), argued that comic books blunted conscience, made children less susceptible to art and education, and obscured children’s understanding of relations between the sexes, causing homosexuality and juvenile delinquency. Although comic strips, cartoons and films of the previous decades had already acknowledged some of the darker, frightening aspects of childhood, “The American assumption” at midcentury was, as David Michaelis writes, “that children were happy, and childhood was a golden time.”71 American adults were eager to see children as symbols of their personal and collective futures, even at the expense of recognizing actual children’s feelings.

For educators and children’s writers, focusing too much on Jewish distinctiveness in the immediate postwar era would have been to clash with mainstream attitudes in a crucial moment of confirming Jewish American belonging in the wider society, as tens of thousands of traumatized, European Jewish refugees and survivors flooded into New York, threatening to ignite new waves of antisemitism against hard-won Jewish American security. Condemning the

Nazis’ sadistic obsession with ethnic categorization and hierarchy, postwar American adults placed their hopes for national rebirth in the “generic,” or universal, symbolic child, which would be cultivated, at least in part, through public education, literacy, and reading practices.72

18 Accordingly, American Jewish communal impulses tended towards unity and away from internal divisions. Jonathan Krasner argues that children’s periodicals like the bimonthly World Over, published in English with news stories, comics, and games, helped create a common public culture of Jewish children’s community across denominations in the 1940s and ‘50s.73 With greater social emphasis on distinguishing childhood from adulthood than on distinguishing internal Jewish experiences, or distinguishing Jew from gentile, JPS found that, despite their desire to cater to postwar youth in order to fight the trends of assimilation in early development, there remained “a dearth of capable authors who could create interesting books for young adolescents, and those who could preferred to write for the general trade where pecuniary rewards were much greater.”74 American picture-book creators like Robert Lawson, Theodor

(Seuss) Geisel, James Daughterty, Ludwig Bemelmans, and Virginia Lee Burton entered the children’s publishing scene in the late 1930s and early ‘40s, followed by Sendak, Marcia Brown,

Barbara Cooney, Leo Lionni, Ezra Jack Keats, and Uri Shulevitz in the 1950s and ‘60s.75

Children’s literature, which had been a lowly and largely insignificant market in American publishing, exploded in the postwar decades as a profitable beacon of middle-class American values for millions of nationals who gave birth to more children and espoused new optimism and idealism after the economic depression and the war. The postwar baby boom and its accompanied rise in funding for public schools and libraries created a thriving market that prompted publishers to expand their lists, as well as inspired new companies, like Golden Books, to create innovations. Children’s editors, librarians, and critics rose to influence, empowered by their authority to designate the prestigious Newbery and Caldecott Medals.76

Cultural optimism around educating a new American generation sometimes sat in tension, emotionally, for those families mourning relatives and communities destroyed by the

19 Holocaust, but it also animated Jewish calls for retributive justice and redemption after the war:

Hitler would be doubly defeated by a shining new generation of Jewish children on safe

American ground. In the 1946-47 Jewish Book Annual, Fanny Goldstein, librarian at the Boston

Public Library, proclaimed, “The 20th Century may well be termed ‘The Children’s Century,’ for everywhere people are striving to create for their children a more ideal environment and a more secure future. […] Books are essential to proper character building and the happiness and enrichment of a child’s life.”77 She observed, “children of today are healthier in mind and body” due to more universally applied education and higher standards of living. Stressing the value of literature for children’s character building, Goldstein insisted that children needed books to help them develop “normal emotions and responses” and to learn how to integrate into “the world at large.”78 Children’s literature portrayed seamlessly American Jews in the postwar years, such as in Sydney Taylor’s All of a Kind Family (1951), which follows a Jewish family on the Lower

East Side and became the first Jewish book read widely by non-Jewish children, as well.79

Taylor’s characters might have identified more explicitly as Jews than would Sendak’s, but their emotional styles and behaviors were indistinguishable from the gentile middle class, unlike

Sendak’s awkward, flamboyant, and wildly expressive characters would be.

The generic child Holocaust victim, as a vulnerable object of emotional investment, also spoke to American feelings regarding the new postwar generation. The children of this generation, America feared, were also greatly at risk; they were also overvalued and invested with the hopes of rebuilding a nation rising up from the tolls of economic depression and war. In figures like Anne Frank and Ellie Wiesel’s child narrator in Night (1956), Americans could relate their investment in protecting the child from foreign harm, bad values, loose morals, and physical danger. As in the early twentieth-century, however, explicitly Jewish children’s

20 literature of high artistic quality remained generally lacking in the 1950s. Thus, the creation of awards like the Isaac Siegel Memorial Award (1956) and the Temple Bnai Jeshurun Juvenile

Award (1957) sought to encourage Jewish writers to use their talents for children’s books.80

Though most of Sendak’s books were not specifically for Jewish children per se, his use of the picture-book form drew directly from Yiddish storytelling, if only from oral tales of his father and maternal grandmother. His sensibilities reflect a position beyond the emotional norms of his wider society. In an early example, The Happy Rain (1956), written by Sendak’s brother,

Jack, and illustrated by Maurice, children grow up in a fictional village of Troekan in which it is for the skies to pour rain that drenched their clothes and muddied the streets. The villagers are traumatized when the rain suddenly ceases and the sun comes out to shine:

Can you imagine how it would be if the sun suddenly disappeared? Or if the moon disappeared? Or the stars? Or the sky altogether? Well, so it was with the people of Troekan and their rain. [...] the people of Troekan were certain that it indeed was the end of the world. They shut their shutters tight. They shook with fear. And they wept, and they wailed, and they wrung their hands. [...] The comforting dark clouds were gone; now there was only the harsh, glaring sun. And the soft, warm mud had become hard, and difficult to walk on. [...] Very wisely, to protect themselves from the terrible sunny weather, most of the villagers carried umbrellas.81

Attempting to bring back the rain, the villagers of Troekan follow various misinformed advisors and proceed to fire canons into the sky while standing upside down and wearing paper bags over their heads – all to no avail – until two children save the day by considering the clouds’ feelings and sending them a note. Troekan is like the village in Mani Leib’s Yingl Tsingl Khvat in its drastic communal reaction to a change in weather, as well as in its ultimate reliance on the emotional directness of children. More exaggerated and humorous than Leib’s village, however,

Troekan also resembles the folkloric Chelm in its counter-intuitive communal attitudes. It is also like midcentury Brooklyn, if one compares the rain to the morose energies, collective trauma, and mourning among which the Sendak children were raised, against the sunny optimism of

21 greater social privilege represented in the American mainstream.

At a time when children’s literature largely served the purpose of teaching children to read, Sendak, entering the publishing scene in the early 1950s, believed his weakness as an artist was “a tendency to be florid, to overwrite.”82 He deemed his first authored publication, Kenny’s

Window (1956), wordy. A year later, Dr. Seuss published The Cat in the Hat (Random House,

1957) with a limited vocabulary to promote early literacy. The same year Sendak released a less- wordy Very Far Away and illustrated Minarek’s as part of Harper & Brothers’ “I Can

Read” series.83 After six more years of a period he deemed his “apprenticeship” in the field, largely illustrating the works of others writers and learning to exercise better restraint and visual- textual rhythm in his craft, he changed the face of children’s literature with Where the Wild

Things Are (1963), profoundly sublimating anxieties and emotional tensions from his own early biography into the universal space of the picture book.

Within the wider mainstream, the reading public had been primed for Sendak’s work by writers like Jewish American Ruth Krauss, who would mentor the young Sendak in the 1950s.

Krauss made early waves in children’s literature with The Carrot Seed (1945, Harper & Row), illustrated by her husband , offering a profound and straightforward message to children: parents and older siblings may crush dreams with logic, but an undying dream leads to unimaginably great results; additionally, peers and elders may teach one how to participate in the social, but socialization should never come at the expense of one’s innermost gifts and desires.

Realists like Charles Schulz (1922-2000), whose Peanuts launched in 1950, also began to humanize childhood by coloring it with the dissatisfaction, existential gloom, philosophical musing, and complexity of adulthood. Michaelis writes that “Schulz reversed the natural order of [assumptions] by showing that a child’s pain is more intensely felt than an

22 adult’s, a child’s defeats the more acutely experienced and remembered.”84 Expanding on

Schulz’s existentially frustrated, but well-mannered caricatures and Dr. Seuss’s zany, whimsical cartoons, the protagonists offered by Sendak, expressed childhood from a deep, emotional perspective, offering a fantasy based in the emotional tribulations of a vulnerable, but fierce infant, a forming subject loudly negotiating self worth and survival. Influenced by Krauss and his

Harper editor, Ursula Nordstrom, Sendak believe that children needed stories not only for optimism but also for self-preservation, in order to “confront the incomprehensible in their lives—bullies, school, and the vagaries of the adult world.”85 Speaking for picture-book artists in the ‘50s and ‘60s as the form was reinvented, Sendak recalled, “most of us were baptised into adulthood and psychoanalysis and everywhere was an exciting and revived interest in children— their language—the state of their minds and hearts.”86 As the present study will attest, Sendak made direct use of psychoanalytic concepts in his work, balancing drives of id and superego and working through the inflated, fragile narcissism that characterizes early childhood. Especially by the early 1960s, the Sendak child battled dangers of entrapment, suppression, boredom and insignificance, and sang songs of wild triumph, of sensual awakenings and powers tasted for the first time. Indeed, lists sensuality and abandon as emotions depicted by Sendak to which “young people are especially prone.”87 Sendak invited both controversy and interest for his radical departure from a Victorian-influenced, American children’s book tradition of depicting Anglo-Saxon children in a rose-colored world dictated by adult norms. His ethnic- looking children were among the first in children’s literature to exhibit anger and difficult emotions, as well as to demand love.88 Unlike Dr. Seuss, who claimed to take inspiration from his quirky adolescent years, rather than from his childhood, Sendak was a pioneer in drawing from the nonverbal rage, sensuality, and animal drives of his earliest years.89 Moreover, as

23 already suggested, Sendak objected to the midcentury categorization of childhood as fundamentally separate from adulthood; he insisted, “I don’t write for children specifically. I certainly am not conscious of sitting down and writing a book for children. I think it would be fatal if one did.”90

Though Sendak depicted ethnic-looking, rebellious Brooklyn children since the early

1950s, his work more explicitly handled the Holocaust and Old World Yiddishkayt after the early 1960s, as I explore in Chapter Four. Jewish children’s literature shifted from depicting thoroughly American and heroic protagonists in the 1920s-50s to depicting ethnically diverse people, survivors, and victims in the 1960s and beyond.91 As the nation moved toward a socially liberal, multiculturalist, and psychoanalysis-infused culture, historians and cultural thinkers began to focus intently on the victims’ experiences of the Holocaust,92 as well as their embodied, post-traumatic afterlives in the present.93

Modern Children’s Literature: A Queer Revolution from the Margins

Despite certain political and social freedoms offered to children’s book artists, anxieties around childhood sexuality have made children’s media a contested space. Throughout the twentieth century, Sendak believed that the public would not have accepted the idea of a gay man writing books for children due to problematic associations made between homosexuality and pedophilia.94 Considering how open Sendak was about his sexuality with friends and colleagues, it seems as though the public actively avoided knowing about this aspect of their favorite picture- book artist’s life.95 Accordingly, previous scholarship has neglected a substantial consideration of Sendak’s queerness. Jerry Griswold critiques the most recent Sendak study, Jonathan Cott’s

There’s a Mystery There (2017), for example, for failing to consider the potential handling of

24 homosexuality that emerges from a deep reading of works by Sendak.96 Kenneth Kidd’s writing invites further analysis, suggesting that “Sendak’s creative life is integrally connected to his ongoing struggles for personal as well as professional satisfaction. His depression and years of therapy surely had something to do with his life as a closeted gay man in pre-Stonewall New

York. Before that, Sendak had what might fairly be described as a queer childhood.”97 As my analysis of Sendak supports, children’s literature has a history of beckoning to adults whose social identities are forbidden from manifesting in the culture – adults whose endangered emotional world leads them to grapple with the void and to imagine a language for existing beyond, or prior to the laws of society: hence the associations sometimes made between the child and the queer or otherwise socially estranged adult, as well as the associations made between children and artists. As Kidd notes, “Queerness, of course, extends beyond the sexual, and in

Sendak’s case might apply to everything about his life and work that is non-conformist or challenging. Sendak, we might say, is queer because he is gay and Jewish and irascible.”98 The

(largely discreet) presence of queer people and Jews in children’s literature is undeniable. Kidd has also contributed to understanding how, since the late nineteenth century, children’s literature for boys has adapted “feral tales” of “animal-human or cross-cultural encounter” toward stories of “(hetero)normative white male masculinity rather than about liminality or alterity.”99 In other words, the mainstream literature and culture that developed around modern childhood, and perhaps especially around boyhood, was more interested in shaping normative subjects than it was in speaking to the emotional truths of childhood indeterminacy and its potential queerness.

Noting that Edward Lear and were, like Sendak, “confirmed bachelors,” literary scholar Philip Nel wrote in his blog last year that the prominence of queer people in the field of children’s literature and culture suggests “a silenced history waiting to be uncovered.”100

25 Early, largely unnoticed contributions to such a history might include John Mitzel’s consideration of children’s picture-book artists within his 1976 essay on “the Gay Sensibility” in an issue of an underground magazine called The Gay Alternative. Mitzel described this sensibility as a “lushness and peculiarity of imagination,” noting that Sendak and other “gay writers generally are disinclined to present the happy, radiant nuclear-family situation so characteristic of conventional children’s literature.”101 More substantially, a 2015 Horn Book article by Barbara Bader celebrated “five gay picture-book prodigies and the difference they’ve made,” including Sendak, as well as (1933–1987), James Marshall (1942–1992),

Remy Charlip (1929–2012), and Tomie dePaola (1934-).102 Kidd writes that a queer interpretation of Where the Wild Things Are’s Max might offer new vitality to observations made

“in the scholarship about Max’s hybridity, passion, and performativity.”103 Despite wider cultural discomfort around recognizing queer or gay children, some of the most profound shapers of children’s literature and adult understanding of children’s emotions – including the above list, as well as Ursula Nordstrom and (1910-1952) – have been avowedly lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who were not allowed to know or claim their own childhood queerness until adulthood, validating their queer childhood selves only in ghostly retrospect. Brown was the bisexual author of (1947) and the first picture-book writer to gain widespread recognition; she helped establish picture books as an art form through her Harper publications.104 She got her start at the Bank Street School, from which Krauss would also collect children’s notecards for A Hole is To Dig (1952), which Sendak illustrated as a young man.105 , the illustrator for Goodnight Moon, was also involved in a gay artistic circle in whose members photographed and painted male nudes of New York’s literary and cultural scene in Provincetown, Fire Island, Manhattan, and .106 Ursula

26 Nordstrom, the lesbian editor-in-chief of juvenile books at Harper & Row from 1940 to 1973, pioneered the transformation of children’s literature from a largely condescending, didactic tradition into one that recognized and spoke to children’s complex emotions. Arnold Lobel, creator of the Frog and Toad series, first published by Harper & Row from 1970-1979, was raised by his German Jewish immigrant grandparents and lived most of his life as a closeted gay man married to a woman before dying of AIDS in 1987. His daughter Adrianne Lobel told a journalist in 2016 that she believed “‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out.’”107 And then, of course, there was Sendak, who became Nordstrom’s most renowned prodigy at Harper & Row, creating his picture books from a voice cultivated by an intersectionally marginal childhood as a gay, painfully shy son of Yiddish-speaking, Jewish immigrants. Using Sendak as an illustrative case study and springboard, this dissertation contributes to a wider project to uncover a growing history of queer understandings of childhood, focusing specifically on intersections between queer experiences of gender and sexuality and the otherness of a Jewish immigrant and post-Holocaust upbringing in the twentieth century.

Sendak became consciously aware that he was gay in his teenage years, in the 1940s.

Coming of age during “the intense homophobia of the late 1940s and 1950s, when being gay usually meant being adept at discretion and an ability to pass,” Sendak, though not in the closet per se, was also “not free of its effects,” to use the words by which art historian Jonathan

Weinberg describes the homosexual identities of Sendak’s contemporaries Andy Warhol and

Ray Johnson.108 One cannot say for certain whether he consciously experienced himself as queer or gay during his childhood years, but he describes a frail boyhood in which he felt perpetually misunderstood and frightened, and some of his childhood artistic collaborations with his brother foreground the trope of forbidden love. Describing his childhood later in life, he claimed, “I had

27 to hide every feeling I had from my parents, and every normal feeling was condemned by me as abnormal and inappropriate. [...] you’re riddled with lies and questions that never got answered about yourself—your body, your mind, your penis, whatever.”109 He also recalled a crush on the male Hebrew school teacher who prepared him for his bar mitzvah.110 Regardless of the extent to which Sendak was aware of being gay as a child, he was aware of being socially queer – a sickly boy whom others called “sissy,” and a dramatic storyteller who struggled to make friends and spent much of his time with his family indoors. He was, in his own words, “a terrified child, growing into a withdrawn, stammering boy who became an isolated, untrusting young man.”111

His retroactive depiction of childhood’s universal queerness – its wild, sensual, and irreverent oddness – resonates with those adults who most remember, or continue to experience, marginal positions of emotional sensitivity and need for liberation and powerful expression.

As Sendak recalled of the midcentury publishing world, “back in the ‘50s and ‘40s [...] children’s books were the bottom end of the totem pole. [...] And you were suspect the minute you were at a party, ‘What do you do?’ ‘I do books with children.’ ‘Ah, I’m sure my wife would like to talk to you.’”112 Resenting this aspect throughout his career, he once exclaimed, “What is a children’s-book artist? A moron! Some ugly fat pipsquick of a person who can’t be bothered to grow up. That’s the way we’re treated in the adult world of publishing.”113 In the public imagination, children’s publishing at midcentury was a feminized and marginalized field. As

Sendak lamented, “Children’s books are always considered a minor art […] things for children are generally lumped and dumped into a sort of lollipop set-up; simple things, cute things, funny things, non-serious things. Which is, of course, deeply offensive.”114 But the artistic form of the picture book enabled Sendak to powerfully articulate his liminal subjectivity of apartness and belonging as a gay, Holocaust-marked Jew in twentieth-century America. He once concluded, “I

28 didn’t have much confidence in myself... never. And so, I hid inside [...] this modest form called the children’s book and expressed myself entirely.”115 Children’s literature, like comic books and other “low art” forms, offered a way to hide “in plain site,” a place from which to be loud and passionate and emotionally honest, even when the adult public deemed the contents of his imagination and desires “queer” or excessive. Chapter Two of the present study elaborates on how the visual-textual form of the picture book, infused with the sensibilities of comic books, film, advertising, and other forms of popular culture, was especially suited to emotionally articulating his particular position as an insider-outsider with internalized feelings of intersectional endangerment.

Sendak was a warrior for the cause of dignifying children’s literature. Critical writings almost always fell short of Sendak’s expectations. In 1966 he complained to the Library Services

Coordinator of Highline Public Schools in Seattle about the lack of seriousness surrounding the field of children’s books, which too many critics and editors treated condescendingly and exploited as a money-making enterprise. Sendak yearned to have respect and academic status granted to the best of children’s picture books. Critics, he felt, needed to recognize that the best books for children were full of wisdom and created by highly dedicated and talented writers and artists.116 Encouraging Selma Lanes to pioneer intelligent scholarship on children’s literature,

Sendak wrote to her in March 1968 that her contributions would contrast with the sentimental, uninformed approaches of most existing studies on the subject.117 In February 1969 he again stressed the importance of Lanes pioneering sophisticated scholarship on children’s literature; for him, he wrote at the time, picture books were the entire world.118 Considering the inherently queer nature of childhood against the adult public sphere, as I discuss further below, the project of dignifying children’s literature was, in some ways, a project of earning respect in the public

29 sphere for queer perspectives, as naturalized in the universality of all people’s originary queerness in childhood vis-à-vis the adult world.

Kathryn Bond Stockton and others propose the cultural argument that childhood is itself a universally queer realm in its liminal difference from the structures of the symbolic realm, the expectations of parents and the rules of adult society into which children are eventually initiated or forced.119 The child, as the not-yet-socialized human being, is a shared symbol, a specter of potential that might transgress such adult categories as class, race, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in its unbiased humanity. The inchoateness of the child’s objective person is also what makes the child “queer” or bizarre to the adult social order, as Stockton has argued. Before children’s initiation into the “popular fiction” of the time and the corresponding laws of discourse and behavior, they are raw subjects-in-formation – both exceptionally free in their access to what Julia Kristeva calls semiotic rhythms of emotion, metaphor, and intuition, but also vulnerable as targets for socialization.120 Sendak’s biographical circumstances lent to an especially sensitive understanding of this complicated position. Twentieth-century immigrants to the U.S. were the objects of diligent reform initiatives that often approached new Americans condescendingly as children in need of instruction, or as raw matter to be trained and sculpted into what the country most needed.121 Surpassing their parents in American social capital, first- generation children of immigrants painfully learned how their parents appeared to others through

American eyes. Far from a childish task, the immigrant family’s struggle to learn the laws of the land and to gain social acceptance evokes the central concern of Sendak’s art: the process by which all children learn to survive in the world outside of their home (if they are even privileged enough to have a home), as well as to face dangers that loom beyond their comprehension.122

Moreover, the position of embodying a gay or queer subjectivity, especially in a context that did

30 not offer socially valid options for queer desires or self-concepts, offered Sendak the frustrating experience of the children in his stories – of emotional obscurity or invisibility, of an isolating difference even relative to one’s own family. Martin, for example, seeks out “very far away” when his busy mother won’t answer his questions; Ida battles supernatural forces after her despondent mother dumps a younger sibling on her, her father absent and at sea.123 The space of

Sendak’s Connecticut studio, which visitors described as a kind of darkened cave in the forests of Ridgefield, lit by a single desk lamp, evokes the symbolic quality of his lifelong quest to expand the social by illuminating how the emotionally abandoned, or otherwise marginal individual survives by grappling in the dark.

Children’s literature has been, beneath the public radar, vastly powerful in its capacity to shape the fantasies of countless readers, and thus of society at large. Sendak, as New York Times art critic Brian O’Doherty described him in the early 1960s, was “one of the most powerful men in the US” due to his ability to “give shape to the fantasies of millions of children.”124 1950s children’s books, such as Cat in the Hat and , according to Seth Lerer, attempted modernist feats of subverting the norms of conservative households, awakening one’s inner artist and striving to articulate it in new, creative ways within the limits of language and culture and in

Kafkaesque realities in which humans give birth to mice, talking cats turn everything upside down, and children wake up to alternate realities. Children’s literature of the era, he states, reads like high modernist art – employing repetition and poetry. Sendak’s contribution, Lerer argues, was turning away from the Puritan, pastoral simplicity of the rural country and toward the dangerous city landscape – the site of modernist art – embracing it as a means to explore the wilderness of the interior self. This came at a moment, I add, in which Americans were primed to turn their attention toward childhood and sought meaning after a world war that shook the

31 foundations of collective human self-understanding.125 But Sendak’s work is also, in some respects, anti-modernist; it is romantic in its celebration of the child’s naked emotional urgency.

Rebelling against the artificial demarcation of childhood as a time of inconsequential frivolity and wholesomeness, from which one is socialized into a sensible adulthood, he revered the indiscriminating mentalities of early modernity, in which fairy tales were “read by everybody” and “not designated as being ‘for children’” but rather tales “about the pure essence of life— incest, murder, insane mothers, love, sex—what have you.”126 Yiddish and Eastern European cultural mentalities contrasted with modern American embarrassment and discomfort around children’s potential capacities to digest serious knowledge. As Sarna notes, a 1955 purchaser of

Solis-Cohen’s JPS translation of Steinberg’s Russian poems expressed disgust over the gruesomeness of the stories, which include one particularly harsh tale about a child getting his throat slit.127 Against the widely accepted and rosy, but often insincere depictions of 1950s children’s books, Sendak sought to restore faith in children to handle more difficult truths, insisting that access to harsh realities was not only their right, but also their desire – a means of working through anxieties, growing, and surviving. A Harper & Row promotional pamphlet describes Sendak as “feeling that children are his peers, not to be treated with condescension or servility.”128

To take a wider perspective across history and geographical context, children’s literature has long functioned as a sort of sanctuary for provocative, unconventional visionaries. Mikhail

Krutikov, for example, describes how, in the context of the Soviet regime, controversial writers like Kornei Chukovskii found children’s literature a “safe haven in the stormy sea of Soviet cultural politics” that offered more “aesthetic autonomy” than available elsewhere.129 Left-wing

Yiddish organizations sometimes turned to children as a means to link generations and transmit

32 messages below the radar of political censorship.130 For example, Daniela Mantovan argues that writers like Der Nister “smuggled” disguised protests of the Soviet regime and political barbarism into their symbolist children’s stories in the 1930s.131 Gennady Estraikh understands children’s literature to have “benefited from the marginalized space standardly allocated to [it],” becoming “the most dynamic and globalized branch of Yiddish cultural production” in the interwar era, which saw both the wider political denigration of Yiddish culture and the “golden age” of Yiddish children’s literature. It became “the most successful and viable branch of

Yiddish literature” as a whole after the Bolsheviks put an end to the Kiev Kultur-Lige.132 In some cases, the lack of respect or attention paid to children’s literature has allowed the field to subvert restrictive political movements from a place of limited visibility. Perhaps precisely for the reason that children’s literature was not seriously considered by social authorities in the interwar and immediate postwar decades, it became an outlet and refuge for political outcasts and dissenters. In 1930s Germany, for example, serious writers in Nazi Germany like Rudolf

Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen (who used the pseudonym “Hans Fallada”) and Erich Kästner, who disagreed with Hitler’s politics, turned to the genres of “light literature” (unterhaltungsliteratur) and children’s books in order to express frustrations and alternative dreams. These less-studied genres could serve as an outlet for a creative phenomenon described as “inner emigration,” a tactic of psychological survival by detaching oneself from the sociopolitical context of the dominant rhetoric, disassociating from one’s surroundings.133 Sendak practiced his own form of inner emigration by preserving himself and his emotional world, retreating hermetically into his studio. As less interesting to the intellectual or political establishments, children’s literature has operated as a sort of hidden, alternative universe, perceived as safer for queer or dissident expression and somewhat beyond the radar of political watchdogs.134

33 The ability to imagine a different reality can operate as a powerful means of resisting troubling or unacceptable circumstances, such as during the American economic depression of the 1930s. U.S. culture escaped the stresses of the Depression and impending war through an explosion of mass media that included movies, celebrity culture, mystery novels, comic books, and popular radio culture. Bob Batchelor writes of the 1930s, “An overriding theme of escapism ran through many of the popular books of the decade. Almost half the best-selling novels of the period 1930-1939 were detective stories. Works with exotic locales and historical settings were also strong contenders.”135 He notes that, “Despite the economic depression and widespread unemployment, Americans still flocked to the movies,” which seemed “a good antidote to the woes outside the theater’s doors.”136

Following film and comic books, children’s books, too, proved a profitable market by the

1940s and ‘50s, inviting both serious talents and entrepreneurial interest. The commercialization of children’s publishing both gradually shifted perceptions of the form as an inconsequential one, as well as changed the field as a whole. Sendak recalled what he described as its masculinization, as it became a more lucrative enterprise: “when we succeeded, that’s when they dumped the women. Because once there’s money, the guys can come down and screw the whole thing up which is what they did. They ruined the whole business.”137 Nordstrom lamented in 1966 that too many children’s books were “routine, cynically produced, coarsely promoted.”138 In a draft of his eulogy for Ruth Krauss, Sendak bemoaned the men in publishing who “wouldn’t be caught dead in a ‘kiddie book’ department” until a “whiff of Big Bucks reassured their masculinity.”139

Similarly, he noted in 1987:

It’s only been in the last ten years that people are not embarrassed to admit that they love reading books for children…In the old days I can’t tell you how many embarrassing parties I went to where only the women talked to me because I was the man who wrote the book

34 that put little Jane to sleep. The macho daddies didn’t know what to make of a man who did that for a livelihood. I’ve been through it a thousand times.140

Methodology and Theoretical Contributions

Sendak’s career offers a rich example of self-searching through creative work and interpretation; describing the illustrator’s occupation, he once stated: “The fun is in finding out something about yourself as you do it. It’s a form of miraculous self-indulgence: in everything you do you are looking for yourself. What better way of spending your life?”141 In writing about an artist’s creative vision in dialogue with his search for self within and against wider historical and cultural forces, it is important to acknowledge the difficulty and multiplicity of the analysis.

Inherent to this project is the notion that literature, art, history, and critical theory are interwoven matters – that art and life are strands in a single thread, informing, influencing, imitating, and altering each other in complex, uneven ways. The circumstances of Sendak’s life affected his art, and making art repeatedly changed his life, as well as wider social conceptions about childhood, ethnic minorities, and queer people. Thus, the dissertation takes an interdisciplinary, cultural- studies approach, sometimes reading Sendak’s art and writings through postmodern critical theory, considering the flux and structure of his subjectivity within his particular biographical and sociohistorical contexts, and sometimes analyzing his life and surrounding contexts through literary and aesthetic considerations of his creative output. It draws on tools of queer and psychoanalytic theory and contextualizes the analysis of Sendak’s life and work in Jewish

American social and cultural history, as well as in changing conceptions of childhood and homosexuality, and in the critical reception of children’s book journals and librarians. It asks how Sendak’s multiple perspectives as a queer, Holocaust-conscious, American-born son of

Eastern European Jewish immigrants informed his life and work.

35 I build on previous scholarship, which includes biographical writing, surveys of Sendak’s career, and disparate articles about specific works. Selma Lanes’ The Art of Maurice Sendak

(1980), the first major retrospective of Sendak’s work, includes about a hundred color illustrations and sketches. John Cech’s Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of

Maurice Sendak (1995) offers a useful model of integrating critical literary and biographical readings. Amy Sonheim’s book Maurice Sendak (1991) provides some useful information about the artist’s career through 1991. Tony Kushner’s The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present

(2003) is a complex analysis of Sendak’s inner world and a fascinating study of the years 1980-

2003, focusing largely on Sendak’s involvement in theater and opera design. Peter C. Kunze’s

Conversations with Maurice Sendak (2016) anthologizes some of Sendak’s key interviews, including several obscure and archival ones. Most recently, Jonathan Cott’s There’s a Mystery

There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak (2017) offers psychoanalytic and art historical discussions of Sendak’s (1981).142

Rather than offer a singular, definitive reading of Sendak’s perspective as a queer Jewish artist of the twentieth century, I investigate meaning around several tensions, themes, and motifs that reverberate between historical, biographical, literary, and artistic modes in Sendak’s life and work, such as romanticism, irony, Judith Butler’s theory of “performativity,” “Camp,” as described by Susan Sontag, and “queer time,” as characterized by Jack Halberstam. In doing so, I offer a complex and illuminating portrait of the artist and of his historically situated person in dialogue with some of his wider contexts. My analysis of queer childhood as a space of displaced emotion and necessary creativity relies on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of “growing sideways” and Miranda Fricker’s notion of “hermeneutical marginalization,” as well as Michel

36 Foucault’s ideas about the duality of freedom and isolation in spaces beyond dominant social surveillance.143

One specific theoretical contribution I make is in my application of intersectionality, which draws on Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s work.144 I extend the term intersectionality to examine how personal and social forces converge in a single subjectivity to produce a particular experience that is a product of both. Specifically, the private feelings, orientations, and desires of a gay person might hold different meaning and ramifications for the individual depending on that individual’s familial, social, and political situations. Sendak’s quest as an artist, as he articulated it, was to exorcise certain feelings in himself in order to survive and function as a human being, sharing the process with children and others. He would insist on the inherently narcissistic nature of his work, claiming, “You also have to be interested in yourself to write…the business of being an artist is indulging oneself. My work points in no direction other than to me.”145 Examining intersectional influences on Sendak’s twentieth-century identity formation and resultant subjectivity help illuminate the specific tangle of emotional challenges that pervaded Sendak’s emotional and artistic world vis-à-vis his surroundings.

This project also employs a new approach to Sendak’s work—the history of emotions, a fairly new and vibrant field. What obsessed Sendak about his own childhood, he claimed, were

“the sounds and feelings and images, the emotional quality of particular moments.”146 An artist of many visual styles but of a firm, unflinching commitment to articulating a specific set of feelings, he claimed that “human feelings” are what most interest him, that “the visual manner and medium of a book mattered far less than the emotional truth it had to tell.”147 As one

Literary Hub writer asserts, Sendak’s work “can only be understood when we remember to internalize how we are made to feel, not how we are made to think. We should all remember to

37 surrender ourselves to these wordless, primal feelings, like children who do it so naturally because it is all they know.”148 Sendak sublimated his socially marginalized childhood feelings of emotional “excess,” personal confusion and terror, irreverent Yiddishkayt, and queer shame by channeling them into the powerful, but liminal realm of children’s literature. Ursula

Nordstrom called Wild Things “the first complete work of art in the picture book field, conceived, written, illustrated, executed in entirety by one person of authentic genius [,] the first picture book to recognize the fact that children have powerful emotions, anger and love and hate and only after all that passion, the wanting to be ‘where someone loved him best of all.’”149

Sendak’s children’s books present an ideal context in which to examine questions raised by “the emotional turn” in history. For example, what do the gaps between experience and expression of emotion in Sendak’s books reveal about the structures of power? According to Nicole Eustace,

“Shifting patterns in who expresses which emotions, when, and to whom provide a key index of power in every society. Every expression of emotion constitutes social communication and political negotiation.”150 Why and how does society “either promote or prohibit some kinds of emotions, while remaining neutral or indifferent to others” and how does Sendak approach these

“rules”?151 What kinds of “emotional regimes” are present in Sendak’s works and how does he employ or subvert them? William Reddy has defined “emotional regimes” as “the set of normative emotions and official rituals, practices, ‘emotives’ that express and inculcate them: a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.”152 He argues that an emotional regime demands conformity and imposes penalties on those who deviate from the norm, causing them emotional suffering.153 A contemporary of Sendak’s, Sontag wrote that the two most prominent shapers of modern cultural sensibilities were Jewish moral seriousness and gay irony; Sendak

38 expressed both in his picture books, which play with the unreliability of surface appearances and remain loyal to serious underlying emotional truths informed by recent history.154

Layout of Chapters

Each chapter of this dissertation is thematic with loose chronological parameters, applying historical analyses, critical theory, and original readings of Sendak’s work to illuminate a central and contextualized motif or set of tensions that the artist tackled.

Chapter One positions Sendak’s coming of age in the late 1940s and his early career in the 1950s between competing cultural narratives and within various social spheres as a covertly gay man from an Eastern European Jewish Brooklyn family, fluctuating between the Manhattan arts scene and the domain of his Yiddish-speaking parents as they mourned the WWII losses of their relatives in Poland. Sendak spent the war years as a young adolescent, aware of the fact that his relatives were being murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland. The young Sendak emerged from a difficult childhood spent during the Depression and WWII as the nation looked optimistically to the future, idealizing an “American dream” that rested on wholesome, socially conforming suburban children who would subdue their own needs and desires in order to rebuild American society. I consider Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory and Agnieszka Bedingfield’s theory of trans-memory to conceptualize Sendak’s socially alienating emotional investment in a past he did not directly experience and in a set of cultural sensibilities absorbed from his Yiddish- speaking family and community that distinguished him from mainstream America but were also never fully his. I explore how precarious identifications color his development as an artist. In addition to his family attachments, I examine how he related to his budding sexuality as a gay man in a homophobic context and how aligning with queerness, even if reluctantly, preserved his

39 sense of self as apart from a mainstream culture that devalued ethnically and sexually queer people. This personal stance primed him to relate to children’s literature as a space of potential freedom and expression that, at midcentury, remained beyond the surveillance of dominant social powers. For Sendak, being a serious artist meant resisting shallow mentalities of social conformity, especially in the years following WWII, which idealized childhood innocence to help restore optimism in the social order.155 Reading typescripts and drafts of his work from the

1950s, including Kenny’s Window (1956), the first book he both wrote and illustrated, this chapter illuminates Sendak’s emergence as an illustrator and picture-book artist, poised between bold professional role models; an inchoate queer sexuality and its corresponding, covert subculture in Manhattan; and the competing cultural ideals of mainstream American society and his Yiddish-speaking family as they mourned WWII losses.

Chapter Two moves forward in Sendak’s career as his work dove deeper and further back into his early childhood, examining a selection of the artist’s picture books after 1960 that responded to feelings from his boyhood years in the 1930s, as he remembered them in the latter twentieth century. It situates his feelings about childhood within the social-historical developments that affected Jewish immigrant families during the interwar years, including the rise of mass culture, Jewish anxiety about global antisemitism, the solidification of child psychology, American anxieties about fascism, and new family ideals. From the confidence of his established career amidst the rise of widespread liberal social movements, Sendak more directly, if ambivalently, handled themes of culturally laden separation anxieties, which he recalled from his early childhood and articulated in books like Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and (1970). Portions of the chapter discuss the Eastern European Jewish immigrant family as it related to Americanization, individualism, and an interwar zeitgeist

40 colored by notions of speed, casual fun, and mass culture. Sendak’s work engaged in interesting ways with the dilemmas of urban children torn between overwhelming spectacles, their “wild” and socially-othered family members, and the bargain of an American individualism that offered new freedoms and sensations that also required negotiation with one’s family attachments and cultural roots. The chapter integrates an analysis of Sendak’s early childhood years, in which immigrants’ children were in some ways socialized out of their own families of origin in order to join American society. Queer outliers like Sendak, whose belonging within his family and within wider social spheres was challenged along both ethno-religious and personal-sexual pathways, demonstrate a fascinating history of critically negotiating with pressures to conform, as well as a model of untangling “reality” from fantasy, social expectation from “authentic” sense of self.

Chapter Three studies the emotional processes that colored Sendak’s work from the

“liberated” 1960s onward, specifically his use of flamboyant and fantasy-oriented child’s play to handle serious personal challenges related to experiences of socially excluded and stigmatized outsiders of the twentieth century. The chapter is rooted in a theoretical discussion of the synergy that links children’s perspectives with those of artists, insider-outsider ethnicities, and other marginalized people who have often achieved belonging, in part, by cultivating sensitive, flexible creative strategies from the sidelines. It examines Sendak’s relationship to the dramatic arts and to spaces of social liberation, including Fire Island, as well as his use of child’s play,

“passing,” and “Camp” in his personal correspondences and picture books like The Sign on

Rosie’s Door (1960) and Bumble-Ardy (2011) to work through feelings of queer shame and social incoherence. It responds to ’s argument that Sendak’s sexuality is “a crucial element of his work” that has been overlooked by most studies, as well as to Kenneth

Kidd’s assertion that “Sendak’s creative activity served as a sort of survival or coping

41 strategy.”156

Chapter Four focuses on Sendak’s life and work in the years following his move to

Ridgefield, Connecticut in the early , examining specifically how notions of “inside”’ and

“outside” intensified within his creative vision and relative to Jewish and queer facets of his subjectivity. As late twentieth-century Jews became more complacently “white” and American than ever before, anxiety about the need to preserve Jewish distinctiveness increased; meanwhile,

America institutionalized Holocaust memory and became more comfortable with Old World nostalgia. This chapter situates Sendak’s heightened attention to boundaries of “inside” and

“outside” within these cultural processes, as well as in relation to the AIDS crisis, which merged gay sex and death in public consciousness, intensifying queer social exclusion and homophobia.

It discusses the ways in which his work ambivalently synergized perceived vulnerabilities of mortality and sexuality through homoeroticism and Holocaust imagery. I analyze Sendak’s peculiar relationship to the concept of family and kinship, as conveyed in works that handle motifs of pregnancy, birth, marriage, and incest. In such works as Outside Over There (1981),

We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993), and the posthumously published My

Brother’s Book (2013), I read Sendak’s unusual depictions of boundary violations and

“unnatural,” death-infused relations as agonized responses to his own aging, to his Holocaust- marked Jewish interiority, and to the loss of dear friends in the AIDS epidemic, as well as to a public that, by the 1980s, waxed conservative and anxiously retreated from the social liberation movements of previous decades – a cultural shift that resonates in the United States at present.

Sources

42 The study examines a representative selection of Sendak’s picture books, original artwork, notes, book typescripts, book dummies, correspondences, speeches, interviews, and other writings.157 I also studied audio and textually recorded speeches and interviews, researcher notes, and original letters written by Sendak to friends and colleagues such as novelist Coleman Dowell, who was partner to Sendak’s first therapist, Bertram Slaff; cartoonist ; and Brother (now

Father) James Bohlman, who previously resided at the New Skete Monastery in Cambridge, NY, from which Sendak obtained his German shepherds. I also cite personal conversations I had with

Sendak’s past colleague Christopher Mattaliano; with Jonathan Weinberg, a dear family friend of

Sendak and his late partner, as well as the current Consulting Curator and Director of Research at the Maurice Sendak Foundation; and with Ben Ross, a grandson of Philip Sendak’s second cousin who recalled Sendak from his childhood in the 1950s.158 Lastly, I draw from records of the National Social Welfare Assembly’s Comics Project (1949-1967), the 1940 White House

Conference on Children in a Democracy, and the Center for Jewish History, which help illuminate interwar and midcentury Jewish childhood, ’s social history, and the history of Jewish Brooklyn.

As instructed by Sendak in his legal will, the artist’s journals and personal writings were destroyed upon his death. His archives, which include the bulk of his original artwork and drafts, exist under the auspices of the Sendak Foundation and Sendak’s estate, and they are not yet open to researchers, as of the completion of this dissertation. Thus my research surveys those materials available in external collections, including: the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia, the , the Elmer L. Andersen Library of Minneapolis, the Harry Ransom

Archives, the Smithsonian Library and National Portrait Gallery Archives, the Thomas J. Dodd

Research Center, the , and others.

43 Chapter One

Between Mourning and Optimism: Sendak and American Childhood at Midcentury

Leonard Marcus describes Maurice Sendak’s central artistic obsession as “the question of how children survive in a world largely indifferent to their fate.”159 Born in 1928, the youngest child in a Polish-Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, the urban artist came of age while his relatives were being murdered in Nazi Europe, and as American Jews rapidly suburbanized, following promises of the American dream. Sendak’s adolescence and coming-of-age were torn between competing and contradictory social realities – on the one hand, a traumatized Jewish community mourning its destroyed European shtetlakh and slaughtered families, and, on the other hand, the pull of an optimistic, forward-looking American dream, which idealized childhood innocence and the conventional, suburban family, and encouraged ignorance of difficult recent pasts.

Overwhelmed by his family’s suffering and alienated from the suburban American dream by his own difference as an emotionally sensitive, serious, physically frail, gay son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, the young Sendak invested his sense of self in the ghostly realm of his family’s destroyed Old World past, blended together with his own creative childhood fantasies and engagement with the language of popular culture. Before becoming a “great” of modern children’s literature, Sendak struggled to emerge from an emotional fog and a complex, introverted subjectivity colored by Eastern European Jewish memory and queer alienation at the margins of midcentury American culture.

Agnieszka Bedingfield’s concept of “trans-memory” might aid an analysis of Sendak’s

44 personal investments; it resembles the more familiar notion of “postmemory,” which refers to what it means to grow up in the shadow of a parent’s overwhelmingly meaningful, but also inaccessible trauma. The parent’s unresolved and all-pervasive psychology, as it manifests in the parent’s behavior and relational style, leads postmemorial children to feel haunted or threatened by a past that they did not directly experience, compelled to piece that past together through creative investment in the parent’s traumatic history.160 Bedingfield likens this experience to that of the immigrant’s child, more broadly, whose “trans-memory” is inherited through “transferal, transition, and translation.” Trans-memory is secondhand memory processed through “a cultural as well as a linguistic adjustment – translation into a language of ‘the present,’ of the North

American ‘now.’” She writes that fusing “the codifying systems of the home/parents (the old country) and the ‘outside’ (the new country) is an element in the process of progressive substitution of the parental language by the language of the new continent” and that the subject’s stability may be threatened by the inability to narrate one’s past in a language that is meaningful to the present.161 A subject caught between competing emotional, linguistic, and cultural worlds,

Sendak experienced his youth as a time of “seriousness, bewilderment, and a good deal of suffering,” which sent him into flights of problem-solving fantasy to negotiate boundaries of self, home, “inside” and “outside,” explored further in the following chapters. His career as an artist took off at an auspicious moment in the 1950s-1960s, in which the culture became more critical of the traditional American dream for its willful blindness to a culturally diverse nation and to the psychological risks of raising children in a conformist culture at a time when the effects of communism and fascism loomed large. Fantasy helped him to see childhood, with its rich imaginative capacities, as “possibly the best of all times.”162

This chapter analyzes Sendak’s early artistic voice in the 1950s by examining his entry

45 into adulthood and the start of his career during WWII and its aftermath, as mainstream

American culture leaned socially conservative and upheld a “generic child” ideal as the raw matter of an optimistic national future.163 The formative period of Sendak’s young adulthood solidified his primary artistic interest in how children endure an uncaring or even hostile world.

Important mentors like children’s editor Ursula Nordstrom, children’s author Ruth Krauss, and child psychiatrist Betram Slaff helped Sendak develop tools in his early twenties for working through his emotional alienation at midcentury. I argue that Sendak’s marginalized subjectivity separated him from dominant social meanings and thus inspired him to identify with children – those disempowered, socially uninitiated, and creative human beings. As an artist he sought to bridge his multiple worlds by exploring how any child, but especially the frustrated or emotionally neglected child, manages to comprehend and survive the social order, the alleged source of exclusion and danger. In his work, children move “from the inside out,” experiencing the world through emotion and sensation in ways unfiltered by the sometimes alienating behaviors enforced by dominant social conventions. Contextualized in a discussion of American cultural ideals around the symbol of childhood in the years during and immediately after WWII,

I analyze Sendak’s creative output in the 1940s-1950s as it relates to his early biography and to the social climate of midcentury New York.

Dangerous Social Contexts

As Jewish American youth of the 1940s and ‘50s navigated a culture that alienated their parents’ traditions, the latter fretted about Jewish continuity while simultaneously striving to acculturate and secure American belonging. As Sendak relayed, “My father used to assure me that the

Holocaust could happen here. ‘Keep a suitcase packed in the closet,’ he said. I hated him for

46 taking away the little security I had from living in this country.”164 The survivalist orientation of

Sendak’s parents is reflected in the artist’s description of their Old World memories, as well as in the concerns of their Brooklyn community in the years of Sendak’s adolescence. His older siblings, Natalie (Nettie) (1920-2004) and Jack (Jacob) (1922-1995), spent their early childhoods amidst greater financial security, before the onset of the Depression. Sendak had early internalized the fragility of his existence, troubled by what he perceived as a lack of safety and social foundation. Philip’s whim to chase a girl all the way to America was, he felt, all that separated his American childhood of “lollipops and bar mitzvahs” from his other potential childhood of concentration camps and gas chambers in Poland. Sendak recalled, “whenever a kid died, when I was a kid, it was a very big thing; it reflected back on the fact that my being here was arbitrary.”165 Sendak’s feeling that his life helplessly depended on chance derived also from hearing about his parents’ attempts to abort him during Sadie’s unwanted pregnancy. In one interview, Sendak describes a preoccupying concern that always stayed with him from his

Brooklyn childhood: “how do you prevent dying? How do you prevent being eaten or mauled by a monster?”166 Before news of murdered relatives arrived, Sendak’s brother and best friend, Jack, was drafted to serve in the Pacific invasion of Okinawa, leaving him lonely. Sendak recalled watching his mother sit by a small table radio in the kitchen in those years, listening and not hearing anything from Jack, who was missing in action for months at a time.167 When Jack finally returned, he was, Sendak claimed, “a totally unrecognizable man,” and the “intense communication” the brothers had shared was gone.168

Sendak’s parents did not directly survive the Holocaust, but they helplessly endured news of their immediate families’ deaths in ghettos and camps. Sendak once proclaimed, “My only memory of my mother is of her crying and pulling her hair out, literally, because people were

47 dying in Europe.”169 Combined with their own memories and direct experiences of antisemitism, as well as their hardships to support themselves in Brooklyn in the wake of the Depression, these second-hand Holocaust experiences depleted them of emotional resources and, thus, infected the entire emotional climate of their tight-knit family.170 As discussed below, Sendak’s descriptions of his early emotional world – and his subsequent obsession with his childhood emotions as they related to his parents’ suffering – reflect elements of trans-memory. The effects of what would later be named the Holocaust thwarted some of the formative moments in Sendak’s adolescence, complicating his initiation into manhood and adult society. In the years leading to Sendak’s bar mitzvah, his parents continuously received news of Jewish deaths in Europe by way of American

Jewish agencies.171 At the onset of war, about seventy percent of Sadie’s shtetl, Zakrocym, located in the Warsaw district of Poland, was destroyed, forcing most of its Jews to flee. In July

1941, remaining Jews without resident permits were expelled to Pomiechowek, the rest sent to the Nowy Dwor ghetto in November 1941.172 In Philip’s home shtetl of Zambrow (in the

Bialystok district of Poland), where all of his close relatives remained, antisemitic violence and economic boycotts became routine by 1936, and half of the town was destroyed in air raids at the start of WWII.173 According to Zambrow’s yizkor book, the Germans conquered the city in

1941 on the first day of the outbreak of war between Germany and Russia (June 22, the month of

Sendak’s bar mitzvah).174 The Nazis plundered and confiscated Jewish property and businesses, sending the town’s Jews to forced labor in a ghetto from which transports to death camps began in September 1941. These transports, along with typhus outbreaks and the shooting of those Jews who sought to escape imprisonment, entirely eliminated the remaining Jewish population of

Zambrow.175 Sendak’s parents were able to bring Sadie’s mother, her three sisters, and one brother to the U.S. before the Holocaust began, leaving another brother, aunts, uncles, and

48 cousins to perish. On Philip’s side, only two second-cousins made it to the U.S.176 Philip’s

Jewish social club would continue to send word of his relatives’ deaths in Europe.177

Sendak’s early internalization of a sense of pronounced endangerment is captured by

Sigmund C. Taft’s 1943 study of Brooklyn’s Jewish communal organizations during the late

1930s and early 1940s. Taft concluded that the Jewish community felt threatened by a “rapid rise of anti-Semitic agitation” set in motion across the globe.178 “Invading the very thickly populated Jewish areas of Brooklyn,” Taft wrote, “malignant marauders have and are perching themselves on street corners to peddle their pernicious filth and actually incite their audiences to riot and mayhem.”179 Sendak described his childhood neighborhoods in Bensonhurst and

Gravesend as tree-lined Brooklyn ghettos comprised of Jews and Sicilians (as a young child he mistakenly perceived the Sicilian as a type of Jew who drank wine and laughed more). In the early 1940s, Bensonhurst contained a Jewish population of 59,000 out of a total 123,545 residents; in March of 1943 its Jewish Council sponsored a large meeting and memorial service for the “millions of martyred dead in Europe.”180

The troubling realities of antisemitic violence became all the more visible in New York as WWII drew to a close, the U.S. accepting over 137,000 foreign Jewish refugees.181 Franklin

D. Roosevelt’s inclusive nationalism, America’s military success, and postwar economic recovery all pointed toward a bright future, but American Jews found themselves pulled in different directions.182 In an era that favored a return to optimism and social unity after the war,

American Jews were torn between, on the one hand, feelings of endangerment vis-à-vis global antisemitism, grief over their murdered European relatives, a sense of responsibility for helping

Jewish refugees and supporting the formation of the State of Israel, and, on the other hand, their own long-term, future-oriented struggle to acculturate as Americans and secure their belonging

49 in the nation. The mainstream American social climate of the 1940s and ‘50s seemed rather unwilling to grapple with the heavy emotional burdens of refugees’ trauma and displacement.183

Critics of postwar American culture believed the nation was despairing from the effects of war, alienated by the mechanical nature of modern life, and turning to aesthetic abstraction and materialism to avoid the burden of contemplating serious human values.184 Traumatized refugees and foreign Holocaust survivors, for the most part, remained queer outliers in the mid-century

American landscape. Survivors’ oral testimonies describe entry into America as frustrating and emotionally isolating, as the cultural climate feared and avoided them.185 To be sure, postwar

American Jews, even despite their goals of solidifying a long process of Americanization, organized around commemorating the Holocaust, but they did so in ways that best suited the image they were constructing of the decorous, civilized, thoroughly American Jew, thereby avoiding inconvenient and shame-inducing confrontations with what America might perceive as unappealing variations of Jewish Holocaust suffering.186 As Bedingfield writes, European immigrants were quick to realize that the United States “does not like to dwell on memories but prefers to create a ‘usable past’ convertible into building blocks for the future.”187 But the space of literature and illustration offered an exception. As I.B. Singer would write in his foreword to

Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, which Sendak would illustrate, “Literature helps us remember the past with its many moods. To the storyteller yesterday is still here as are the years and the decades gone by. In stories time does not vanish. For the writer and his readers all creatures go on living forever. What happened long ago is still present.”188 Sendak, sensitive to his parents’ emotional relationship to their past and to their personal losses, was primed to trace the history of his family’s difficult feelings and to contextualize and universalize it in emotionally visceral stories.

50

Midcentury Negotiations of the Generic Child

The social conformity of mainstream American culture between the 1930s-1950s was undercut by anxieties about the human condition in the face of fascism and mass media. In a morally panicked adult society, social commentators worried about children trained to accept adult- conceived ideologies without critical engagement or creativity.189 Emotionally oriented, child- centered psychology challenged established notions of “child-training” within behaviorist psychology. It drew from fears about the effects of authoritarianism on the human subject, who, if exposed too early to the harsh will of adult problems or attitudes, seemed vulnerable to becoming an obedient automaton who would suppress feelings and follow orders from whoever offered the strongest leadership.190 Even as they turned attention to children’s emotions and individuality, these neo-Freudian, “permissive” approaches to child psychology at midcentury were also a product of their socially conformist era. They privileged and sought to elicit the emotional experiences of a specific sort of child – namely a child who would grow to replicate the existing middle-class social order – one that was largely white, Anglo-Saxon, and exclusively heterosexual. Popular children’s films of those years, like Disney’s Dumbo (1941), both celebrated individualism and suggested that any given individuality was best when it served the existing social order; Dumbo can fly, but that talent is only meaningful when channeled toward the circus, the very entity that exploits and imprisons him.191 To the dismay of people like

Sendak, the notion of an ideal, “generic child” at midcentury shaped social expectations placed on real children of diverse needs within diverse families. Sendak would later critique this notion, arguing, “Children are as different and as varied as adults. Some have more taste, some have less. Some are interesting, some are dull. […] And it’s a terrible mistake to train young writers

51 and illustrators as though children were this big, gigantic entity, ‘Child’…”192 Francelia Butler, a literary scholar and friend of Sendak’s would also later regret that “adults have been brainwashed into thinking that children always want to be children and that their fantasies are identical with the bland imaginings of .”193 American Jewry, solidifying its middle-class status, sought to cultivate qualities of the idealized, generic child in their own families without losing elements important to Jewish identity and to Jewish communal and family memory.194 The symbol of the generic child – as a largely white, middle-class fantasy – operated as a cultural site of debate for social scientists, educators, politicians, and popular media determining who would be included in the nation’s desired future, and under which conditions.

Jewish children’s periodicals reflect American Jews’ emotional shift from feelings of endangerment to suburban optimism and belonging at midcentury.195 Children’s periodicals like

World Over Magazine, published in English for a Jewish child readership across religious denominations (and reaching nearly 40,000 subscribers by 1948), initially offered stark reports of

European Jews’ plight in the war. As Jonathan Krasner notes, weeks after Hitler’s genocidal policies became public in the United States, the January 8, 1943 issue of World Over “candidly recounted” that “In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettos established by the German invader are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again.”196 During WWII, Yiddish children’s periodicals like Kinder Zhurnal detailed accounts of ghettos, gassing, and other atrocities committed against Jews in Poland.197 Yiddish writers even made emotional appeals to Jewish children; an August-September 1942 issue, for example, features a front-page story about the hundreds of homeless Jewish refugee children in America, rescued from the war by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the United Palestine

52 Appeal. It includes photographs and asks what will become of them. The article describes the invasion of Jews’ homes by storm troopers at night and masses of Jews forced into starvation, panic, and death in concentration camps. One photograph depicts a group of refugee children in

America, explaining that they cannot muster a smile, because their hearts are weighted with strife.198 Yiddish schools, writes Naomi Prawer Kadar, “included the events of the European tragedy almost as soon as they transpired,” beginning with Kristallnacht on November 9,

1938.199 Accordingly, in 1947, Yiddish linguist and educator Yudl Mark wrote,

The children of the Yiddish school may be said to have lived through the happenings themselves. For them the gruesome tortures, the march through crematories and the gas chambers did not remain a secret. […] It may be that we sinned thereby against child psychology; nevertheless we permitted ourselves to be influenced by the urge to take our children in as partners in our harsh fate, and to arm them with firmness and to brighten their spirits with the luster of the recent martyrdom of fellow Jews.200

While midcentury Yiddish stories for children, in the service of Jewish nationalisms, continued to emphasize the pain, loss, internalized fears, and individual heroic acts of the war, wider

American cultural shifts pushed for fostering a more blissful, protected generation of children who could redeem the nation after war.201 Some Yiddish publications responded accordingly; the Kinder Zhurnal, for example, revamped its cover art by the late 1940s with a more childish aesthetic. An April 1946 issue, for example, replaces the previous, more sophisticated cover art of ornamental patterns, majestic lions, deer, birds, and decorative plants with wide-eyed, cartoonish children – one of them dressed in a sailor outfit – accompanied by dolls, baseball bats, and small, silly-looking, cartoon animals.202 Acculturated American Jewish writers in those years focused on garnering empathy for their collective losses through emotionally accessible child victims who could be recast in the spirit of the hopeful, raw potential of the American child symbol. Anne Frank’s diary was translated to English in 1952, her father, Otto Frank, censoring those portions dealing with her sexuality and criticism of her mother. Elie Wiesel’s Night,

53 narrated through the author’s boyhood self, was published in English in 1960, its title purged of the damning connotations of the Yiddish original, Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Kept

Silent). Rather than emphasizing specifically Jewish survival and specific in-group values, these iconic narrators reaffirmed shared American ideals of ethical humanitarianism, of paying new attention to the child’s emotional world, and of continuing to revere children as the idealized, symbolic material of a collective American future.203 Anne Frank’s diary, especially, made waves in the American publishing industry and led the way to a children’s literature based on tolerance and understanding.204

If mainstream America hesitated to empathize with the voices of queer, jaded, or “ethnic” artists at midcentury, minority artists could try to universalize their concerns through the figure of the generic child, a sort of shared social denominator. The needs of all American children – to integrate family heritage with individual desire, to survive potentially hostile political forces beyond one’s understanding, and to balance between social pressures and animal drives – could be articulated through the figure of the generic child, the ultimate symbol of postwar universalism and national rebirth. The symbolic child operated as a boundary-crossing object of empathy, as all adults could recall surviving a stage of life that was raw and new and sometimes frightening before undergoing initiation into a society run by adults. As suggested earlier, the emotionally dependent, vulnerable nature attributed to modern, middle-class children also supported the idea that all children were blank slates of shapeable human matter and thus, on some level, comprise a unifying element across ethnicities, religions, and other divides.

According to Mark Anderson, Anne Frank and other symbolic child victims helped coalesce complicated reactions to the Holocaust with mainstream American values of the time:

the figure of the persecuted child turns the Holocaust into a moving and accessible story with religious and mythic associations. Transcending history even as it affirms the most

54 dreadful historical reality, it appeals to our own memories of childhood, our identities as parents, sisters, brothers: it speaks to us in existential and moral terms, and only secondarily in historical or political ones.205

The innocence and mutability of the Jewish child allowed him or her to serve as a stand-in both for European Jewry and for universal human vulnerability and courage, the latter most appealing to 1950s Americans recovering from the war. Anderson muses, “If a bearded Polish rabbi or a wealthy German-Jewish businessman had written a comparable memoir (and many did), would big-name publishers, Broadway producers, and Hollywood moguls have rushed to make their stories known?”206 Not only was the child a more inviting figure for universalist American identification, but embracing the disenfranchised minority child would become a significant part of postwar Democratic policy and a focus of social liberation movements. Already in 1940, proceedings of the White House Conference on Children and Youth, which met each decade between 1909-1971 to discuss improving the lives of American children, stated that “the denial of opportunity to any child on the base of race, color, or creed is undemocratic and is dangerous to the welfare of all children. The effort to eliminate race prejudice and accompanying discrimination must be made in home and school, local and national organizations, public and private agencies.” Civil rights activists would warn that at-risk children were liable to fall short of expectations placed on the postwar generation if they were not accepted as American. Greater racial, ethnic, and religious tolerance would thus be essential if minorities were to be subsumed in a larger project of Americanization focused on the child’s development, vulnerability, and vitality.207 Beyond the scope of this project, the different extent to which African American and

Jewish children were actually accepted and integrated in postwar America is a subject worthy of additional studies.208

55 American Jewish children’s books of the immediate postwar years helped integrate the image of the Jewish family as “normal,” light-hearted, decorous, and thoroughly American.

Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family (1951) was the first children’s book about Jews to attract a large non-Jewish readership.209 “We were all infected back then with a postwar idealism,”

Sendak once said.210 The artist was twenty-two years old when he published his first children’s book illustrations – for Good Shabbos, Everybody by Robert Garvey, published by the United

Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education in 1951, the same year as Taylor’s bestseller, followed by his illustrations for Happy Hanukah, Everybody by Hyman and Alice Chanover, for the same commission in 1954. The pictures emphasized closeness between siblings and family in an ethnically Jewish atmosphere, the grandfather of Good Shabbos appearing bald with a large nose and slanted eyes – his countenance almost child-like. These two books portray the Jewish family and home as emanating warmth and love – the grandparents are caring and wise; the parents are generous and offer gifts and surprises. They are situated between an impulse to whitewash and idealize a specific, forward-looking American dream and to dignify the particularities of Sendak’s own Jewish minority group.

Incorporating idealized child Holocaust victims, like Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s boy narrator, as well as cookie-cutter Jewish American children like those of Taylor’s stories, into the canon of American children’s literature helped American Jews belong to the postwar vision of the nation’s “wholesome,” child-centered future, even as the terms of this vision helped cleanse the public sphere of such unwanted elements as homosexuals, non-acculturated immigrants, irreverent or subversive sorts, and those too unrestrained, rebellious, or emotionally destabilized by trauma to perform the conventional roles of the bourgeois American family.211 The context of this symbolic framework around American childhood in the 1950s sets the stage for the

56 emotional alienation of queer, socially neglected, or traumatized outsiders whose voices would begin to rise more prominently into mainstream culture during the latter half of the century.212

By the end of WWII, American social welfare initiatives sought to expand acceptance of minority groups within the nation’s idealized future vision. The government suppressed racist publications and promoted what Eric L. Goldstein calls a “vigorous propaganda campaign” with a “goal of unity by defining the American values of tolerance and equality as the antithesis of

Nazi racism,” a message announced by the Office of War Information through radio, pamphlets, movies, posters, and comic books.213 In 1955, Sendak’s drawings for Little Stories on Big

Subjects by Gladys Baker Bond, published by the Anti-Defamation League Of B’nai B’rith, promoted multiculturalist acceptance and social sensitivity. One of them described the experience of Johnny, a child, drawn with dark hair, who is tricked by a group of boys, whose staring “blue eyes and gray eyes and green eyes” make him “uncomfortable” and warn him of the danger that awaits him.214 On a larger scale, the Manhattan-based National Social Welfare

Assembly, responding to accusations of comic books’ harmfulness to children’s development, created a Comics Project from 1949-1967 that sought to both reinforce the social order and promote multiculturalism, combatting young Americans’ inherited ethnic, religious, and racial prejudices.215 Its educational inserts in popular DC comic books reached an average of forty million Americans each month.216 In “Superman’s Code for Buddies” (1949), Superman intervenes when boys are excluding a Jewish boy (surname Levy) by taking them to a veterans’ cemetery, where stars of David and Christian crosses intermingle across the graves of friends who fought together to protect the nation.217 By 1951, there were representatives from the

National Jewish Welfare Board and the American Jewish Committee included on the comics project.218 Midcentury social welfare projects, however influential, came a bit late to impact

57 Sendak’s own personal development; he was already twenty years old by 1948, and mainstream

Holocaust memory and organized movements for gay rights would not arrive until he reached middle age.219

Growing Up in a Fog

As symbols of an ideal national future and of parents’ desired legacies, midcentury children were sometimes actively discouraged from connecting with their own individual drives, visions, and dreams.220 Sendak recalled his childhood as “a mess of missed signals, missed cues, of ‘how could your mother know this, and how could you know that?”221 From early infancy, he internalized his elders’ confusing projections of his own identity and destiny. Describing the way he was treated as a sickly baby, he recounts, “My grandmother […] sewed me a suit of white with white stockings and white shoes. And I would sit on the stoop in front of the house with her so that the angel of death would pass over because I was already an angel.”222 Sendak would also tell an interviewer, “My father connected me with the Wall Street crash. I don’t know quite what sense that made, but it was part of the guilt of having me.”223 Neither an angel nor a living embodiment of the Great Depression, Sendak fought to embody and assert his own feelings and sense of self against an overwhelming set of adult-imposed obstacles. He felt like the changeling “ice baby” he would depict in Outside Over There (1981), switched and replaced by some false version of himself to which his mother had no awareness.224 Sendak would base

Outside Over There, discussed at length in Chapter Four, on the “hell of growing up” without knowing who to talk to, who to trust, and how to function.225 Reflecting his advocacy on behalf of all alienated children, Sendak described his own childhood in terms of what Miranda Fricker calls “hermeneutical marginalization” – exclusion from the dominant channels of meaning-

58 making and consequent difficulty coming into one’s own feelings, socially actualizing, and

“becoming who you are.”226

The 1940s and 50s saw the new family formations of the American generation born of those who immigrated in the great influx between the 1880s and 1920s. Since the turn of the century, American Jews invested great hopes in this generation’s development, as these children were to finally achieve the American belonging and affluence for which their immigrant parents sacrificed their own quality of life. Born to immigrant Jewish parents in Brownsville, New York,

American writer Alfred Kazin described the role he filled for his parents: “It was not for myself that I was expected to shine, but for them – to redeem the constant anxiety of their existence. I was the first American child, their offering to the strange new God; I was to be the monument of their liberation from the shame of being – what they were.”227 Speaking for his siblings, Sendak related, “We didn’t know who we were, and whatever we chose to be was seemingly in opposition to what our parents wanted us to be […] They wanted us to be wealthy Americans,” he mused, “A doctor, a professor. My sister could be a rich wife.”228 Given the freedom to step beyond parents’ emotional worlds and pre-American roots, the young American was to invest primarily in existing American establishments, as well as to pragmatically generate new ones that spoke to the culture at large, beyond that of one’s family of origin. In this context, Sendak’s obsessive, intense emotional investment in his family history – in his parents’ murdered relatives

– as well as his Yiddish-infused sensibilities, distinguished him as a queer outlier from the workings of popular American youth culture, which looked forward rather than backward in time and, at least by the postwar years, also shifted geographically to idealize the suburbs.

As discussed above, the systematic murder of Jewish relatives in Europe added another dimension to American Jewish adults’ expectations of their children, leading some to demand

59 that their postwar children both preserve their dark memories, or secondhand stories, of Jewish wartime victimization while also becoming exceptionally successful and happy, to compensate for losses and to spite Hitler. Traditional religious continuity was also an important point of emphasis. A chairman of the Jubilee committee for the Orthodox congregation of one of

Sendak’s Brooklyn neighborhoods wrote in 1947, “There is no finer field to inculcate that love for Torah, for the preservation of which so many have died and so many are still giving their lives, than in our children.”229 During and after WWII, David Roskies argues, the parent-child relationship also became a “universal trope” in Jewish folk songs and literature as a symbol of both Jewish vulnerability and hope: “In wartime writings, as in life, the child was inducted into a reality too terrifying even for the adult to comprehend, but the very presence of a Jewish child signaled the possibility of regeneration.”230

Dina Wardi refers to those children personally marked by such expectations in their own families as “memorial candles,” sometimes having also been birthed with the explicit purpose of replacing children or other relatives murdered in the war. Philip and Sadie Sendak displayed photographs of nieces and nephews sent to concentration camps, including newlyweds and babies. The young Sendak came to cherish the photographs, as they were his only access to most of his aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. If he suffered his parents’ emotional turmoil, the artist also cultivated affection for their memorialized relatives; he once described his murdered uncles as “all handsome and interesting looking.”231 On the other hand, he was constantly compared to his dead cousins by his parents as they mourned and sought to instill good behavior and gratitude in their young, gifted son, who was often frustrated and difficult to manage:

If I was staying out late and dinner was on the table and I’d been called three times, I was playing stoop ball or something outside in the street, my mother’s voice would tell me that I’d better go up now. And I’d go up. And she’d say, “Your cousin[s], they’re in a concentration camp. You have the privilege of being here. And you don’t come up and eat.

60 They have no food.” [...] I was made to feel guilty all the time. Because I had the great, good luck and it was only luck that my father came here. I mean really just dumb luck. [...] 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.232

This dynamic created a morose and emotionally oppressive atmosphere:

I’d hear about Leo and Benjamin and the other children who were my age who […] were good to their mothers but now they were dead, and I was lucky. ... I hated [them] for dying because all they brought was violent scenes in the house between my mother and father and her pulling hair out of her head, my father diving onto the bed…vivid memories.233

Sendak, of course, did not hate his dead relatives; he hated the consequences of their deaths on his access to his distraught parents, whose resultant emotional fragility left him – a sensitive and impassioned child – isolated from his own sense of self. He was to feel selfish for having needs and problems of his own in the face of such collective tragedy. Even in his old age Sendak would continue to recall a particular memory of guilt from age twelve in 1940: “Everybody was very unhappy. And I was ashamed of being so happy, because I wanted to see Pinocchio. […] I was ashamed also, because my mother and father were crying because Jews were dying […] and I had gotten everything I wanted, and I was ashamed.”234 On Sendak’s bar mitzvah in June 1941 a telegram alerted Philip to the news of his father’s death.235 Philip had been in the process of trying to bring his relatives to the U.S. Those remaining in Poland would all perish in the

Holocaust.236 The morning of his bar mitzvah, Sendak recalls of his father:

he lay down in bed. I remember this so vividly. My mother said to me, ‘Papa can’t come.’ I was going to have the big party at the colonial club, the old mansion in Brooklyn. And I said, ‘How can Papa not come to my bar mitzvah?’ And I screamed at him, ‘You gotta get up, you gotta get up!’ And of course he did. The only thing I remember is looking at him when they broke into ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’… And my father’s face was vivid, livid, and I knew I had done something very bad; that I had made him suffer more than he had to. What did I know? This thirteen-year-old ersatz man.237

Of course these intergenerational tensions also reflected wider differences between the American ideals in which Sendak grew – of individualist self-discovery – and the Eastern European Jewish

61 values of survivalism and the emotional interdependence of the family. Sadie’s tendency to induce shame in her children contrasted with popular contemporary American approaches to parenting, which saw parents’ imposition of guilt on children as a psychologically damaging behavior.238 Perhaps in the service of overcoming his distraught parents’ feelings and proving to himself that he was not, contrary to Sadie’s claims, a selfish ingrate who took others’ deaths too lightly, Sendak would later create a boy protagonist onto whom he projected those same accusations. He would illustrate his Pierre of the Nutshell Library (1962) in a spirit of ungrateful irreverence, dismissive of his distraught parents and a dangerous world. Repeatedly indifferent toward his parents and reclining against a lion that threatens to eat him and to separate him forever from his mother and father, Pierre yawns and repeats his mantra, “I don’t care.” Once devoured by the lion, which may recall Leo, one of Sendak’s murdered cousins, Pierre is rescued by his distraught parents whom he ultimately comes to value. Sendak would later write, “I was never Pierre at any point in my life. Perhaps I harbored his thoughts, but I would not have dared speak to my parents in such a way. That’s why I wrote the book.”239 His later works Hector

Protector (1965) and Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967) would similarly pit self-indulged, reckless protagonists against the threat of a hungry lion’s jaws. As described above, Sendak’s In The

Night Kitchen (1970) would also feature a cranky child who dreams about escaping his bed and flying to colossal heights after breaking out of an oven into which he has been ushered by three giant bakers.

Between Queer and Jewish Dangers

Sendak’s Jewishness, though sometimes a source of internalized feelings of endangerment, was arguably a safer dimension with which to identify than that of his budding sexual or romantic orientation. Situated in a Jewish family and what he referred to as a Brooklyn shtetl of Jewish

62 immigrants, but disconnected from any collective affirmation as a gay person, he was less alone in his Jewish difference than in his difference as a queer youth. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, while a Jewish youth has “the identity and history and commitments” enabled by an upbringing in a Jewish family, gay people “seldom grow up in gay families.” Gay people are:

exposed to their culture’s, if not their parents’, high ambient homophobia long before either they or those who care for them know that they are among those who most urgently need to define themselves against it[, and] have with difficulty and always belatedly to patch together from fragments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance.240

Additionally, twentieth-century Jews usually garnered protection more successfully than did their gay counterparts. As Sendak would likely have seen and heard about in Manhattan, not only did gay men lack sufficient police protection – they were sometimes brutally harassed by policemen and even jailed, simply for being present at a gay establishment. George Chauncey notes that in the 1930s, an era David Leddick describes as having a “don’t ask, don’t tell” atmosphere,241 New York State’s highest court upheld regulations that “explicitly prohibited gay men and women from gathering in licensed public establishments,” and other regulations

“threatened to destroy the business of any bar or restaurant proprietor who served a single drink to a single gay man or lesbian, to close any theater presenting a play with gay characters, and to prevent the distribution of any film addressing gay issues. They explicitly defined one man’s trying to pick up another man as a criminal offense. Never before had gay life been subject to such extensive legal regulation.”242 One self-identified heterosexual New York journalist wrote in Commentary Magazine, “The police […] were a presence, if only as a theoretical possibility, in the life of virtually every homosexual. As were other embodiments of authority whom we heterosexuals never thought about except to suppose that they were working for us.”243 As a gay youth entering manhood in this socially conservative era of New York’s history, Sendak surely

63 struggled to understand the intimate urges that would have been widely considered by his family and Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood as symptoms of a perverse disease at odds with the

American, middle-class family values by which Jews might gain more acceptance in the nation’s future. Unlike gay Americans dodging police abuse and avoiding the cops out of the fear of what being “outed” might mean for their careers, familial support, and social standing, Brooklyn Jews of the interwar years could hold police accountable for their protection. For example, since 1939, the Brooklyn Jewish Community Council established close relations with the police department in order to prevent vandalism of Jewish buildings and spaces.244

Moreover, acculturating Jews defined themselves, in part, against queer people. Like other Jewish families, the Sendaks grew up with inherited memories of Jewish persecution and political exclusion in Europe that resulted, in part, in “queer” labels for Jews as feminine men and aggressive women. George Mosse, among others, explores how, drawing on centuries of stereotypes and prejudices, the Jew was figured as a countertype to the symbolic ideal citizens of forming nation-states in Europe. Jewish men, in particular, fought against the wider cultures’ depictions of them as weak, feminine, homosexual, salacious, cowardly, and physically unfit to be soldiers.245 Combatting such perceptions, American Jews, since at least the turn of the century, infused Jewish children’s fiction with didactic worldviews that reinforced Jewish self- consciousness both in terms of strengthening in-group pride and in terms of promoting successful acculturation.246 It must have been difficult for a queer boy to learn about his Jewish identity with these sorts of inherited messages, as his people self-consciously sought to conform to the mainstream culture and negate its image as the somewhat gender-queer foil to Europe’s ideals of masculinity and femininity. Sendak was queer both in terms of being a physically frail man attracted to other men, as well as for being haunted by Old World Jewish memories of

64 endangerment and out of sync with the casual, self-assured styles idealized within American masculinity. Explaining why he never used his fireplace, for example, Sendak once told Jewish

American playwright Tony Kushner, “You, you’re an emancipated Jew, you don’t know fire will kill you! I will never unlearn that!”247 Around 1950, on a Canadian ski trip with friends, Sendak spent all of his time in the lodge, doing the artwork for A Hole Is to Dig, fearing that skiing would certainly lead to broken fingers.248 He recalled that Philip saw him and his brother Jack as

“duds,” indoor bookworm artists with green complexions, inferior to his sister Natalie, the smart and good-looking, “normal” one.249 Philip felt like his children were his punishment for running away from home to chase a girl, because Jack, Natalie, and Maurice were “the kind of children he could have had ‘back there’” in the Old Country, because they “were not healthy and sound.”250 Jack shared Philip’s “deformity,” and Philip used to scold Jack in Yiddish,

“hunchback! stand up straight! Pull your shoulders back.”251 Thus, the young Sendak may have found his queer orientations in conflict with the one community in which he felt a rare glimmer of belonging and respite from a potentially threatening, antisemitic world. He would later share on National Public Radio that discovering that he was gay was “a shock and a disappointment

[…] I did not want to be gay. […] I always objected to it because there is a part of me that is solid Brooklyn and solid conventional, and I know that. I can’t escape that. It’s my genetic makeup. It’s who I am.”252 His queer orientation set him apart from social tangibility, and, thus, from participating openly in making meaning with others around him.253

In his old age, the artist would share that, although his parents met and respected Eugene

Glynn (1926-2007), the psychiatrist and art critic who was Sendak’s partner for fifty years, they did not want to know about his relationship to their son: “They never knew I was officially gay.

Of course, they knew. […] Nothing was said, but if something had been said I would have been

65 thrown out of the house. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”254 Therefore, Sendak “lied to them constantly.

They couldn’t have dealt with it.”255 The reactions of Sendak’s family reflect the wider cultural incomprehensibility of a happily partnered gay person. As he disclosed,

I remember sitting in my studio, working, and my sister was visiting me, and I heard her weeping and I said, “Natalie, what’s the matter?” And she said, “I’m just thinking of my little brother, sitting there drawing pictures, and what’s going to happen when I die? You’re going to have no one.” And I said, “Wait a minute, I have Eugene.” “No, no,” she said, “you’ve got to have a woman to take care of you.”256

Celebrating Sendak’s thirty-eighth birthday, Sendak wrote to a friend and former lover, Sadie wept, because her aging son was still unmarried.257 A few years later, reflecting on a recent trip to Florida with his father, sister, and niece in February 1969, Sendak would write to Coleman

Dowell, a gay American writer and friend, as well as the partner of Sendak’s former therapist, about the loneliness he experienced among his family members at that time.258

Sadie’s feelings about her son’s bachelorhood reflected popular Jewish ideals of the time;

Jacob Kohn writes in Modern Problems of Jewish Parents (1932), “For clean young people marriage should mean a keying up of all of life’s promises, social and individual, spiritual and physical.”259 Jewish children internalized the message that solitariness was a social evil, and marriage was a cultural and religious duty.260 Chauncey’s study of interwar New York notes, for example, that gay men believed that Jewish men were less likely than Italian and Irish men to respond to their sexual advances, and turn-of-the-century investigators had “found a more institutionalized fairy subculture in Italian neighborhoods than in Jewish ones.”261 While traditional Yiddish culture did play with gender, sexuality, and cross-gender disguises in the context of the theater, it did not openly integrate homosexuality as a real-life possibility, and it frowned upon those who remained single, discouraging self-imposed isolation from the Jewish community and the joys of marriage and childrearing.262 The Sendaks surely shared these values

66 of Jewish family, which required participation in heterosexuality; Philip’s stories suggest as much. In one story, a boy meets a fish that warns him to differentiate between those fish who live with their families and those who are evil, have no family, and devour other fish without remorse.263 Before mainstream acceptance of American gay identities, bolstered by the 1973 depathologization of homosexuality and its removal from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,264 gay people – as social outsiders in relation to the exclusively heterosexual bourgeois family – were painted as urban predators and vampires, obscenely consuming others for their own shameful, antisocial pleasures. 265 One thinks again of Sendak’s

Pierre, who does not care about his parents and lets a male animal literally consume his body.

Sendak confessed that being gay in his youth felt dangerous and alienating. He called it “another sign of isolation” and admitted he had never “stopped beating myself up about it. […] I missed a lot of fun [...] to me it’s a dilemma, it’s like how do you cross the Alps? How do you have fun?”266 His recollections of his own boyhood are not far off from his interpretation of Peter Pan as “a boy obsessed with death, afraid to live.”267 “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy,” he told in 2008.268 And yet – or perhaps, because of this self-suppressing tendency – Sendak’s best work features children who fight to survive, children who refuse to be emotionally erased by parents who are too harried, disapproving, distressed, or distracted to validate their needs and desires. The following analysis of Sendak’s own adolescent internalization of an intersectionally precarious identity as a queer Jew in his era, and of such early works as Kenny’s Window (1956), the first book that he both wrote and illustrated, sheds further light on the relationship between Sendak’s social context, his forming subjectivity, and its artistic manifestation.

67 A Queer Coming-of-Age

The young Sendak did find at least one male role model that spoke to his queer sensibilities in the Jewish milieu of his Brooklyn surroundings. Though his father never modeled the act of praying or wearing phylacteries, only forcing him to wear them for his bar mitzvah, young

Maurice developed a crush on his Hebrew school teacher, Mr. Berdichevsky, whom he affectionately called Mr. Berd.269 Hebrew school, which he attended from about age ten until Bar

Mitzvah in June 1941, was on the corner of Maurice’s street at the time (West 6th St. in

Brooklyn, off of Kings Highway), and Mr. Berd, who was a sort of hero to the young Sendak, took a special interest in the boy. Sendak described him as a kind and gentle Polish immigrant with beautiful, fragile features and a fedora hat. Mr. Berd had immigrated with his mother, who wore a shaytl and lived in a back room in the tiny apartment where her son taught.270

It is unclear whether the young Sendak would have recognized the queer irony of Mr.

Berdichevsky’s nickname: the bird served as a queer symbol in Yiddish culture, as the Yiddish word “feygele” (“little bird”) was popular slang used to describe a homosexual man, presumably as meek and fluttering. From 1930-1968, the Motion Picture Production Code (“Hays Code”) forbade “any reference whatsoever to homosexuality, or ‘sex perversion,’” so directors sometimes used birds to suggest the homosexuality of a given character when explicit depiction was forbidden.271 Prefiguring Max’s wolf costume and his discovery of the wild things, Sendak, from his earliest work, merges children with birds in stories of fantasy and survival.272 Sendak would likely draw this motif from his father’s stories, as further elaborated in In Grandpa’s

House (1985), in which a boy protagonist searches for his lost parents on the wings of a giant bird. Sendak told Rolling Stone, “birds were my father’s favorite fairy tale symbol. He used to tell stories of birds taking children away. And I think that they enter into a lot of my things

68 because it’s an image of his that has always appealed to my heart.”273 Sendak even called himself a “bird of prey” when discussing the sort of artist he was: not much of an inventor, but one who collects and “steals” from different places to synthesize a new work of art.274 He would draw himself as such, his head on an eagle’s body, for the frontispiece of I Saw Esau (1992), along with the book’s authors and publisher. Discussing his integration of painful family memories in his work, he declared, “I am like a vulture […] I will feed off these memories because that’s the only way I can handle them.”275

The act of flying, more generally, would also feature centrally in books like Night

Kitchen (1970) and Fly By Night (1976), both of which would depict naked boy protagonists and specifically juxtapose the seemingly conflicting positions of being a child to one’s parents and coming into one’s sexuality. Like J.M. Barrie’s archetypal Peter Pan, argues Kathryn Bond

Stockton, children often wish to merge with the animal world in order to grow “sideways,” or even backward, rather than “upward” in the direction of social maturity, when the process of social maturation feels threatening, foreign, or overwhelming.276 Critical of the midcentury social order, which liked to pretend that children were always innocent and happy and socialized them toward culturally and politically specific outcomes, Sendak sought to honor the child’s animal instincts, truth-seeking, and serious emotional world. Identification with animals or animalistic

“wild things” might signal a decision to honor inner drives and needs despite the prohibitions of social propriety. The freedom gained in child-animal mergers alleviates the Kafkaesque alienation that, according to Mark Greif and other intellectual historians, characterized the flawed state of human nature in the modern western world. It liberates one from dehumanized, technologically advanced bureaucracies that arbitrarily survey and control.277

69 Sendak’s sexual maturation occurred during WWII, a time that, as a gay man, surely set him apart from the mainstream. In a society that deems same-sex desire obscene and forbids children to relate romantically toward the same sex or to identify with any sexuality, gay children are not allowed to exist; only gay adults – after uphill battles for self-recognition and expression

– can recover their gay childhoods in ghostly retrospect.278 Coming into consciousness as a gay youth thus often involves navigating a fog of misrecognition, confusion, and disapproval. This experience is likely to have shaped Sendak’s artistic interest in “how a child deals with revolutionary, tumultuous feelings that have no place in a given setting, like the classroom or his mother’s apartment or whatever.”279 In adulthood Sendak wrote, “To deny children’s sexuality is a crime which we in this country are very guilty of.”280 Growing up queer before the advent of mainstream “gay” identities and their gradual acceptance in normative, middle-class society,

Sendak experienced a complicated coming-of-age, which I analyze below in conjunction with the socially conservative midcentury ideals that pervaded the years of his early career.

As a student at Lafayette High School, Sendak, who called himself a “teenage fattie” and was referred to by others as “mild-mannered Maurice,” contributed work to the yearbook and literary magazine.281 Starting around age fifteen, in the summer of 1943, however, Sendak began privately composing illustrations for his own pleasure, beginning with . He soon after made pictures for the late Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, a story he found

“extraordinary,” about impossible love between a statue and a sparrow. Next was Bret Harte’s

The Luck of Roaring Camp, which was his favorite story – “about a baby adopted by a lot of rough men, lumberjacks – an illegitimate child abandoned after the death of its mother.”282

Already then he began to identify interests in how young individuals survive insufficient emotional guidance, physical and social danger, and forbidden desires. During summer vacation

70 of 1944, Sendak became close with a twelve-year-old named Pearl Karchawer during one of his family’s two-week August stays at Charlie’s, a kosher hotel in the Catskills; Sendak and Pearl bonded over the shared experience of having an older brother drafted to war and missing in action. Pearl died suddenly the following year from a surgery-related infection, at age twelve.

This direct experience of a young friend’s death left a lasting mark on Sendak and would later lead him to dedicate his Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960) to Pearl.283 Richard Rosenblum, a classmate of Sendak’s at Lafayette, shared, “He was a sensitive, talented young man. He was very different. He was driven, he was always drawing and doing projects. His entire life was art. He was devoted to art completely. At the age of 16-18 he was drawing cartoons, while others were involved in sports and having fun.”284

Seeing himself as “a serious person in an unserious society,” Sendak chose to remain a misfit focused on serious emotional pursuits, rather than to give in to pressures to neutralize difficult feelings, fit a standardized social system, and prioritize superficial gains in a fad- oriented popular culture.285 American society placed increasing importance on peer approval and self-esteem for children’s health and success after WWII, as the United States moved from a largely manufacture-oriented economy to a service-sector one that required socially talented workers who felt comfortable enough with themselves to interact easily with others.286 Such cultural pressures bred self-consciousness among the socially disadvantaged or marginal. For the high school newspaper Sendak created a comic strip called “Pinky Carrd” about life in the classroom, featuring a sort of queer outsider named Pinky who gets enlisted to sweep the floor at the senior prom while other couples let loose.287 Even as a successful artist and popular icon by the 1970s, Sendak would admit to his friend Coleman Dowell that social grace did not come

71 naturally to him, and that he struggled to speak honestly and candidly with people about his real feelings.288

Teenage Sendak became familiar with the comics industry by working after school at

All-American Comics on adapting famous strips like Mutt and Jeff for comic-book format by filling in background details, such as trees, houses, and puffs of dust to indicate running speed.289

Sometimes skipping school, which he was failing, he recalled that he would “take my stack of papers back home, shut the door, make [my parents] believe I was doing my homework, and what I was doing was backgrounds for Scribbly, backgrounds for Mutt and Jeff, backgrounds for

Tipsy and Captain Stubbs.” Sendak’s work there came to an end when his drawings failed to sufficiently conform to the heterosexual fantasy in which women were drawn as “sexy” and men as valiant heroes.290 Most paid work for artists of the time required adherence to a sexually and ethnically conservative social order. Postwar goals of reviving a unified national culture required a focus on the common denominators that united most Americans, rather than on the experiences of marginal outliers. The textbook illustrations that Sendak’s Lafayette High School physics teacher would commission from him in 1947 – for one hundred dollars and a royalty of one percent of McGraw Hill’s earnings – would also implicitly reflect the artist’s awkward position on the fringes of mainstream, heterosexual youth culture – an illustration titled “The

Chemical Dance Floor,” for instance, shows three chlorine atoms represented by chloride boys pairing up with sodium girls, a sort of testament to the natural science of heterosexuality.291

Appropriate to their subject matter, the illustrations are vapid and mechanical, if sometimes slapstick. They convey concepts such as the “chain reaction” through images of faceless figures connected by repetitive motions. One cannot help but see the stiffness of Sendak’s high school drawings as a reflection of the teenage artist’s woodenness and reserve within a culture that did

72 not welcome queer expressions or unusual desires. Though it was surely monumental to have his drawings published in a book at such a young age, a request for dutiful depictions of physics concepts was surely a limited opportunity for creative growth.

The summer after graduating high school in 1946, the seventeen-year-old Sendak lived for a time in a first-floor studio on 10th Avenue by 49th Street, in the heart of what Chauncey calls “a less wealthy gay enclave” that developed “in the Forties west of Eighth Avenue, as large groups of poorer gay men, often youths, crowded into flats in the old tenements of Hell’s

Kitchen.”292 The artist sometimes went by “Mark” instead of “Maurice,” possibly attempting to ease his social integration.293 Almost two decades before Max donned his wolf suit, Sendak may have learned about the “wolves” of Manhattan in the 1920s and ‘30s, a term used for men who, unlike “fairies,” maintained masculine social personas while engaging discreetly in homosexual behavior.294 A meek, new employee at his first full-time job – at the warehouse of Timely

Service, a Manhattan window-display company for which he helped build models for store windows out of chicken wire and papier-mâché – Sendak described this period as “one of the best times in my life. I was in Manhattan, I was meeting all kinds of people I’d never met in

Brooklyn. They were people who felt they were really artists.”295 But, after a promotion that moved him to a department of older employees, Sendak quit and moved back to his parents’ apartment in 1948, commuting from Brooklyn to a new job he found as a window-display assistant at FAO Schwarz on 59th Street and 5th Avenue, his ticket to visibility. An emotional crisis around this time led Sendak into long-term psychotherapy:

I couldn’t hold myself together till I left the nest and I got uptown. And everyone said, Oh, you’re so talented and you’re going to get a book […] — and, of course, nothing happened as soon as I wanted it to. And then I did get a job. I worked at FAO Schwarz in the window; I did window displays ... and I painted things and stuff, and then I keeled over. I just really ran out of steam and I was too frightened. I just lost it. And a very good friend of

73 mine then paid for my first session [of therapy]. He said, ‘You have to help yourself.’ And I went and I stayed for 10 years.296

While Sendak was able in retrospect to identify same-sex crushes and queer sensibilities in his youth, he claimed to have become conscious of his homosexual orientation by age nineteen, which would have been during his first year living on his own in Manhattan.297

A late bloomer, Sendak reached adulthood in a time of societal flux. In the ‘40s and ‘50s,

American marriage rates were increasing, average marriage age decreasing. Postwar youth embraced the ideals of rebuilding the nation, which had endured record lows in birth rate during the Depression years, followed by war losses. America produced over four million babies per year from 1946-64, during its “baby boom.”298 Marriage also appealed to many young people as sexual intercourse was, in 1950s middle-class society, expected to be reserved for matrimony.299

In this context, Sendak was alienated from the lighthearted, family-centered culture of his peers due to his suppressed homosexuality in a homophobic era, as well as his emotional internalization of his family’s suffering in response to the systematic murder of their relatives in

Europe. As a single, unmarriageable young man, Sendak surely felt excluded from that era’s ideal of the reproductive, bourgeois family – the symbolic source of the child in whose innocence and malleable potential the nation’s future was invested. Heather Love’s description of “gay shame” sheds light on Sendak’s emotional stance as a young man: “self-loathing, anger, sadness, fear, the sense of failure, envy, despair, longing, loneliness—or a resistance to community altogether […] produced by the experience of social exclusion […] like Xs marking the spot where the social is at work on us.”300 Sendak’s therapist, Bert Slaff, who was also gay, closeted, and Jewish, took special interest in the lonely plight of creative, gifted youth, whose inner worlds isolated them from the wider society. His publications in adolescent psychiatry would advocate against pathologizing those whose psychological distress reflected, rather than a

74 character disorder, merely the suffering of a misunderstood, “creative personality.” Terms like

“creative” and “artistic” often connoted homosexuality when used to describe men in the years of

Sendak’s young adulthood.301 “Growing up differently from most people,” Slaff wrote of the

“gifted individual,” this person “is likely not to have developed successfully the kinds of support systems more generally available, such as stable and predictable family and career anchorages.

He is likely to be unique and alone, sometimes gloriously so, sometimes devastatingly so.”302

As I discuss below, from the start of his career as an illustrator for Harper, Sendak found mentors who helped him resist the stultifying and exclusionary pressures to conform to ideals that disregarded or degraded him. Akin to Stockton’s idea of “growing sideways,” Jack

Halberstam’s notion of “queer time” is helpful in understanding the liberating creative approaches modeled to Sendak by mentors like Ruth Krauss and Ursula Nordstrom, who showed

Sendak the possibility of collapsing time and space from its mainstream configurations rooted in child development, biological clocks, expected family timelines, and the regulated daily schedules of child-rearing families. Queer time responds to the impending threat of “no future,” of potentially lacking the option to belong or to survive. It creates a new emphasis on the present, an “urgency of being” that “expands the potential of the moment” and “squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand.”303 Sendak once stated, “I skipped my adolescence. Total amnesia.”304 Harnessing the queerness of child’s play, the artist could reconfigure an oppressive, socially imposed timeline to instead honor emotional realities linked to an excluded and shamed subjectivity in need of protection, as well as to work through confusion and anxiety at his own unusual pace. In Ruth Krauss’s I’ll Be You and You Be Me (1954), which Sendak would illustrate, for example, Krauss would have a girl declare, “I THINK I’LL GROW UP TO BE A

BUNNY BEFORE I GROW UP TO BE A LADY.” Sendak would later use queer approaches to

75 time in his own work, having Max sail “through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year” on his imaginary journey to the Wild Things, and beginning the narrative action during bedtime in his Night Kitchen. Sendak would, throughout his career, cultivate a timeless quality in his work, as if to maintain a space of sanctuary for a perspective at odds with normative timelines and trajectories. He alternated between styles that included sentimental

Victorian crosshatching, as in his illustrations for Minarik’s Little Bear series; a flatly colored, fast-paced, heavily contoured interwar comic-book-style, as in Night Kitchen and Hector

Protector; a colorful, playful style using crayon and paint, as in Brundibar (2003) and Bumble-

Ardy (2011); and masterfully executed, transcendental, German romanticist-inspired watercolors, as in Outside Over There and Dear Mili. In doing so, he also spoke to the timeless quality of early childhood, rooted in emotion and physiology, and preceding one’s initiation into schedules, due dates, and systems.305

Sendak’s own biographical timeline took a queer turn at age twenty, in 1948. Having quit his job and moved back in with his parents in Brooklyn that year, he began to spend his time observing and sketching children out the window and painting portraits. Looking back on these sketches, which would earn him his first book-illustration contract, the artist would admit,

“These early, unprecise, wavery sketches are filled with a happy vitality and a joy that was nowhere else in my life at the time.”306 One self-portrait of his captures an emotionally blank stare from under a towel draped on his head like a lion’s mane or a woman’s hairstyle.307 He would later lament, “There was something wrong, always. […] Whatever was wrong […] manifested itself when I was becoming a teenager and then going to live on my own in New

York. I was permanently frightened.”308 According to Leonard Marcus, Sendak was “painfully shy” in these years but had “a fistful of talent and a boundless eagerness to work.”309 Seeking a

76 voice and a living, Sendak took evening classes at the Art Students League in oil painting, life drawing, and composition (his only formal art training) during two of the three years spent working at FAO Schwarz. The artist also had his first sexual encounter with a man at FAO

Schwarz; strangely enough, it happened “in a giant doll’s house on the second floor” of the toy store.310 It would take years of mentorship under Ursula Nordstrom and others for Sendak to overcome his own creative inhibitions, however. Displaying his drawings in the store windows, he connected with Leonard Weisgard, his first career mentor; and Frances Chrystie, the store’s book department manager, who introduced him to Nordstrom, who would become his editor and greatest champion.311 But when she first met the twenty-year-old Sendak, he “didn’t project his personality at all,” and she even had to ask his age.312

When Sendak began publishing his illustrations in the 1950s, he was still working through the emotional fog of his inscrutable childhood with the help of his therapist, Bert Slaff.

Slaff would maintain a friendship with Sendak for decades.313 As partner to writer Coleman

Dowell, Slaff would have had firsthand experience understanding an alienated queer artist struggling to integrate conscious cognition and suppressed desire.314 During his years in therapy, which Sendak initially hoped would turn him heterosexual, he tried sexual relationships with women and even became engaged to one and impregnated her. This arrangement was dissolved after a fight between them became physical, Sendak pushing his fiancée, who then lost the baby.315 Also during his twenties, Sendak began reading the works of , starting with Moby Dick (1851), surely engrossed by its themes of male-male eroticism and the dangers of a lurking, menacing secret, as embodied by the eponymous sperm whale. He would later understand Melville as a potentially repressed homosexual, and he would create sexually charged visual interpretations of such Melville works as Pierre and Billy Budd. 316 In a painting he did of

77 Melville himself, which hung above Sendak’s drawing table in his Connecticut studio, the writer appears as a wistful and handsome dandy, wearing a red necktie and a flower in his hat, his eyes soft and blue.317 In the early 1950s, Sendak became romantically involved with Eugene Glynn, a child psychiatrist and art critic, who would remain Sendak’s partner for fifty years, Glynn living with Sendak until the former’s passing from lung cancer.318 Glynn had experienced a difficult childhood of his own in Passaic, New Jersey, his mother having died of pneumonia shortly after his birth, his father shot by a robber of the family grocery store when Glynn was nine.319

The financial success of Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig (1952), which Sendak illustrated, allowed the artist to quit his job decorating store windows, move out of his parents’ Brooklyn place, and settle in an apartment between East 54th Street and Madison, blocks from what was then called the “bird circuit,” a popular district for gay nightlife between East 45th Street and

52nd Street on Third Avenue. The bird circuit, a favorite evening destination of Slaff, who was only seven years older than Sendak, and Dowell, three years Sendak’s senior, included bars with names like the Golden Cockerel, the Swan, the Yellow Cockatoo, and the Blue Parrot.320 Slaff and Dowell resided near the circuit and had connections in an upscale milieu of gay and bisexual

Jewish artists and cultural figures in New York, such as composer Leonard Bernstein.321 Surely

Sendak had some direct exposure to the surrounding gay scene, as well as the dangers associated with it. During his years living in New York, Sendak later told a reporter, he had “loved walking around the city when he finished working each evening at around midnight,” despite having been mugged three times.322 Later in his old age, discussing gay New York in the 1950s, Sendak would admit that it was an exciting subculture, “though gay bars were tiresome.”323 During these years, the New York City police and governing authorities continued to harass and persecute gay men and the establishments that served them.324 Sendak’s full, wild embrace of the Manhattan he

78 had once idealized as a Brooklyn child generated drafts in the late 1950s of what would later become Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and In The Night Kitchen (1970), a celebration of a triumphant child’s secret knowledge and of urban, nocturnal delights. Sendak disclosed that he had conceived of Wild Things around 1955 as Where the Wild Horses Are, which he called “a fantasy without any text whatsoever. It was a sequence of drawings without words of a little boy who stumbles almost haphazardly into a strange place where wild horses are running tempestuously about. And he tries his best to stop the stampede […] There was something orgiastic and strange, and I knew there was some seed in it.”325

Manhattan came to symbolically embody Sendak’s flight into creative fantasy and the freedom to be an individual, as unusual and hybrid as a modern individual may be. Leonard

Marcus articulates the contrast: “Brooklyn for Sendak was a mournful, oppressive place not unlike the Old Country that his parents had fled shortly before WWI. Manhattan, on the other hand, was the magical mother lode of movies, art, and everything worth being and doing.”326

Manhattan was also the celebratory site of victory over the Nazis in WWII. Sendak recalled being about seventeen and running “from Brooklyn to New York City to get ahead of the soldiers, and those doors opened, and we were welcomed. Young people were welcomed. New things were happening, a surge of energy: a surge of hope. A surge of happiness.”327 As I discuss in Chapter Three, Fire Island, to which Sendak regularly retreated in the 1960s and ‘70s, offered him an even further flight from the conventions and surveillances of contemporary

American life.

Though personally “out” to most friends and collaborators in his adult life, with the mainstream press Sendak remained discreet about his sexual orientation and relationship with

Glynn until 2008, sensing that the public did not want to know about his homosexuality.328

79 Already in the 1950s, poets like San Francisco-based , also a sexually queer

Jewish man, participated in a “youth revolt” against the “repressive, conformist, racist, homophobic society of the 1950s.” Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956), with its condemnation of contemporary life as materialistic and conformist, as well as its profanity and explicit, sometimes gay sexual content, shifted and consciousness, raising questions about the nature and extent of American censorship in the arts.329 Lerer suggests that late-1950s children’s books followed suit, calling Theodor (Seuss) Geisel’s Cat in the Hat (1957) a “beatnik” figure who subverts bourgeois norms by making a mess of a domestic interior space and playing with the limits of language.330 Tony Kushner wrote that Sendak, along with Dr. Seuss, was credited and blamed for “unharnessing the Unconscious of a generation, for carrying the energies of a protean cultural revolution into the story-before-bedtime hour, for speaking with an unembarrassed immediacy to the sacred and profane beings children become when they dream.”331

Wild Mentors: Ursula Nordstrom and Ruth Krauss

A renaissance in postwar children’s book publishing and social fixations on the symbolic, postwar child figure helped pave the way in the early 1950s for Sendak to convey his interest in the struggle of the human being – especially the marginal, queer, abject elements of the human being – to survive in a world indifferent or hostile to its existence. This revolution in children’s literature reacted against the late-interwar revival of Victorian, angelic, frivolous conceptions of childhood that had imposed themselves on Sendak’s own younger years but also, he felt, set his own difficult childhood in such ironic relief. Moreover, at least in the early postwar decades, the relative obscurity and marginalized cultural status of children’s publishing allowed socially

80 insecure artists like Sendak to create their most genuine, heartfelt work “off the map,” beyond the surveillance of the wider, masculinized public sphere. As Sendak would recall decades later, using a favorite metaphor of diving to denote a deep sort of truth-seeking, “Back in the ‘50s and

‘60s, the decades I define as the golden age of children’s book publishing, we — the then new generation—were actually encouraged to dive—an unimaginable situation today. There were no temptations except to astonish, there was not much money, and ‘kiddie books,’ as they were called, were firmly nailed to the bottom of the ‘literary-career-totem-pole.’”332 With the help of determined figures like Ursula Nordstrom, however, children’s books began to attract great attention and excitement in the years of Sendak’s evolving career.

Nordstrom became director of Harper & Brothers’ children’s book department in 1940, inheriting associations with classic children’s writers such as , E.B. White, and Margaret Wise Brown. A “self-educated daughter of vaudevillians and a child of divorce” who offered “saucy wit and impassioned concern for the well-being of young people,”

Nordstrom claimed her authority in the field as coming from being “a former child” who had not

“forgotten a thing.” As Maria Popova writes, “Modern childhood’s most benevolent patron saint turned out to be a childless gay woman living through the height of consumerism in America and yet managing to envision, publish, and defend children’s books that were not forgettable commodities but masterpieces that stood the test of time and enchanted generations.”333 She was,

Leonard Marcus writes, “the field’s most audacious editor and inspired mentor.” When first meeting Sendak in 1950, Nordstrom was “America’s most daring publisher of books for young people” who “regarded children’s books as an underrated literature of largely untapped potential: an art form trapped in sentimental taboos and conventions, some of which dated from Victorian times.”334

81 Nordstrom had a penchant for nurturing the suppressed inner world of the creative child – both in her authors and her readers. A day after meeting Sendak and looking at his sketches,

Nordstrom hired him to illustrate Marcel Aymé’s The Wonderful Farm (1951).335 Sendak described meeting Nordstrom and “knowing instantly my life was with her. […] I would do anything she said. […] she was integral, she was so important to my life.”336 The powerful editor surely saw the fragility and raw, creative potential of Sendak’s hidden emotional world – a world that his reserved, child-like manner sought to preserve and to protect. As mentor,

Nordstrom “lavished praise” on Sendak, “gently probed and ministered to his every insecurity,” and introduced him to influential critics and career connections. She challenged and educated the young Sendak by assigning him two books in 1952, four books in 1953, three in 1954, and three more in 1955. In 1958, she assigned him nine. Marcus notes that by the time of his first major press profile, in on September 26, 1956, Sendak had published twenty-four books.337

At the heart of Nordstrom’s agenda was taking the unruly child’s side in its struggle against what she perceived as a desensitized, uninspired adult world designed to reproduce itself by breaking the child’s instinctual energies. She hoped to put an end to “bad books for good children” – the moralizing, vapid Dick and Jane stories – and begin a culture of “good books for bad children,” of work that acknowledged and supported children as real, imperfect human beings, through their frustration and emotional needs. Nordstrom helped Sendak, at age twenty- two, evolve from a meek, self-doubting person into a direct and forceful visionary with confidence about the seriousness of his work.338 In her letters to him in the 1950s and ‘60s,

Nordstrom built the young Sendak’s self-esteem, assuaging his anxieties about his identity as an artist, modeling professionalism and confidence, and even calling Sendak “Marlon” after movie

82 star Marlon Brando, affirming the young Sendak’s stardom.339 Nordstrom would write to him in

August 1961, “You love and admire the work of some other contemporary artists and writers today but really, think how few of them have any vigorous emotional vitality? What you have is

RARE.”340 About two years later, she would reassure the artist, “You’re not in any ‘difficult genius’ category. […] You’re a genius, but we don’t think you’re unusually difficult.”341 The emotional tone Nordstrom took with Sendak in her letters was at once maternal, goofy, and jokingly flirtatious. Considering the possibility that Sendak might miss his due date to have his drawings photographed for printing Wild Things in summer 1963, she would write, “I will personally stitch the folded sheets into the cloth binding of several thousand copies (I am a very good seamstress), and take them by taxi to the various NYC stores. If you finish in time, beautiful.”342 She sometimes lightened Sendak’s serious moods with self-effacing humor about her own failures to perform traditional femininity – recounting, for example, how, for a

Newbery-Caldecott awards dinner, she wore an unflattering lavender lace dress and shed her glasses, fumbling to see anyone who spoke to her. “I’ve just seen the photographs,” she wrote to

Sendak, “Oh God. [...] who is that? Or rather, what is that? Surely it isn't a woman, or even a human being. No, it is more a sort of expanse of something, and so why would it be in the picture? Is it a prairie? No, it seems to be more of an enormous Russian steppe..... Oh, I know what it is, it is Jones Beach - a picture of Jones Beach. Jones Beach Nordstrom.”343 A lesbian middle-aged woman and an uncompromising visionary of children’s literature, Nordstrom both modeled and participated in a freewheeling, unabashed emotional style with the young Sendak, who found in her an adopted parent as well as a friend similarly alienated by conventional gender and sexuality norms. Nordstrom also published other “confirmed bachelors” like Edward Gorey, who drew gothic, subversive illustrations of domestic scenes.344

83 Nordstrom’s encounter with the young Sendak in 1950 corresponded with a shifting moment in American cultural history and a time of desperation in the twenty-two-year-old

Sendak’s own biography. Having come of age in a culture with little room for his feelings or perspectives, he hungered to give voice to the neglected child inside of him – to find the courage to express the emotional vitality and anxiety surrounding an experience of growing up beneath the weight of his parents’ socioeconomic and emotional travails, as well as his own “deviant” sexual orientation, both of which complicated his individual actualization as a modern American adult and kept him hiding on the edges of respectable society. As Sendak later argued,

Too many parents and too many writers of children’s books don’t respect the fact that kids know and suffer a great deal. My children show a lot of pleasure, but often they look defenseless, too. Being defenseless is a primary element of childhood. And often, I am trying to draw the way children feel – or, rather, the way I imagine they feel. It’s the way I know I felt as a child. And all I have to go on is what I know – not only about my childhood then, but about the child I was as he exists now.345

Sendak’s insistence on speaking to children directly stems in large part from the anxiety he felt about his sexuality, which made him generally ashamed of himself as a person and made his own body a site of guilt and misery. Nordstrom introduced Sendak to children’s book writer Ruth

Krauss, who collaborated with Sendak on several works and helped him overcome his sexual shame in his early twenties, liberating him to express his creativity with less self-consciousness around what he was and what he might be revealing about himself. Krauss spoke bluntly to the young artist about the human body and the naturalness of sexual desire.346 He would later recount,

Ruth—to me, timid Brooklyn boy—her ability to talk about the body and its orifi was an amazing adventure. I was both shocked and so elated that my thoughts were not sick and putrid, as I thought they were, as I suspect most young people of that generation thought that what they were thinking was sick. Because how could you know? No one else talked about it. No one would confirm your fantasies or answer your questions.347

84 Krauss had studied anthropology under Margaret Mead and reassured the young, repressed

Sendak with her openness about sex and the human body. Sendak contrasted Krauss with his own mother, noting that Krauss

was very interested in sex. She loved things of the body. She was very unusual in that department, too, in her ability to talk about such things. I was stunned. I lived in Brooklyn. I didn’t know women knew what happened to them until it happened because that was what my mother always said—that men were plunderers and pigs, and one had to endure it. That was part of what the marriage thing was all about–a woman’s endurance. God forbid she should enjoy it. And then to meet Ruth Krauss who boasted of her sexuality.348

Krauss’s shocking sensibilities shaped Sendak’s aesthetic and taste. He once stated, “I think my entire training was Ruth Krauss, working with her.”349 Sendak absorbed her frank demeanor and aversion to prudishness and “middle-class” inhibitions, freeing himself to access the monstrosity and animal passions of childhood, which were then taboo in American children’s publishing.350

He later confessed, “I’ve taken on so many of her traits and Ursula’s traits. These were my models. And I will not tolerate oblique language. She taught me how to say ‘fuck you.’ I never said things like that until Ruth said them.”351 In his eulogy for Krauss, Sendak called her a

“fiercely liberated woman” who met him at a time when he was a “hopelessly middle-class kid.”352

Their first collaboration, A Hole Is to Dig (1952), sold over eighty thousand copies by its fifth year in publication and, Leonard Marcus writes, first established Sendak as “a talent to reckon with.”353 Sendak called it his “baptism into picture books.”354 To write the book, which was published as “a series of definitions reflecting childlike logic (many supplied by children themselves),”355 Krauss studied children at the progressive Bank Street School, collecting definitions offered to her by the toddlers and preschoolers on 3x5-inch index cards.356 She assembled and typed lists of these definitions; some that did not make it to the final version included: stomach = “food factory,” match = “to light cigarette,” chimney = “Smoke comes up

85 and Santa Claus comes down,” and shell = “Lobsters – snap your hand off.”357 The book was an

“anomaly” for lacking a plot.358 It was also the first modern children’s book to come directly from the mouths of children.359 Marcus identifies “the keynote of Sendak’s vision of childhood” as an “ultimate faith in the resilience of children.” The “stumpy, dark-haired unattractiveness,”

“quirky proportions,” and weighty line quality of his drawings of children in A Hole Is to Dig, as well as the children’s “rambunctious, self-absorbed, generally unruly behavior” and the

“anarchic spirit” of his design, which placed figures on the page in a “freewheeling” manner,

“signaled a radical departure from the sun-splashed idealization of picture-book convention.”360

Commenting on his drawings of Brooklyn children, Sendak said, “they’re all a kind of caricature of me. They look as if they’ve been hit on the head and hit so hard they weren’t ever going to grow up any more.”361 These Brooklyn kids were “old before their time [...] Most of them were

Jewish, and they may well look like little greenhorns just off the boat. They had - some of them, anyway – a kind of bowed look, as if the burdens of the world were on their shoulders.”362

Sendak did not intend for the children of his early books to look like anxious, elderly people, as critics described them. He was simply depicting the way he and his Brooklyn peers looked to him – much unlike the depictions of previously existing picture books featuring children from

“other neighborhoods and planets.”363 Sendak once told Leonard Marcus that his choice to draw large feet on his children reflected his desire for children to feel that they are “not going to be pushed over easily,” that they are planted on the ground, because they “have the ability to face difficult realities and to find their own way of dealing with them” through fantasy and shrewd survival.364 His children’s stances may have also taken inspiration from Slaff, who had clubbed feet.365 Slaff studied serious children firsthand and may have spoken to Sendak about them. He would write in a psychiatric journal in 1981, for example, about “an extraordinarily ‘different’,”

86 autodidactic child who “related as a little adult. He was formal, polite, and verbally communicative. He told me that he disliked being a child and had no intention of acting like one.”

Sendak and Krauss’s artistic visions shared an appreciation for the oddities of children’s creativity, serious feelings, and play. Thus, their collaborative work spoke to children in their own language, however queer or inscrutable to adults. In Krauss and Sendak’s I’ll Be You and

You Be Me, a boy describes another young boy: “HE CAN’T TALK YET / BUT I CAN

UNDERSTAND HIM […] HE ANSWERS WHEN I CALL. / I CALL ‘HONEY, COME HERE,

HONEY,’ / AND HE COMES.” Krauss lived beside a gay couple named Harry Marinsky and

Paul Bernard and had several gay friends, including Frank O’Hara and , who illustrated some of her books.366 Sendak wrote that she and her husband Crockett Johnson became his “weekend parents” when he was twenty-three and came to visit them for as many as two weekends a month in Rowayton, Connecticut. Sendak sought their guidance when his own parents lacked faith in his ability to make a living or were too traditional to hear about his romantic life with men.367 Johnson conceived the word “rumpus” for Sendak, who, writing the text during his summer on Fire Island, struggled to verbalize Max’s feeling of reckless abandon and transcendence among the Wild Things. While visiting Krauss and Johnson in Connecticut,

Sendak also befriended Doris Orgel, whose young son might have served as early inspiration for

Max; this boy wore “fanciful leopard pajamas, complete with big-cat ears and tail.”368

Set apart by his experience of trans-memory and shame around his sexuality in the 1950s,

Sendak, like the children he depicted and admired, worked “from the inside out,” struggling to understand and hold together his challenging subjectivity in an era that predated socially dignified, empathetic explanations for his queer suffering. Against the bourgeois conformity of

87 the ‘50s, Sendak began to engage with ideas that were circulating about the value of individuality and diversity in a democratic, capitalist climate. By the mid-1950s, Sendak recalled, America began to circulate European books for children, including those by Hans Fischer and Carigiet; consequentially, the look of American books became more European.369 In 1956, Nordstrom introduced him to , a rebellious twenty-two-year-old French artist, with hopes that

Sendak would teach Ungerer how to do the color separations used in publishing of the time. In the ‘50s and 60s, Selma Lanes writes, Ungerer was Sendak’s closest colleague and friend; both lived in the Village, and they would often meet for coffee and “walk together late at night, to talk about illustration, ambition, and life in general.”370 Ungerer’s work reflected WWII’s disruption of his own boyhood home in Alsace under German occupation, as well as his resulting emotional alienation. In a later documentary about his life, Ungerer would offer the mantra, “If you are faced with nothing, you can fill it up – with your mind.”371 Similar to Ungerer in this respect,

Sendak created child heroes who, situated in a gulf between competing forces of urgent feeling and imposed, social expectation, face a void of meaning and address that void through fantasy.

Sendak respected Ungerer’s work and shared his feeling that fantasy offered redemption for children who struggle to matter beyond the strictures of the existing contexts that ignore, suppress, or exploit them – whether those contexts were the public, urban streets or their own families. Circus Girl (1957), written by and illustrated by Maurice, depicts the protagonist in a sort of fascist nightmare – a “thick mist” hanging over the village, in which the people all form “a great, silent circle about her. And as the little circus girl walked around the circle looking at each one of them, she saw that they all had the same face. Men, women, and children—all exactly alike. Just as though they had all been stamped with the same rubber stamp.

Then, slowly, they closed in around her, staring at her with their dreadful, unmoving eyes.”

88 Published the same year, Sendak’s drawings for Else Minarik’s Little Bear renegotiate the

Victorian, bourgeois self-restraint imposed on the child. Steeped in the mores of a buttoned-up culture, the young protagonist sheds his clothes and pursues adventures, connecting with his animal needs and curiosities. His illustrations for Minarik’s No Fighting, No Biting! (1958) also critique the well-mannered, emotionally suppressed child ideal. These Victorian-era children cannot sit still, so their caretaker tells them stories of a wild alligator and her two rambunctious children. Formally dressed, resigned to a drawing-room sofa, and slouching into the books they are made to read with their caretaker, they look like zoo animals, out of place in their oppressive surroundings. Sendak heightened the emotional boldness of the children in these works through visual contrast, drawing them in the restrained, crosshatching style of Victorian illustrator

George Cruikshank.372

Undergoing his own therapeutic process and thawing his emotional defenses in those years in the service of his artistic work, Sendak also began to ponder and express his sexuality in more open ways, at least privately and with his friends. If Sendak as Jewish son was bound to the haunting, unresolved needs and losses of his older relatives, Sendak as queer artist was committed to finding ways to liberate and validate postwar children from the constraints of the generic child. Author Gregory Maguire, one of Sendak’s best friends, said that Sendak “began to be honest in the ‘50s [...] He was laceratingly honest at a time when few others were.”373

Doodles in Sendak’s studies for A Hole Is to Dig show two nude youths drawn with a loose line, one approaching the other, genitalia in view. Across the page, a girl bends over a reclining dog, sharing a mouth-to-mouth kiss.374 In a draft of his illustrations for Ruth Krauss’s I’ll Be You and

You Be Me (1954), in which a boy and girl speak to each other on the telephone in a series of playful poses, the artist doodled the lower half of a leaping male nude.375 Sendak would have

89 been twenty-five or twenty-six at the time. A year or so later, at the top of his sketch for page forty-two of Kenny’s Window, whose text reads, “What looks inside and what looks outside?,”

Sendak doodled two nude figures crawling on their hands and knees at the focal point of Kenny’s upward gaze. What appears to be a male nude moves low to the ground in a position of desperation or despair. A headless female nude crouches over, her breasts dangling.376 They occupy the space above the protagonist’s window, out of which he gazes upward at the falling snow. In a draft of Let’s Be Enemies (written by Janice May Udry, 1961), beneath one of the pencil studies in which the boys share an umbrella and blow bubble gum into each other’s faces,

Sendak doodled, with a shaggy line, the form of a reclining male nude, muscles rippling. Perhaps these hints of sexuality placed by Sendak in the margins of his drafts merely reflect the wandering imagination of the adult artist. But they might also reveal what Sendak could not so explicitly include in his stories – the child’s lonely curiosity about the physical and social implications of a gendered, sexually emergent body and the queer desires that may emanate from that body – as well as confusion about adults’ notions of sexual shame. There may be significance to the placement of most of these marginal figures in the upper regions of the page, or “sky” regions, as the theme of flying and floating pervade Sendak’s work. In both In the

Night Kitchen and Fly By Night, for example, nude male children float through the sky while parents are missing or asleep. Flying connotes both the uninhibited, unconscious rhythms of the mind when dreaming, as well as the movement of birds, another important symbol in Sendak’s work, invoking a history of Jewish and gay associations.377

Growing up in an age of unfathomable loss and disruption but expected to conform to evolving ideals of childhood innocence and sweetness, modern children, Sendak felt, were sensitive, frustrated human beings with suppressed needs and dreams of their own and, often,

90 connections to dark familial and collective pasts that mattered at least as much as any future- oriented American dream. Beginning with some of his earliest works, Sendak expressed the potential marginalization of children from within the space of their own middle-class homes. In

Kenny’s Window (1956), the first book that Sendak both wrote and illustrated, a lonely horse sits on the roof but does not come inside. Painted studies for the cover of Kenny’s Window emphasize the boy protagonist’s identification with the lonely horse on his roof, blue against a sunny backdrop, and looking out into the starry sky.378 Though Kenny is trapped inside the home, he imagines himself into the Swiss Alps. He understands that “outside” can be dangerous, though, after shutting a toy soldier out on his snowy windowsill. In Very Far Away (1957),

Martin suffers the neglect of a mother preoccupied with a new baby and seeks a place where others do not ignore him. In Circus Girl (1957), Flora, the protagonist, is a social outsider, venturing away from the circus in which she was born in order to spy on people in a residential neighborhood and learn about “how the outside people live.” Any sensitive or emotionally endangered child might relate to Flora when she tightropes across the neighborhood street on this journey. Naomi Prawer Kadar even uses a tightrope metaphor to describe the specific plight of first-generation American Jewish children as their parents’ Yiddish language waned in Jewish

American institutions of the 1940s and ‘50s: “Walking the tightrope of becoming integrated into

American society while maintaining a close connection to the Jewish roots and linguistic heritage of the immigrant generation ultimately proved to be an impossible task.”379

Another way in which Sendak’s early work challenges the generic child is to subtly subvert the norms of a gender-rigid, sexually restrained, exclusively heterosexual society – the vision of society that such a future-oriented, middle-class vision of childhood sought to reproduce. In a culture saturated with representations of sweet, submissive girls and brave,

91 confident boys, as well as the unquestioned expectation that all people experience only heterosexual desire, Sendak drew from queer variations in his own life. He recalled sensitive, shy boys and bossy, impatient girls. His own sister, Natalie, he remembered, was an aggressive, shrewd businesswoman from childhood, hiring neighbors to make bindings for her brothers’ homemade books and collecting profits.380 Following Krauss’s desire that boys and girls not be constrained to stereotypically gendered activities, Sendak changed some of the girls to boys and vice versa in the final drawing stage for A Hole is to Dig: “There are, alas, some suspiciously hermaphroditic-looking kids lurking in the pages.”381 Also, during the snowstorm in Kenny’s

Window, Kenny watches an affectionate moment between a man and his baby, rather than finding a stereotypical image of a mother and child. When playing at hosting a party, Kenny’s teddy bear, Bucky, asks, “No lady guests?” When Kenny summons Baby, his female dog, she

“promptly curled up and went back to sleep.” Baby’s anticlimactic response to a call for participation in a game of conventional gender roles resembles moments in other Sendak work, including a drawing for Ruth Krauss’s I’ll Be You and You Be Me (1954) in which Sendak has a clueless boy scratching his head beside a frustrated girl, with hand-lettered text proclaiming: “IF

YOU KISSED ME, I’D KISS YOU BACK, I GUESS.” On page thirty-two of A Kiss for Little

Bear (1968), Little Bear would anger the groom, a skunk, by lifting his skunk bride off her feet to kiss her on the lips in the midst of their wedding. The groom holds a drawing by Little Bear of the skunk couple kissing and holding hands; looking identical, it is unclear which is the bride and which the groom. As an adult, Sendak might have seen himself as something of a playfully welcomed intruder and an anomaly in the social matrix of American heterosexual courtship and family – not belonging, but carving out a relational position for himself with play, subversion, and affection. In his eulogy to Krauss, he would write, “When I last visited Ruth, I was struck

92 by her extreme frailty […] I took her face in my hands and kissed her on the mouth. And I was rewarded once more with her growing belly laugh […] This was the same seductive Ruthie, the high-flying Ruthie who gave all of herself to her art. What a lucky kid I was.”382

Sendak also subtly offered the possibility of flirtation and affection between children of the same sex – a taboo idea in an era that policed sexual development and pathologized homosexuality. In an early draft of Kenny’s Window, the boy protagonist asks the four-legged rooster and the lonely horse if David can reside with him in the garden and ride with him in the caboose of the train. The rooster affirms this request, including David in the dreamlike vision he paints for Kenny.383 The book also depicts an exchange between Kenny and his friend David in a kind of romantic pose, Kenny gazing downward from his window like Juliet answering Romeo’s call.384 Some of Sendak’s early published illustrations even show eruptions of same-sex affection, emerging regardless of their absence from the accompanying text. What the symbolic order does not explicitly condone in words might still emerge in the emotional texts offered by images. Sendak’s cover art for A Hole is To Dig, for example, features one small boy offering flowers to another. In Wheel on the School (1954), we see a quiet moment of bliss shared between two boys in an open field – one reclines on his back, smiling, while the other rests his hand on his friend’s abdomen, gazing downward at him with gentle warmth.385 In I’ll Be You and

You Be Me (1954), Sendak chose to depict “” and “Hoppy” as two boys holding hands.

He also drew two boys sitting on each others’ feet to illustrate Krauss’s words: “YOU SIT ON

MY COLD FEET AND I’LL SIT ON YOUR COLD FEET.”386 To illustrate the line “You take my name and I’ll take yours,” Sendak again chose to draw two boys, leaning head-to-head.

These moments are the first visual representations of same-sex affection in any of Krauss’s published work and perhaps in any American children’s books. In Let’s Be Enemies, Sendak

93 would also depict two boys cheek-to-cheek with arms wrapped around each other, and then cozying up and smiling in a narrow bed together.387 In another pencil study for the book, a picture of the boys reconciling, Sendak writes himself a note between the figures: “closer together.” Perhaps Sendak was thinking purely of spatial layout, or perhaps he wanted to emphasize a friendly togetherness. I do not discount the likelihood, however, that the artist longed to see his own orientations more honestly and positively reflected in the world, which in midcentury offered little validation for queer affections.

Nordstrom would have supported such a stance; she would tell an interviewer years later,

“I had for years also said that I wished somebody would write a book that would just give a hint that there could be a romantic feeling between two persons of the same sex.”388 And she would later publish her own picture book, The Secret Language (1959), about a special, intimate friendship between two girls at boarding school.389 Her socially subversive inclinations extended to matters of gender, as well as ethnicity and religion. For example, I.B. Singer’s Zlateh the Goat

(1966) collection of Yiddish folktales, which Sendak would illustrate, was generated from

Nordstrom’s longing “to find and publish some good and beautiful stories about Hanukah and/or other [manuscripts] with ‘non-Wasp’ backgrounds.”390 The editor cared most about offering unusual beauty and interesting realities to children, regardless of how much a departure from social convention might embarrass adult librarians or critics.

As argued above, Sendak’s boldness with regard to depicting unconventional childhood emotional qualities was inseparable from his proximity to Jewish historical trauma and his family’s wartime losses. Speaking on the Holocaust, Sendak offered, “It forced me to take children to a level that I thought was more honest than most people did [...] Because if life is so critical, if Anne Frank could die, if my friend could die, children were as vulnerable as adults,

94 and that gave me a secret purpose to my work, to make them live. Because I wanted to live. I wanted to grow up.”391 Similarly, he remembered concluding from the news of his friend Pearl’s death at age twelve, “You can die when you’re a child, that’s what I knew.”392 In his eighties, he would state, “She was my personal Anne Frank. She died during the war, she was Anne’s age, and to have a friend die at that age is pretty serious stuff. […] I still have every letter she wrote me. […] It affects me now as much as it did back then.”393 Sendak’s way of making children

“live” was to portray their inner lives honestly, without the idealization and purification imposed on childhood by adult constructions of it. Max, the protagonist of Where the Wild Things Are

(1963), for example, is a far cry from the well-mannered, 1950s model American child when he runs about the house in a wolf costume and shouts at his mother, threatening to eat her. Max’s mother, in turn, is unlike the idealized midcentury American mother when she punishes him.

Sendak once remarked with sarcasm, “she puts him in a room and denies him food. No way.

Mamas never do that kinda thing. Kids never get pissed at their parents. Unheard of.”394 In The

Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960), Rosie’s mother calls her daughter “my little girl,” forbids her from playing with firecrackers like the other kids do, and offers that playing with her cat Buttermilk would be “much nicer.” Instead of politely submitting to her mother, Rosie disagrees, calls herself a big girl, and removes herself from the room to grimace on the apartment stoop. By piercing through traditional assumptions and expectations of postwar American children and families, Sendak invited readers, Jewish or not, to face difficult emotions and realities that tended to get swept under the rug in popular American representations of his time.

Kenny’s Window

95 A more extensive analysis of Kenny’s Window demonstrates the young Sendak’s dynamic position between competing social pressures to look backward to remember the traditions of a threatened Jewish culture and to look forward towards an optimistic, bourgeois vision of the future. In this early book, Sendak draws Kenny as slender and blonde, like the idealized

American children; however, unlike that ideal, he allows Kenny to erupt in moments of vindictiveness, anger, and greed. The book is dedicated to the artist’s parents, to Nordstrom, and to Slaff. It took inspiration from psychoanalyst Dorothy Baruch’s clinical study of a seemingly autistic and apathetic boy named Kenneth (“One Little Boy”). Sendak was “blindsided” by

Kenneth, “by his inability to communicate,” admitting, “Kenny’s troubles suggested my childhood to me. I had been that lonely.”395 Kenny’s Window draws also from the solitary indoor play of his early childhood years recovering from sicknesses. The book pushed the boundaries of the time by allowing a child to express anger, to be unfair, and to be cruel in his struggle to gain control over his anxieties and fears through fantasy play. Sendak worked on the book at Yelping

Hill, a summer literary community established on the property of Henrey Seidel Canby, founder of the Saturday Review and the Book-of-the-Month Club.396 Kenny’s Window helped Sendak learn how to speak to children honestly and directly, rather than through a façade of flowery pretention. External comments on the 1955 corrected typescripts of the book rebuke the writing as coy and excessively cute.397 Sendak would also later judge this work harshly: “The pictures are ghastly—I really wasn’t up to illustrating my own texts then—and the story itself, to be honest, is nice but overwritten.”398

Looking as far backward as the bible, Kenny’s Window borrows symbols from Genesis’ story of creation and the Garden of Eden: the division of light and dark, a wondrous tree

96 blossoming in a garden, the number seven (connoting the days of creation), and a call to seek hidden knowledge, to answer questions. The book opens with the line,

In the middle of a dream, Kenny woke up. And he remembered a garden. ‘I saw a garden in my dream,’ thought Kenny, ‘and a tree.’ There was a tree covered white with blossoms. And above the tree shone the sun and the moon side by side. Half the garden was filled with yellow morning and the other with dark green night. ‘There was something else in my dream,’ thought Kenny, and he tried to remember.

Here, Sendak replaces the biblical serpent with a winding train carrying a different kind of creature to instigate human curiosity – a four-footed rooster who gives Kenny seven questions that he must answer. The rooster, as symbol of masculinity, confidence, and phallus, is made queer by his extra feet.399 He rides in the rear caboose of another phallic symbol – the train, which penetrates the garden. This dream fuses Old World shtetl imagery with a subtle expression of Sendak’s queer sexual awakening in Manhattan, as discussed above, and which could not easily find voice in his parents’ Jewish Brooklyn.

The act of making art is empowering largely because it is a means of “playing God,” of reenacting creation. Here the artist tenuously weds his stifled sexuality with the very source of its denial: the constraining, but cherished traditions of his Jewish heritage, as emerges in his gesturing toward Genesis and with his intrusion of Old Country roosters and goats into a story about a boy living in a modern city.400 Moreover, he offers real advice to children about how to transcend psychological imprisonment and pursue dreams. The seven questions posed to Kenny may reflect insights from twenty-six-year-old Sendak’s own life at the time, settling into a coupled, domestic life in Manhattan and undergoing therapy. They teach the following lessons: apologize with sincerity and use playfulness to mend relationships – as Kenny does with his teddy bear; love others for who they know themselves to be, despite what you want them to be – as Kenny does for his dog, Baby, who dreams of being an elephant; traditional relationships can

97 be lonely traps if the pair does not see each other for who they genuinely are and what they genuinely want – an “only goat,” which Kenny seeks to bring home from Europe (“I have come all the way from America to make you my only goat”401) like an Old Country bride, is a “lonely goat” who cannot play outside402; don’t rely on your parents too much or expect them to understand your dreams – “I won’t tell mama or papa [about the horse on the roof]. They’d say it was a dream. They don’t know how to listen in the night”403; be flexible about adjusting your expectations – you may come to crave adult freedoms over early childhood comforts – “I thought

I wanted to live in the garden [but] I wish I had a horse, and a ship with an extra room for a friend.”404 Max of Where the Wild Things Are (1963) would enact a similar process of growth, moving from his own self-created Garden of Eden among the wild things to a yearning for family and empathetic connection.

Sendak was especially invested in the message of transcending parental expectations without fully rejecting parents themselves. He felt overwhelmed by the expectations of his own parents: they had first predicted his death in early childhood, only later to place the insurmountable expectations on him of carrying the burden of memorializing his relatives murdered in the Holocaust, of being shiny American successes, and later of denying his dreams of being an artist for a more “respectable” path.405 When Sendak won the Caldecott award, for example, Philip joked, “Well, now, maybe they’ll give you a grown-up book to do.”406 Sendak felt strongly about advocating for those who are misunderstood or treated in ways incongruous to their emotional truths.

The young Sendak might have felt something like the goat in his draft of Kenny’s

Window, expected to perform an inauthentic childhood characterized by angelic sweetness and orderliness in a system that felt unnatural to him: “‘Can I lie in the mud in America?’ ‘No,’

98 Kenny answered, ‘My goat must be pretty and clean and wear a silver bell around her neck.’”407

Connoting Christmas time, churches, and weddings, silver bells further hint at Sendak’s alienation as a queer Jewish boy growing up in mid-century America. In an earlier draft, the goat dies of a broken heart, because she never became Kenny’s “only goat.” Like Max of Wild

Things who eventually longs to leave the wild rumpus for someone who “loved him best of all,” the goat wants to be seen, differentiated from others, and understood. She corrects Kenny when he confuses her with a picture of some other goat from a book. Her death in this earlier version leads Kenny to cry and reflect that her love will remain a secret inside of him.408 This piece of the story was removed, perhaps too morose or too distracting from the central narrative. Also omitted from the corrected typescripts of Kenny’s Window is a line in which the goat reminds

Kenny that one’s “inside” is not only heart, but also stomach, refocusing attention on bodily drives, against bourgeois sentimentalism, which would have suppressed such feelings in service of an ideal, disembodied symbolic order.

Earlier drafts also play with traditional masculinity and introduce homoerotic tensions, having intimate, tender moments take place between male characters. In one of the typescripts, reacting to Kenny’s announcement about his plan to draw a special, secret picture, the two toy soldiers appear pleased, and Kenny whispers nice remarks to them. A reader’s hand-written reaction to this moment with the toy soldiers condemns the writing as fussy and confusing, suggesting that this moment should be erased.409 At another moment in the story, one soldier asks the other to run away with him. Kenny stops them, telling them he loves them, whispering sentimentally to them and rubbing his finger over their bodies.410 Sendak wrote that he used to spread toy soldiers on his blanket when he was a child suffering long illnesses at home.411 One typescript for Kenny’s Window also includes a sort of lovers’ quarrel between Kenny and his

99 sulking teddy bear, Bucky, in which the two parties threaten to never speak or sleep with each other again.412 The published story contains only faint traces of this spirit – “Last night,” Kenny explains to his toy soldiers in the final version, “I forgot and didn’t take him to bed with me.”413

Working on this project in his twenties, the young Sendak may have worried about maintaining others’ love in ways similar to Kenny’s dog, Baby; she dreams of being an elephant but fears that Kenny would stop loving her if she no longer looked and behaved like a dog, admitting, “I couldn’t sleep, because I was too big too fit under your bed. I couldn’t eat because elephants don’t like hamburger. […] And most of all I was afraid you’d stop loving me. I thought, ‘Kenny has lots of love for a little dog, but does he have enough for an elephant?’”414

Baby’s fear is, of course, a reflection of Kenny’s feelings as a subject whom others might receive as undesirable or excessive. Strikingly, an early draft almost explicitly paints Kenny as queer, having him protect a cherished secret feeling from his dream. The secret revealed to Kenny in an earlier unpublished typescript is that he is different. In an unusual moment of revelation, Kenny is moonlit and dusted in the white of snow, his eyes colored rainbow. He realizes that the secret he seeks is inside of him, rather than outside of his window.415Around the same time he worked on Kenny’s Window, Sendak’s included in his 1955 draft of a piece that would become Where the Wild Things Are a supporting character in search of “where white is the color of everything,” contrasting the protagonist’s search for wild horses.416 Sendak would also recall feeling struck by the sleek whiteness of the 1939 New York World’s Fair at age eleven, where his older sister lost track of him, a story that ended with Sendak’s return home to Brooklyn in a police car.417 Would it be too great a leap to read into the snowy whiteness and rainbow mist of Kenny’s difference, of his secret self, an expression of Sendak’s alienation from his family as an American-born, queer man? A more “white” American than his parents, and – though a “child-at-heart” – a man

100 with a powerful, colorful, socially forbidden sexuality? In any case, Sendak’s conception was too obscure and indirect for his contemporaries in the industry. Comments on the typescript, presumably from an editorial reader at Harper, beseech Sendak to be more direct, cheerful, and outward, rejecting the introversion and obscurity of Kenny’s perspective.418 The motif of an intimate secret, expanded with queer undertones, is ultimately excluded from the published story.

Kenny’s Window reflects the midcentury tension between idealizing a generic child that would rebuild the nation with the existing American ideals and the desire for children to have their own individual voices. The young Sendak’s interest in lonely soldiers, secret pleasures, and whispered pleasantries between male characters might reveal an eagerness to handle the loneliness and frustration of a particularly queer childhood, but it did not suit the social climate of the 1950s, nor did it manifest at this early stage in ways that sufficiently spoke to the generic child or to universal childhood drives. Sendak consequentially neutralized Kenny’s voice from its initial loneliness, sensuality, and secretiveness to a more universal, generic tone. However, he creatively infused Kenny’s fantasies with queer undertones and honored the alienated child’s inner drives, painting this first serious protagonist as an all-American, but solitary, frustrated child with forceful emotions and dreams of agency and independence.

Conclusion

The young Sendak teetered on the boundaries of what mainstream American society of his time considered decent and acceptable for an American youth, as the perceived raw material of the nation’s future. A sexually queer son of urban, Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants during an era of widespread Jewish American acculturation and migration to the suburbs, as well as a time that criminalized and pathologized homosexuality; a sensitive person shrouded in the despair of a

101 family experiencing the destruction of Polish relatives and communities before the advent of institutionalized Holocaust memory; and a physically frail introvert who hated school and immersed himself in comic books and mass media culture, the young Sendak experienced from the inside-out much of what his nation sought to negate in its shaping of the future generation.

Based on creative visions gleaned from within this less-than-“ideal” upbringing, and with the help of mentors like Ursula Nordstrom, Ruth Krauss, and Bertram Slaff, he found his artistic voice in the service of expanding the culture’s conception of childhood, building creatively on existing critiques of midcentury America’s socially conformist and conservative culture, and thereby contributing a dignified mirror to those people especially marginalized by that culture and its values. Inspired by a psychological exploration of his own queer, sensitive, and serious emotional world as a child, he challenged the notion that children comprise a singular, generic category of raw matter for adult shaping, insisting that, regardless of their age, children are in fact diverse, complex human agents. Sendak’s work in the 1940s and ‘50s subtly represents the emotional positions of outsiders struggling to grow up beyond oppressive norms of gender and sexuality, as well as in relation to the psychological weight of beloved parents who mourned a destroyed past and who were othered in the American public. The work begins to recognize ethnically marginal, socially alienated, emotionally brave, and creatively resilient children that pushed the boundaries of the symbolic, generic child at a moment in which the nation, recovering from its war on fascism, reconsidered the content of its social and cultural future.

102

Chapter Two

“The Boy of Today Loves Speed”: Sendak on Interwar Jewish Childhood in Flux

Sendak’s artistic representation of childhood deepened in the late twentieth century by engaging with competing social forces of his 1930s Jewish Brooklyn childhood, as he had emotionally internalized them. This chapter sets the stage for understanding the artist’s early youth in the context of a rapidly emergent and mystifying popular culture of movies, comic books, cartoons, radio shows, and advertisements. Economic and social shifts between the 1920s and ‘30s created tensions that characterized these years as “decades of anxiety” for American Jews, to use the words of Lucy Dawidowicz.419 Commercial markets and mass media developed against stark intergenerational differences in the interwar Jewish immigrant family and exerted both regulatory and liberating influences on Jewish American children. Drawing on this history, I integrate analyses of several works of Sendak’s artistic maturity, beginning in the 1960s, which emerge from the emotions of an interwar Jewish child’s need to grasp certain individual opportunities while surviving multiple potential threats: on the one hand, a matrix of powerful public agendas to “socialize” children and immigrant families, and, on the other hand, personal relationships with difficult, but beloved parents who suffered the distresses of immigrating and enduring the Depression in an era marked by anxieties about global antisemitism. Resonating on wider levels for understanding notions of modern childhood, as well as American, Jewish, and

103 queer subjectivities, Sendak’s art documents and explores how he sublimated intersectionally internalized feelings of endangerment as a queer interwar child of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants.420 Sendak once stated, “I only have one subject. The question I am obsessed with is, how do children survive?”421 Many of his later works, including the books he deemed his

“trilogy” – Where the Wild Things Are (1963), In the Night Kitchen (1970), and Outside Over

There (1981), as well as projects like We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993), intuitively visualize confrontations between the competing energies of private and public, particular and universal, “inside” and “outside.” His creative instincts speak to generations of children raised under simultaneous pressures to revere parental authority and inherited traditions, as well as to participate independently in a fast-evolving popular youth culture often at odds with their parents’ emotional worlds. Revitalizing his interwar childhood feelings in the late twentieth century, Sendak highlighted interior struggles still relevant to modern children: the need to preserve vitality and individuality while navigating private and public realms that alternated between stultifying and liberating.

Jewish American Childhood in an Age of Mass Culture

Sendak grew up in an era that saw the social progressiveness of 1920s New York City recede into economic depression and anxious conservatism.422 Philip started his American career as a successful shirtwaist tailor, making blouses and pleating skirts and dresses, but the Wall Street

423 crash impoverished him. After relocating from the East Side to Brooklyn, the Sendaks struggled to stay afloat financially. All three children were born on the dining room table.424

College was an expense that the Sendaks could not afford for either of Sendak’s older siblings,

Natalie and Jack.425 Often harried and exhausted, Philip and Sadie were inconsistently available

104 to their children, as Sendak painted it, creating a dynamic that fluctuated, in his experience, between emotional neglect and moments of intrusiveness.426 He came to see his childhood self as both “spoiled” and “traumatized,” claiming that he was the noisiest, crankiest, sickliest, and most demanding of the family’s children.427 Sadie would startle Sendak by running into his room and shouting “Whooot,” or by roughly tickling his feet, making him scream for her to stop. He believed, “It was her constant pain not to understand why I didn’t realize she was being affectionate.”428 The artist would later confess, “I felt certain that my mother did not like me.”429

Overall, Sendak felt, “being young was such a gross waste of time […] I was just such a miserable, miserable person.”430 He recalled a childhood of confinement on his neighborhood block, as well as a series of “dreadful” apartments, complete with bed bugs and backyard odors.

To avoid rent hikes and the chaos that came when buildings were re-painted, Sadie repeatedly uprooted the family, moving between neighborhoods in Bensonhurst and Gravesend, and switching the young artist between various Brooklyn schools, which complicated his ability to make lasting friendships. As Selma Lanes writes, Sendak developed an early talent for

“observing and savoring, rather than actively participating in, the life around him.”431

Sendak claimed that from infancy he was highly conscious of the possibilities of losing his parents, facing brutal antisemitism, or dying. The possibility that he might perish from his illnesses was a real one, indeed. Philip had experienced the death of his own little sister as a boy in Mishinitz, Poland, before the family settled back in his grandfather’s shtetl, Zambrow.432

Moreover, Sendak recalled that Philip told him as a child, “We tried everything to stop you coming. We bought Momma all kinds of things from the drugstore. And I pushed her off the little stepladder. But you sure as hell were going to come.” These attempts, Sendak understood, were due to the stigma among Eastern Europeans in that era of becoming pregnant after one’s

105 twenties (Sadie was 31), as well as due to financial concerns about raising a third child.433 The artist spent much of his early childhood indoors, both alone in his bedroom and absorbing the

Yiddish-inflected “kitchen Judaism” of his mother and maternal grandmother, Minnie, who periodically lived with the Sendaks.434 Minnie and Sadie relayed memories of pogroms in their

Polish shtetl, Zakroczym, during which “the Jew-haters would come into her little grocery store” and Minnie “would push her children down into the cellar,” including Sadie, hiding while the

Cossacks ransacked their store.435 Bedtime stories in many Yiddish-speaking, immigrant families, like Sendak’s, reflected the need to nourish the child’s capacity to locate and heed dangerous situations. Philip’s “myselles,” as Sendak called them, included “villagers frightened of Cossacks and of Polish peasants who came with clubs studded with nails.”436 They also sometimes featured children who lose their parents, succumbing to a fatal sleep in the snow, or who fail to be recognized by their parents after a period of separation.437 Later, in Philip’s book

In Grandpa’s House (1985), which Sendak would illustrate, the child protagonist would struggle to get his captured parents to recognize him after he frees them from their captor.438 Likely drawing from the mysehs, midrashic tales, and folklore of his childhood kheyder and community in Zambrow, Philip embellished otherwise truthful renderings of his youth with elements of fantasy, biblical stories, and the terrors of pogrom memories.439

Some of the most pervasive influences on the young Sendak’s creative vision came from the physicality of his lower-middle-class urban Brooklyn childhood, in an era that saw a rapid increase in industrialization, a popular youth culture disconnected from that of adult parents, and the emerging reign of far-reaching and persuasive advertising companies.440 A wider social expectation emerged that urban American adolescents participate in an evolving set of recreational behaviors and personal styles, which transgressed immigrant parents’ traditions – as

106 well as some of the mores of the nation’s older establishment.441 Nicholas Sammond notes the novelty of a child market in American advertising around WWI. Children of the following decades were the first to consume mass culture, in the form of dime novels, pulp magazines, movies, radio, and television.442 A rapidly growing advertising industry spoke directly to children, ushering them into consumerism through grand spectacles and manufactured dreams.

The 1939 New York World’s Fair, for example, which Sendak visited and which helped inspire his Night Kitchen, focused on creating a “better future” and published extensive exhibition guides geared toward children.443 Urban youth were perhaps the most exposed to the growing mass media of popular culture and its accompanying ethos of speed, individuality, and casual fun.444 Reflecting on the increasingly mechanical, industrialized nature of the early century, interwar critics like Malcolm Cowley bemoaned a loss of humanistic values as America’s old social establishment faded into a “grab-and-git” mentality, an “age of machines, and of persons who reacted like machines, in spastic patterns of stimulus and response.”445

Even in child psychology of these decades, the school of behaviorism advocated for raising children in mechanical ways that focused on punishment and reward and resembled training a house pet. Sendak came of age in an era that applied unprecedented scientific and cultural attention to the shaping of America’s future through its children, including and perhaps especially those children born to immigrants.446 He recalled 1930s school reading assemblies in which “you sat, row by row, class by class […] with your hands folded in your lap. Kids assigned by the teachers to be monitors walked up and down to see if your hands indeed were clasped tightly. […] all you thought about were your hands […] how anti-reading, how anti-life, the situation was.”447 The sensitive Sendak was hit with a ruler in order to stop writing with his left hand, to become right-handed.448 He recalled preserving his emotional integrity by relating to

107 his books carefully, as “holy objects to be caressed and sniffed and treasured.”449 He would lament, “I couldn’t stand being cloistered with other children, and I was usually so embarrassed that I stammered.”450

As dominant attitudes gradually shifted in the interwar decades from behaviorist “habit- training” to more emotionally invested, child-centered approaches aimed at promoting confident independence, a conflict grew between the generations: anxious adults felt more eager to shield and protect allegedly fragile children from the potential threats of the adult public, while children gained more emotional authority to determine and insist on their feelings during childhood.451

Meanwhile, as suggested above, youth became increasingly independent of the family structure via technological advances, such as the expansion of the urban subway system and the popularization of the automobile in the suburbs.452 In 1922, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise noted the deepening “consciousness of children that they have the unchallengeable right to live their own lives, under freedom to develop their own personalities. Revolting against the superimposition of parental personality […] they have begun to hearken to Emerson’s counsel to insist upon themselves.”453 The eagerness with which young interwar Americans emulated trends set by advertising campaigns, famous athletes, and movie stars suggested the readiness of youth to distance themselves from particular inherited traditions in the service of their American belonging as they constructed their own individualities.454 Mass media could pressure youth culture under the guise of liberation through exciting and fast-paced technologies, products, and styles.455 Children’s literature would absorb and convey elements of alienation between interwar parents and a generation of children mesmerized by an unprecedented, larger-than-life sort of popular culture. Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), for example, shifted gears from a career of making drawings for major advertisers during the Depression, writing his first children’s book in

108 1937: And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street. It followed a boy named Marco’s vision of a fantastical parade of wild creatures and bizarre vehicles, as well as the humorous gulf between children and adults when the latter cannot understand or appreciate an imagined fantasy.456

The expansion of mass entertainment in the interwar decades (including film, newspapers, and comic books) characterized a zeitgeist of speed and play, and it led to greater public coverage of children and the rise of professional “child wonders” like Shirley Temple,

Bobby Breen, and other young entertainers.457 Joseph Illick argues that babies and youth, as cultural symbols, helped resolve tensions between tradition and an emerging youth culture in the

‘20s to delineate the modern child and imagine its “ideal” manifestations from the perspective of anxious parents. He writes, “young people were caricatured as a way of understanding and coming to terms with the changes that overwhelmed the old order,” soothing adults’ anxieties about what it meant for their urban children to be increasingly at risk of corrupting influences from the public sphere.458 Sendak would recall “the cheated, missed-luck look in my father’s eyes as he turned from the radiant image of Shirley Temple back to the three un-golden children he’d begotten. Ah, the wonderful, rich, American-dream blessing of having a Shirley Temple girl and a Bobby Breen boy! I never forgave those yodeling, tap-dancing, brimming-with-glittering- life miniature monsters.”459 Entering the powerful realm of popular media, Walt Disney and other commercial producers of the interwar decades, along with childrearing manuals and periodicals, also helped normalize the notion of an ideal, wholesome, middle-class American child in mainstream culture, which naturalized ideas about race, gender, and class through that imagined child.460 Accordingly, gradually evolved in the 1930s from a jazzy, urban, scrappy mischief-maker to a well-mannered, wide-eyed suburban sweetheart. The emerging cultural norms of modern childhood – of prioritizing an emotional education and

109 protecting children and adolescents from social and psychological dangers – helped acculturate immigrant families by insisting that their children have a specific, emotionally “innocent” sort of childhood shielded from paid labor and the adult public.461 By the late ‘30s, Nicholas Sammond writes, the U.S. was “poised between two opposing ideals of child care—older ideals of behaviorism aimed at instilling obedience, versus neo-Freudian ‘permissiveness.’”462 While behaviorism sought to train a child toward a specific outcome in a somewhat impersonal, authoritarian manner, child-centered neo-Freudianism sought to uncover the young individual’s independent sense of self and allow children to actualize as individuals on their own terms in a culture that idealized the “American Dream” of self-made prosperity and belonging. With public anxiety about the morally vacuous, impersonal nature of the “age of machines,” as well as about the youth culture emerging overseas in 1930s Nazi Germany, critics associated behaviorism with the authoritarian production of “automatons.”463 On the other hand, implicit in the neo-Freudian expectation that modern children be permitted to overcome autocratic or “primitive” qualities of authoritarian parenting styles was the demand that they also overcome their parents’ foreign behaviors and mentalities in order to acculturate to mainstream American society as freed individuals best suited to the public sphere and emotionally receptive to the nation’s future goals.

Accordingly, the popular child ideals of the ‘30s exacerbated parent-child tensions in some traditional Jewish American families. Yiddish children’s literature published in interwar

Europe and the U.S., stemming from experiences of physical endangerment, heightened political consciousness, and emotionally tightknit families, handled difficult themes of war, violence, racism, lynching, and death.464 As Daniela Mantovan shows, Yiddish children’s literature of the late ‘30s, like Philip Sendak’s bedtime stories, reflected the harsh realities Jews faced in Eastern

Europe, as well as the general atmosphere of political terror.465 Der Nister’s tales, for example,

110 used animals to symbolize those human elements that needed to be othered, regulated, or forbidden – small, benign animals attempt and fail to participate productively in human society, and larger, predatory animals are killed as enemies.466 Though Sendak did not recount reading

Yiddish books as a child, he described internalizing his parents’ feelings that life was dangerously fragile and that gentiles were hostile to their kind.467 Delivered orally in Yiddish, his father’s stories, even the happier ones, were “always on the darker side of irony,” Sendak recalled.468 Moreover, Yiddish immigrant culture prioritized family and in-group feelings, which lent to a relational dynamic that would have been unseemly in the eyes of middle-class

Americans. Sendak recalled a typical Sunday afternoon in the late 1930s in which

the relatives have come to our house, as usual, to eat everything they can sink their teeth into. And that, in my feverish child’s imagination, meant me too possibly! It seems, in retrospect, they even left with the furniture. They were a huge bunch who would roughly snatch you up at any moment. They’d jabber loudly in a foreign tongue —kiss, pinch, maul, and hug you breathless, all in the name of love. Their dread faces loomed—flushed, jagged teeth flaring, eyes inflamed, and great nose hairs cascading, all oddly smelly and breathy, all dangerous, all growling, all relatives. We obeyed. We respected them. It would take a long time to learn to love them. I would, at a later date, take my revenge and turn them into the Wild Things.469

Sendak’s childhood, in other words, was awkwardly stretched between public cultural ideals of childhood as a lighthearted, protected realm from which to cultivate emotionally independent, socially conscious Americans, and his immigrant relatives’ spirited and unselfconscious ways of relating to their children.

Though significant numbers of American Jews did achieve financial security and middle- class status by the 1920s and ‘30s, families like the Sendaks remained in Yiddish-speaking, working- and lower-middle-class urban enclaves.470 While Philip offered his children tenderness and suspenseful, original, bedtime stories, he was also emotionally overextended, struggling to earn a living as a tailor during the Depression and in the years leading to when the Nazis

111 decimated his hometown and family. “Leading […] the macho life – of taking care of the family,” Sendak once said, Philip “repressed so much […] ingenuity”.471 Sendak claimed that his earliest memory of his parents was of them openly fretting over the possibility of him dying from early childhood diseases, including measles and double pneumonia at age two and scarlet fever at age five, in an era predating the use of penicillin. This early fear of his own mortality merged for the child Sendak with the media-sensationalized March 1932 kidnapping and murder of

Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s infant son, who was allegedly abducted through his bedroom window, by ladder. This was a baby who, the four-year-old Sendak understood, had enjoyed much greater surveillance and protection than Sendak did.472 The artist would describe this publicized kidnapping as “the major event of my childhood, and probably the source of my conviction that it’s impossible to shield children from frightening truths.”473 Following that news story, Sendak’s fearful parents, despite the economic hardship of the Depression, bought and installed new, extra tight screens in their children’s bedroom.474 Philip also slept on the floor of

Sendak’s bedroom in his underwear “armed with a fly swatter or bat, to ward off potential kidnappers.”475 Sendak recalled that one of his uncles joked, implying the undesirability of poor,

Jewish children, “Philip, who would want your children?” The artist would always harbor the pain this caused him, and he would draw this uncle as the ugliest monster in Where the Wild

Things Are (1963). After admitting this to his uncle in a letter, the latter never spoke to his famous nephew again.476 Sendak, on his part, never forgot his early fear of kidnappers or the terrible internalization of worthlessness in comparison to rich, gentile children. Never completely sure of his safety or of his parents’ ability to protect him, he once said, “being kidnapped was always the lingering nightmare of my life.”477 On an emotional level, the artist internalized a

112 sense of early endangerment as the son of lower-middle-class Jewish immigrants. He would recall synthesizing his perceptions of his own early illnesses and the Lindbergh scandal, making:

the queer association that, since I was not meant to live long – I had been told that – if the Lindbergh baby is kidnapped, it can’t die, because it’s a rich, gentile baby. It has blue eyes and blonde hair. The father is Captain Marvel and the mother is the Princess of the Universe, and they live in a house in a place called Hopewell, New Jersey where there are German Shepherds, and where there are nannies, and where there are police […] how defenseless could babies be, even among the rich? I could not bear the thought that that baby was dead. […] because if that baby died, I had no chance. I was only a poor kid. […] And when the baby was found dead, I think something really fundamental died in me.478

Fearing a similar fate, the child Sendak referred to the Lindbergh infant as “the mush baby,” later noting the similarity between the word “mush” and his own Yiddish name, Moishe.479

Sendak was far from alone in making associations between concerns about socioeconomics, Jewish acculturation, and survival. Commentators on the Jewish family of the interwar decades fretted about moral dilemmas related to financial status.480 Socioeconomics, warned Stephen S. Wise and other interwar Jewish commentators, held great influence on parents’ ability to give their children both substantial Jewish education and the requisite materials and emotional attention necessary for American belonging, let alone physical survival.

The economically strained family, Wise argued, lacked the physical energy and psychological reserves for cultivating a child’s healthy emotional development by modern American standards.

Nicholas Sammond writes that children, as targets of social reform and enthusiastic customers of cinemas and city shops, became a bridge between the home and the public sphere. Such a position could be an especially stressful one when the child’s worlds lay particularly far apart from each other, as they did for Sendak.481 Philip did not learn to read or write English until later in life; Sadie, doing seamstress work at home, never learned. Presumably, those immigrant parents who depended on their offspring for such basic tasks as translating their bills and letters from English and mediating American culture, more generally, needed their children to gain

113 American cultural capital for their families’ survival.482 But it would have been particularly difficult for such disadvantaged families to provide the relaxed, secure, and emotionally balanced environment needed to cultivate culturally American insiders.483

The project of modernizing childhood was a class issue if work, or the emotional tone of a working-class family, impeded a child’s “proper” performance in mainstream American culture, a culture that required sufficient time and energy for social training beyond what was available to paid laborers. In 1917, Antonio Mangano estimated that ninety percent of urban adolescents of foreign-born parents worked.484 This figure included people like Sendak’s Polish mother, Sadie, who in 1911 was sent alone to New York to begin sweatshop work at age sixteen to earn money to support other family members’ subsequent immigration. Coming of age years after the Depression, Sendak experienced more financial security than did his parents as adolescents, but his 1930s childhood was colored by their serious anxieties. Heightened by class- consciousness and social exclusions, twentieth-century Americanization and the creation of modern childhood were intertwined matters centered on securing the safety of a middle-class status and standards of American cultural “normalcy.”485 Both were facilitated in part by an emotional rift between generations, which was enacted through wider commercial appeals to a playful, spectacle-filled, erotically charged, peer-driven popular youth culture beyond the comfort zone of traditional parents raised on other continents.486 Socially alienated and highly invested in his parents’ feelings, Sendak resisted this rift to some extent but, as I discuss below, also yearned to explore the personal questions that an urban American individuality might allow him to indulge.487

As historian Eric L. Goldstein writes, to white Americans before the 1940s, “Jews were a racial conundrum, a group that could not be clearly pinned down according to the prevailing

114 racial categories.”488 Inasmuch as Jews were financially insecure, European immigrants, like

Sendak’s parents, they were part of a publically perceived cultural threat. Inasmuch as they were received as middle-class Americans of the Jewish faith (as a modern religion) they could perhaps gain inclusion in the mainstream establishment.489 Interwar commentators concerned with

American Jews’ public image in the face of nativist social trends urged Jewish parents not to give their American children too much individuality, drawing a line between necessary freedom and emotional neglect.490 For example, Conservative rabbi Jacob Kohn warned against exposing

Jewish children to adult entertainment and drunkenness, which Kohn perceived as a common occurrence at the modern, urban configuration of the Bar Mitzvah ritual.491 Reform rabbi

Stephen S. Wise similarly bemoaned the “pleasure-madness of our children” in the 1920s, commenting on their hunger for crude films and sexually exciting theatrics on stage.492

Commentators saw the “breakdown of sympathy between immigrant parents and their adolescent children” as the cause of young people’s liberal attitudes toward sexuality.493 Some critics blamed urban individualism and the freedom to socialize beyond the framework of a tightknit religious community for problems like wife desertion and juvenile delinquency.494 Since the turn of the century, Yiddish newspapers like the Forverts pressured American Jews to be more present and influential in their children’s upbringing, despite their poverty and exhaustion from

“backbreaking working conditions, long days in the sweatshop and low self-esteem.”495 Jewish immigrants were urged to self-regulate against perceptions of themselves as corrupting social agents in America.496 They collectively worried about meeting the standards of the emerging middle class and about protecting the public image of the Jewish community while struggling to survive financially in a difficult economy.

115 Where home failed to do so, peer groups and public school helped first-generation

American children negotiate the sharp disparities between increasingly private middle-class households, where personal emotional worlds were shaped, and the public world in which one was expected to take a useful, collectively defined social role.497 Deborah Dash Moore writes that some second-generation New York Jews treated the public school like an “ethnic institution,” in this regard.498 Sendak’s biography, however, offers the perspective of a social outcast estranged from both parents and peers. He would later recall, “I couldn’t play stoopball terrific, I couldn’t skate great. I stayed home and drew pictures. You know what they all thought of me: sissy Maurice Sendak.”499 Sendak would later state, “I hate, loathe, and despise schools

[…] school is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way.”500 Specifically, he felt that being herded by teachers in a group was impersonal and deadening, that teachers emphasized manners over content, and that they policed students’ misbehavior rather than inspiring their learning.501 He found most of his peers overly competitive and felt “very alone.”502 Thus, as already mentioned, the present study follows Eli

Lederhendler’s call to study those who, like Sendak, did not fit traditional descriptions of mainstream Jewish American acculturation, finding their American identity through more isolated, creative, or otherwise “queer” pathways.503

As I discuss in the following analysis, Sendak channeled the emotional flux of his own boyhood, responding to the interwar popularization of an American child ideal and its mass commodification. As already described, the artist’s early youth had been situated between competing desires as a queer, sensitive, urban child of traditional, Yiddish-speaking immigrants negotiating the extent of their own acculturation in a Depression culture saturated by mass media pressures and financial strain. Intuitively sifting through his emotional responses to these social

116 factors, he would articulate unvoiced personal needs of overlooked, real children within an elusive matrix of competing powers. Night Kitchen, for example, emphasizes a growing commercial and child-centered ethos with its giant brand-name products, like the baby food containers and “Mickey oven,” the enormous milk bottle, and the console model radio set – the greatest household spring of 1930s advertisements.504 Sendak’s Mickey is a unique and seemingly audacious child for taking control over the adult prescriptions imposed on his body and experience. The bakers howl, “MILK! MILK! MILK FOR THE MORNING CAKE!”

Mickey responds, “WHAT’S ALL THE FUSS? I’M MICKEY THE PILOT! I GET MILK THE

MICKEY WAY!” He proceeds to fly over the Milky Way, into a milk bottle that is also a skyscraper, and asserts power by pouring milk down from the sky like a self-appointed god of dairy.505

Humanizing an Urban Jewish Childhood

As interwar social authorities maintained, urban children were more exposed to the harshness of the public than were their idealized suburban counterparts.506 Rabbi Jacob Kohn wrote in 1932,

“the larger the city, the smaller the home for the rank and file of people who live within its boundaries. It is difficult to see how within the physical limits imposed by a two, three or four room apartment a family can be reared and flourish and can find its natural joys and daily recreations.”507 Irving Howe recalled that New York of the ‘30s was a “brutal, ugly, frightening, foul-smelling jungle....[…] the embodiment of that alien world which every boy raised in a

Jewish immigrant home had been taught, whether he realized it or not, to look upon with suspicion.”508 Real estate companies and social commentators of the ‘30s painted the urban landscape, once idealized, as crowded, filthy, and dangerous.509 Indeed, Sendak remembered

117 playing in the street as a young boy and seeing his friend Lloyd become airborne and die, hit by a car after chasing a ball Sendak had thrown into the street – the artist’s first real encounter with death.510 The children of his neighborhood were strictly confined to their block so as not to endanger themselves by crossing the trafficked urban streets. Sendak described how mothers’ heads would appear from the windows and scream “that you would die” if you crossed the street, making you “a prisoner” of the block. Another of Sendak’s friends, Freddy, lived across the street, and their only interaction with each other was waving from a distance.511 Entrapment on an urban block also meant a lack of privacy. As Sendak recalled, “We lived in apartment houses very close to each other. Next door, a little girl, Helen, was being abused. My sister and I would listen. Afterward, Helen would go down and play in the street. The doors were wide open.

Everything was in code.”512 On the other hand, the most dangerous aspects of urban life elicited some of Sendak’s most pleasurable childhood memories. He recalled that in the ‘30s it was still unusual in his family’s Brooklyn circles to own an automobile, and only one of his relatives had one, offering the young Sendak a ride on rare occasions; he would excitedly rush into the car, but much to his disappointment, the motion of the vehicle would put him to sleep, despite his anxious attempts to stay awake for it. He remembered his father reaching in to pick him up, sleeping but awake enough to know that Philip was carrying him up the stairs to bed, a warm and happy memory.513 Additionally, getting lost in a crowd at the 1939 New York World’s Fair as an eleven-year-old was terrifying, but it also led to the thrilling experience of riding home to

Brooklyn in a cop car, the policemen indulging Sendak’s request to put the siren on “for a grand entrance.”514 Regardless of whether urban childhood was more dangerous or exciting in those years, early twentieth-century middle-class Americans gradually came to consider cities undesirable places to raise “the American child” – in part because of physical dangers, and in

118 part because of the psychological influence of what reformers deemed to be socially “deviant” cultures that congregated in them, including Eastern European Jews, black migrants from the south, bohemians, political radicals, and queer youth fleeing intolerant families and hometowns.

The American Dream painted suburbs as the optimal location for cultivating proper values and socially desirable personalities in children, away from the corrupting influences of the public sphere. In dense cities, by contrast, the public sphere was ubiquitous, and in it children collided with difficult realities.

On the other hand, not all interwar American Jews necessarily idealized the culture of the

Anglophone, suburban bourgeoisie. Although a fully “socialized” American child might be the closest an immigrant fleeing poverty or persecution might come to achieving American belonging in a society that imagined itself as a “melting pot,” such a child – so self-sufficient, emotionally restrained, and culturally middle-class – would also be a strange creature to working-class, immigrant parents who struggled to survive as members of a persecuted ethnic minority and who enjoyed the specific cultural richness of their Yiddish-speaking urban communities.515 The Yiddish language and its subversive cultural attitude toward the bourgeois establishment was one route through which Eastern European Jewish immigrants imbued their children with critical perspectives and liberal politics.516 Sendak claimed that he spoke only

Yiddish at home until learning English for school.517 In the years of his schooling, he usually spoke a mix of Yiddish and English with his family, but he switched to mostly Yiddish during his maternal grandmother’s extended stays at their home.518 A “bitter and sharp” woman whom

Sendak adored, she held Sendak on her lap while she davened by the window, and she modeled an emotionally resilient stance, linking him most directly to his Eastern European heritage, “like the bridge from the old country to the new country.”519 Sendak also absorbed his father’s leftist

119 ideas to some extent through Philip’s Yiddish bedtime stories, which offered messages at odds with the ruthless competition of urban capitalism and individualism. In Grandpa’s House (1985), a tale dictated to Sendak by his father, as recalled from the latter’s boyhood in Poland, would draw on Jewish folk wisdom to condemn animalistic systems in which the big eat the little, as well as materialistic greed, which turns people into monsters.520 Tony Kushner, Jewish American playwright and longtime friend of Sendak’s, called the book Philip’s “socialist primer.”521 The child Sendak also came to adore a Communist cousin whom he was “not supposed to like” but nonetheless glamorized as “our only superior relative.” She encouraged the young Sendak’s art and spoke to him directly. He would later gush, “How romantic being loved, being respected, being looked at by a Communist!”522 The artist may have enjoyed channeling such sentiments in his illustrations for “Grandmother’s Story” in I.B. Singer’s Zlateh the Goat story collection

(1966). Against omnipresent cultural motifs of Christmas, capitalist fun, and the bourgeois family, the story features a jolly, big-bellied devil who arrives by sleigh during Hannukah with a bottomless purse, joined by a gang of “goblins in red caps and green boots.”523 Sendak’s dancing goblins look like tiny elves with the pointed hats of those so often depicted in Christmas folklore.524

Though the child Sendak preferred American books like Tom Sawyer, his father was an avid reader of the Yiddish stories serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward by I.J. Singer, Sholem

Aleichem, and Sholem Asch.525 Philip told violent, fantastical bedtime shtetl stories that would blend in Sendak’s imagination with earlier versions of the Brothers Grimm tales, which had also offered children and adults alike “that same ferocious truth,” which, despite the “clichés of fairy tale tricks,” emerged with “great poignancy and real joy…like life.”526 Though originally collected for adults interested in a disappearing culture of German oral folktales, Grimm stories

120 quickly absorbed children’s emotional interest, especially in their earliest editions, prior to censorship. Sendak’s work, tapping into real childhood feelings, Philip’s shtetl stories, and

European fairy tales, provides a model of childhood agency and cleverness in the face of danger.

Having been a sensitive child in a decade obsessed with caring for its young against the serious threats of a tanked economy and an impending world war, it is perhaps unsurprising that middle- aged Sendak was repelled by the didactic, moralizing literature that, he felt, manipulated children and obfuscated their vision, making it difficult to heed impending dangers and leaving them crippled like Ida, the protagonist of his Outside Over There (1981). Sendak would have Ida begin an urgent quest to find her threatened infant sister by flying backwards in the night, obstructed by the folds of her mother’s oversized cloak; only the disembodied call of Ida’s father turns Ida forward and saves her infant sister’s life; her father’s voice reaches her from across oceans, as if from the afterlife, or from a clever insight remembered from a bedtime story.

Sendak’s attitudes refreshed postwar parents who had grown up spiritually alienated and disengaged from their own cultural and religious roots in the socially conformist 1950s. As is widely known, the American Jewish community of the 1960s specifically struggled with intergenerational conflicts between acculturated parents who had built suburban synagogues and institutions, and young adults seeking deeper emotional and spiritual engagement with their roots. As Hillel Levine recalled of his postwar childhood, speaking to the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Boards on behalf of an alienated generation of young American Jews:

you might dismiss us as children of our times, [...] but we see ourselves as children of timelessness. [...] The Holocaust made a deep impression on our young minds, as did the new-felt pride in the State of Israel. […] [T]he larger world was exciting, a labyrinth of mystery and challenge. The warmth of an old grandfather, the tranquility of a Sabbath at home, the moral indignation of a verse from the Prophets may have given us second thought about our Jewish identity, but on the whole we knew where the action was and where it was

121 not. [...] We were not attracted to a Jewish life devoid of intellectual and spiritual energy. […] We woke up from the American dream and tried to discover who we really were. 527

The 1960s and ‘70s saw civil rights movements, as well as greater mainstream cultural embraces of racial and ethnic minorities as Americans criticized the conservative social conformity of the previous decade and the hegemonic, sexist, culturally homogeneous nature of the bourgeois social establishment. This decade also saw the popularization of overtly Jewish art and the exploration of Jewish roots, Israel, and the Holocaust.528 In other words, by the time a forty-two- year-old Sendak published In the Night Kitchen in 1970, popular culture had shifted far away from the conservative tone of the artist’s formative decades.529 On the cover of Rolling Stone’s

December 30, 1976 issue, two dark-haired Sendak children with smug expressions take charge of the Christmas tradition of decorating the tree, except this tree is “Moishe” one of the Wild

Things. Sendak’s 1985 poster for the Jewish Book Council’s Jewish Book Month would feature a dark-haired boy and girl with squinted eyes and prominent noses sitting on “Bernard” the Wild

Thing, who holds an open book. An earlier pencil draft includes “Sipurei Shalom Aleichem”

(The Stories of Shalom Aleichem) written in Hebrew along the book spine.530

Explicitly employing his parents’ frankness, subversive wit, political awareness, and serious energies in his creative work, Sendak delighted postwar generations with his willingness to speak more openly and truthfully about what most children, even comfortably middle-class children, feared and pondered about the world, including the taboos of unrestrained rage, abuse, sex, and death, from which the artist may have been less shielded in the urban, working- and lower-middle-class milieu of his 1930s childhood. Sendak claimed that while his books’ portrayals of inattentive mothers and older children’s dislike of younger siblings frightened polite American parents, for him those elements were important depictions of daily family realities, even if only on an emotional level.531 Beyond the sphere of socioeconomic privilege,

122 these were sometimes literal realities. When Sadie had to work, for example, she would hand the infant Maurice over to his sister, Natalie, who was reluctantly forced to babysit, even during her excursions with boyfriends. As mentioned earlier, Night Kitchen is a subversive account of children’s awareness of the physical pleasures of which they are expected to pretend innocence, such as sexuality and the nocturnal amusements of urban life.532 Sendak once complained, “In most children’s books in this country […] you would never even know that children had normal bodily functions, because it’s an unmentionable kind of thing. And children must think it very peculiar that they read books and see things that don’t mention things that are so apparent to them.”533 Similarly, he called his Hector Protector (1965) a “vendetta book” against critics who saw Wild Things as inappropriate for children. A serpent tangled around Hector’s sword in the shape of two coiled circles and a lunging head emphasize the protagonist’s phallic force. One young male reader sent a letter to Sendak, asking, when I grow up will mine be as big as

Hector’s? Describing these drawings as revenge against critics who found his work too explicit for children, Sendak admitted that he had consciously played with the suggestive image of the snake.534

Sendak understood the child’s imagination as “the miraculous, freewheeling device he uses to course his way through the problems of every day,” which transcended cultural and class constructions and included matters of sexuality and mortality deemed “inappropriate” for children. He insisted, “I refuse to lie to children […] I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”535 Children’s fantasies, innocent or not, he felt, were “the normal and healthy outlet for corrosive emotions such as impotent frustration and rage; the positive and appropriate channeling of overwhelming and, to the child, inappropriate feelings.”536 Sendak’s picture books of the late twentieth century, referencing advertising, popular news media, and mass culture,

123 articulated a vision of childhood that spoke to youth of the 1960s and beyond.537 This vision, rife with strong desires, internalized social pressures, physical terror, and loneliness experienced firsthand as a sensitive interwar Jewish child, validated children’s private and socially neglected feelings, encouraging them to survive the daunting expectations of meaning-making and self- actualization in a century torn between conservative nation-building and dizzying forces of social liberation. Like the children he depicted, Sendak creatively protected those parts of his emotional world targeted by social pressures within the process of “growing up” in interwar America.538

At a time when Americans idealized the dream of raising children in a private home with a well-manicured yard, Sendak’s books continued to depict children in dense cities in which ubiquitous advertisements, news media, popular entertainment, and technological spectacles colored the landscape.539 With its ethos of empowered, youth-driven energy, the city into which

Sendak was born invited one to carve out one’s independence, to experiment socially, and to try on different potential selves. Sendak directly conveyed the emotional storms of urban children whose experiences wavered between liberation, neglect, and endangerment, applauding these children’s resourcefulness, creativity, and resilience in their direct engagement with hard realities both “inside” and “outside” as they struggled to survive, physically and emotionally.540 Earlier works like Very Far Away (1957) and The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960) show children either ignored or “dumped on the sidewalk to play” in the claustrophobic but intimate atmosphere of

Brooklyn, where children were captive on a single-block radius, neighbors visible to each other from the stoops of their apartment buildings. These children don disguises, run away, distract themselves with animals, play make-believe, count automobiles, and return home. With

Nordstrom’s guidance, Sendak contributed to the project of conveying the urban landscape through the eyes of an inspired child. Nordstrom wrote to the artist in 1963, for example, “The

124 dreamy rural aspects of most picture books are lovely but you could do something about a little boy on a Brooklyn street, the stoops, the entry ways, the backyards, street fires, street games, little stores, slightly older children […] …the sun against some of our horrible old buildings is as lovely as lots of things in these wholesome rural backgrounds.”541

In later Sendak works, elements of fantastical romanticism and apocalyptic dystopias color narratives of children pushed from overwhelmed mothers onto ambivalent older siblings, as in Outside Over There, or pushed alone onto the street, as in Brundibar (2003) and We are All in the Dumps (1993), discussed later.542 Drawing perhaps on Philip’s socialism, We are All in the

Dumps envisions an entire subculture of abandoned children surviving the urban slums, forced to band together and protect each other to avoid the looming threat of capitalist predators.543 These works dignify the realities of those degraded and forgotten children who, Sendak knew, had the capacity to feel so deeply and to survive with such bravery and ingenuity, even as the wider society preferred a more innocent and “wholesome,” suburban child ideal who, raised on privilege, would stand for the American dream. They would also speak to postwar generations struggling to find meaning and direction in a liberated society in which the youth set the cultural standards, outmoding older adults. In 1969, Sendak would describe a walk he took with his father through Second Avenue’s crowds of young hippies stumbling around on drugs, expressing the desire to care for and feed them. While Philip grimaced at what he perceived as a lack of self- respect in these young people, Sendak winced at what he feared was the result of a wider lack of meaning.544 Even comfortably middle-class American children of the postwar generations, as inexperienced and physically dependent human beings, would remain hungry for stories about how people survive states of emotional hardship and need, beyond the bland security of “Dick and Jane,” Disney, and other rose-colored depictions of their reality.545

125

Comics Sensibilities and Children’s Liberation

Sendak’s picture books of the latter twentieth century draw explicitly from the cultural attitudes, fast-paced rhythms, and mixed aesthetics of the interwar decades. That increasingly industrialized era potentially alienated individuals and challenged the unity of the traditional family, but it also facilitated democratic self-invention and improvisation for young adults and creative individuals. Shifting from classical and moralizing perspectives, cultural establishments of the 1920s increasingly valued art that the public enjoyed, usually by communicating and mirroring direct, embodied experiences from the ground up.546 The aesthetic and cultural movement of Futurism fused youth, the machine, and the spectacle. The popular arts of the time,

Sendak wrote, were “liberating, socially equalizing, and aesthetically avant-garde, […] in lively communication with the fine [arts], and a kind of give and take refreshed and deepened both.”547

Before studying canonical illustrators and fine artists as an adult, Sendak as a budding artist was most invested in the popular media available to him: comic books, dime novels, movies, and cartoons. Walt Disney’s early iterations of Mickey Mouse as a playful, but degraded rodent especially spoke to the child Sendak’s identifications: this early Mickey was

“more dangerous [and] did things to Minnie that were not nice.”548 At one point, as a child,

Sendak lived a block from Kingsway Theatre, which he frequented. He recalled seeing every

Merle Oberon and Bette Davis movie there with his sister and becoming wildly excited by the

Mickey Mouse cartoons that played before and after the films.549 In his forties and fifties, Sendak would accumulate 1930s toys in his studio, amassing a major collection of early Mickey Mouse paraphernalia, to help him remember the emotional tone of that era in order to depict visual cues that would recreate it.550 In his Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967), for example, he centered the face

126 of the protagonist, his Sealyham terrier, inside a circle to resemble the lion in the famous MGM logo. Sendak repeatedly described using a fast-paced, musical approach to his books, striving to catch readers’ attention through a jazzy flow that, like an old film or comic book, would animate a text and hurry it to a beat.551 Sendak’s use of interwar comics, film, and advertising conventions harkens to the first palpable expressions of children’s desires within American popular culture – the historical moment in which mass media began to approach the child directly as a cognizant individual with legitimate emotional needs, as well as to locate lucrative pressure points. In some respects, the popular media of Sendak’s youth inexplicitly mirrored his queer desires and rebellious spirit. The playful irreverence of Disney’s earliest versions of

Mickey Mouse spoke to the stifled parts of Sendak’s difference as a queer, urban, lower-middle class Jew during an era in which Jewish American culture became increasingly “white” and bourgeois – qualities somewhat foreign to Sendak’s youth.552 In comic books, cartoons, popular films, and Manhattan store windows, the boy Sendak learned about a world of expression that transcended the laws of his constraining family life and, in some cases, subverted the mainstream social order.553

American comics, an industry that came of age alongside Sendak, drew from cultural excitement about new, fast-paced technologies, jazz music and the speed of film, automobiles, and aviation. A 1922 newspaper article noted that “the boy of today […] loves speed and […] wants to move fast [,] looks forward to 300 miles an hour with confidence [,] is not interested so much in parents’ old stories but in those involving modern methods of speed, of wireless, flying, even mental telepathy.”554 Even boys’ fashion of the 1930s reflected their interest in speed, flight, and exploration – sailor suits and caps, as well as aviator helmets of strapped leather with cheap goggles attached became popular in that decade.555 If older children of the 1920s and ‘30s

127 idolized Hollywood movie stars, celebrity athletes and explorers, and comic-book superheroes, younger ones absorbed cartoons and the “Sunday funnies,” colorful shop signs, ads, and radio programs, which colored their imagination. Sendak, who cherished his childhood comic books, often recounted a memory from infancy in which he conceptualized a comic-like series of panels while watching his siblings build a snowman through the sporadic opening and closing of a window curtain, dividing the motion into sequential images.556

Sendak began to develop his own skills as a narrative artist around age nine, pasting together comic strips, newspaper photographs, sketches of his family, and hand-lettering on paper and shirt cardboard, bound with tape and book covers that he decorated to illustrate his brother Jack’s stories.557 He believed his parents were “indifferent” to his drawing as a child but glad when the children were occupied and less of a burden on them. As a teenager during

WWII, Sendak would also become directly involved in mainstream comics in his first after- school job drawing background details for All American Comics strips, as mentioned in Chapter

One. Later, in a September 1969 journal entry, while working on Night Kitchen, Sendak described the book as “comic-bookish” and as a “series of moving panels.” He reminded himself in his journal that, like a comic book, the spreads “must vary in exciting fashion – like a film.

Fast!”558 The children of The Sign on Rosie’s Door had also imagined Rosie’s “Magic Man” as a man in a mask and blue cape with wings and earmuffs, like a strange variation on a superhero.559

Sendak’s illustrations for the Kraken edition of Herman Melville’s Pierre (1995) would also emulate comic-book heroes and the eroticized quality of popular youth culture by placing Pierre in a red cape and a skin-tight, blue bodysuit with visibly emphasized genitalia.560

Sendak’s comics sensibilities can also be understood in the context of the technological development of American children’s books, which, by the late 1920s, became more like comic

128 books due to improvements in color lithography and the rise of child psychology.561 Oversize print and exciting, often cartoonish imagery made the picture book, like the comic book, seem deceptively simple.562 Before the late twentieth century when graphic novels reached bestseller lists and the children’s book became a dignified art form, comics and children’s picture books shared a low cultural status.563 Condescension experienced as a children’s-book artist, in solidarity with comic-book artists, fueled some of Sendak’s empathy for children themselves, whom he viewed as constant social victims of patronizing attitudes.564 Sendak’s Night Kitchen, widely read as a child’s nocturnal triumph, would offer explicit emotional liberation to those children made to feel unduly naïve, ignorant, and irrelevant to adults – put to bed before the important events of any given evening and denied access to knowledge about their own bodies and physical drives.565 Comic books had offered interwar children like Sendak similar flights into forbidden freedom and agency. A youth services representative of the American Jewish

Committee, in her defense of comic books during a talk she gave at the 1960 White House

Conference on Children and Youth, would contrast the fast-paced, engaging quality of comic books with the uninspired, muted readers available to children:

Dick and Jane are fair-haired, blue-eyed, neatly dressed children. They romp on well-kept lawns and play with a pretty little dog while a young, smiling mother stands in the background near a pretty little house. How real or how interesting is this to beginning readers? Second- and third-grade books paint much the same bland and unexciting view of the world. What a difference from the action and adventure of most comic books.566

Night Kitchen, like comic books and graphic novels, uses a language of simplified planes and shapes, the collapsing of time and space, a fast-paced rhythm, separated panels, speech bubbles, word-image interplay, popular cultural references, and a kind of dream logic in order to articulate a serious, self-reflexive message.567 Mickey’s name is, in part, a nod to the cartoonist Winsor

McCay’s in Slumberland (1905-1911, reprinted in the 1920s).568 Like Little Nemo,

129 Night Kitchen features elongated panels to dramatize a surreal, urban dreamland. By contextualizing a book about childhood sensuality and emotional agency in a sort of comic-book form, Sendak playfully expressed that some modern human needs are only met beyond the purview of parents and inherited traditions. However, by framing Mickey’s nocturnal tryst in a domestic household scene, dedicating the book to his parents, and using their names on brand labels for the oversized kitchen products of his tactile fantasy, he also offered children a world in which individual drives might somehow manage to relate directly to a particular familial belonging.569

Historians note that the comics form, developed largely by first-generation Jewish

Americans in interwar New York and other cities, has always been infatuated with secret identities, social justice, multiple realities, and superheroes. Comics scholars describe the form as especially suited to expressing hybridity, duality, and ambivalence – its protagonists fly between panels and pages in order to manage the pressures of being in multiple places at once.570 In this regard, comics are suited to what Jack Halberstam has called “queer time,” a less stable, more emotionally centered human relationship to time based on reactions to crisis, spontaneous bursts of energy, and present-mindedness, rather than on socially normalized schedules of daily life in the bourgeois family and its larger-scale timelines of reproduction and childrearing.571 Night

Kitchen negotiates between mainstream ideals and comics tendencies by situating the child protagonist as both a bourgeois child who cries, “Mama! Papa!,” and a hungry, urban hero who follows his own dreams, sculpts an airplane, and flies naked through the nocturnal cityscape on a sensual journey while his parents sleep. Comic-book superheroes of the 1930s and ‘40s mirrored the psychological and emotional dilemmas of first-generation Americans torn between identities.

130 Indeed, as I’ve argued, Sendak created his work from a place of hybrid identity, describing his childhood as:

composed of disparate elements strangely concocted, a childhood colored with the memories – never lived by me – of shtetl life in Europe, vividly conveyed to me by my immigrant parents – a conglomerate fantasy life typical perhaps of many first-generation children in America. It was composed, on the one hand, of feeling as though I lived in the Old Country – the fabulous village world of my parents – and, on the other, of being bombarded with the full intoxicating gush of America in that convulsed decade called the thirties…572

Like Superman and other heroes managing a dual-identity, the offspring of American Jewish immigrants negotiated conflicting spheres of belonging. Sendak would later write to a friend that the name Maurice had caused him social distress as a child on a street filled with American names.573 Children of his generation sought to prove themselves “American enough,” especially against forces of nativism and antisemitism, as well as to meet Jewish communal expectations.

Accordingly, Sendak juggled feelings of reverence and embarrassment toward his relatives. He believed his mother was “always mad and in Yiddish she called me the equivalent of ‘wild thing’ and chased me all over the house. I used to hide in the street and hope she forgot before I crept up in the evening. It was all natural that your father took swipes at you that you dodged, and your mother….rough, rough, rough.”574 However, Sendak consistently valued aspects of his parents’ behavior and attitudes, which he saw as more frank and honest, and thus more respectful to children than were other American adults who condescended to youth. Children, Sendak believed, were so honest, frank, and resilient that “they will make a joke about something that’s primarily quite painful […] There’s such a fierce honesty in children, which I believe gets lost in the complicated business of growing up and being socialized and civilized.”575 In this respect, paradoxically, a lack of American social refinement in immigrant parents could mean a high level of solidarity and directness with their children.576 Sendak recalled, “My parents were

131 immigrants, and they didn’t know that they should clean [their] stories up for us, so we heard horrible, horrible stories, and we loved them! We absolutely loved them.”577

American “Wild Things” and the Jewish Immigrant Family

The Jewish family – archetypically a tight-knit, emotionally expressive, ritually-bound social unit – has been both idealized as a site of ultimate warmth and nurture, as well as criticized by individualist cultures that prioritize self-sufficiency and emotional restraint (stereotyping the

Jewish family as a prototypically codependent, enmeshed, or neurotic family). Early twentieth- century social authorities struggled against Jewish parenting styles, argues Riv-Ellen Prell, to grant children the liberties of an individualist life, requesting that parents give up the collectivist notion that children’s desires should be trumped by the family unit’s economic needs or that children were links in a long, unbreakable family chain. “In the new order,” writes Prell,

“children’s needs would come first. Children were to be liberated from the family.”578

By the time of Sendak’s childhood, popular psychology and social commentaries urged parents to become more understanding of children’s need for differentiation. Early twentieth- century American social authorities and psychologists asked immigrant parents to hide their own distress and heartbreak as those children came to sometimes see them as culturally backward.

They were asked to remain present and supportive but to lessen their emotional hold on their children.579 1920s Jewish communal leaders like Stephen S. Wise acknowledged the necessity of such changes in the family with empathy and notes of regret:

It is not easy for the Jewish mother to surrender that sense of possession which grows out of undivided preoccupation with child or children, that sense of possession fostered as much by a child’s sense of dutifulness as by parental concern. The Jewish mother, whom the middle- aged have known and loved, found her deepest and most engrossing interest in the days and deeds of her children. It may be and it is necessary for the Jewish mother to relinquish her long-time sense of ownership, but let it not be imagined to be easy.580

132

Speaking from his experience counseling children, Wise warned against parents’ “invasion of

[the child’s] personality” by nagging, busy-bodying, and ceaseless fault-finding, which reflect the parents’ own emotional stress more than any real fault in the child. Such behavior, he wrote, was “an obtrusion of self into the life of another” that ultimately negates the child’s sense of individuality.581

It is important to acknowledge that interwar Jewish family styles were, of course, far from uniform. Religious and cultural beliefs, for example, influenced parenting philosophies.

Unlike most vocal Reform582 and Conservative583 American Jews of the ‘20s and ‘30s, who tended to emphasize the need for parents to follow the modern child’s curiosity about technological speed; recreational excitement; and various social possibilities in the wider culture,

Orthodox and traditional Jews like the Sendak family focused on preserving an all-encompassing style of Jewish living that dictated a great amount of everyday social norms and behaviors.584

The Sendaks would have likely eschewed those liberal American models that sought to accommodate mainstream American culture by compartmentalizing Judaism as a “religion” privatized and based in the synagogue structure, organized to suit a thoroughly “modern”

American family identity.585 Philip and Sadie’s Jewishness was, rather, a deeply embedded orientation and lifestyle, and it revolved around daily practices, ritual cleanliness, traditions, folk superstitions, and communal norms.586

Raising children to revere and practice Jewish tradition required high levels of child obedience and the instilling of children’s accountability to an insular collective.587 Traditional

American Jews of the ‘30s found themselves torn between desires to give their children the opportunity to succeed, even in a somewhat nativist American context, and to protect a minority religion and culture, often for which they had suffered great persecution in Europe to preserve.588

133 Children became the focus of Jewish communal concerns about assimilation and collective continuity – objects of ambivalence for their parents, they represented both the cherished fruit of the Jewish family and the potential shame of assimilation or loss of a threatened lineage. Sendak recalled his parents’ constant preoccupation with regulating his behavior, describing Sadie and

Philip as “too anxious. Everything was hard, everything was a problem, everything was a scolding. Everything was you-did-something-wrong. You went around the block, you did something wrong. You spoke to a strange person, you did something wrong.”589 It is no wonder that the children of Sendak’s picture books appear burdened and world-weary. He once wrote,

“People used to comment continually on the fact that the children in my books looked homely –

Eastern European Jewish as opposed to the flat, oilcloth look considered normal in children’s books. They were just Brooklyn kids, old-looking before their time.”590

The difficult emotional transition to American cities from European shtetlakh often meant the adjustment of priorities of collective Jewish observance and community to expectations of individual actualization and self-sufficiency in a new, democratic landscape of open consumerism, class mobility, lighthearted “fun” and emotional restraint.591 Clashes between the social ideals of Jewish Eastern Europe and wider New York City were evident in

Jewish literature for decades before Sendak’s birth. Popular belief in some of the Eastern

European communities from which people like Philip and Sadie Sendak immigrated held that

America was a hedonistic, materialistic escape for rebellious or undignified Jews. Crossing over to that continent was, for those immigrants, an epic leap “outside” of their tight-knit Jewish communities.592 Indeed, Philip Sendak’s father, a prominent rabbi and lumber merchant in

Zambrow, Poland, never forgave his handsome, prestigious son for chasing an unserious girl to

New York and becoming an American “drudge” (this young woman ultimately rejected Philip,

134 before he met Sadie, Sendak’s mother).593 To some traditionally observant Jews, their American brethren were immoral wild things, enjoying illicit modern indulgences beyond the framework of

Jewish law and society. On the other hand, acculturating American Jews similarly disdained their un-American counterparts as “wild,” judging their unrefined, “greenhorn” ways against

American styles and standards of gentility. Sendak would absorb some of these feelings, expressing them in depictions for Where the Wild Things Are, whose grotesque, horned monsters creatively conflate the explosiveness of childhood rage with the unkempt wildness of the greenhorn stereotype. As he repeatedly stated, Sendak intentionally based his temperamental, childish Wild Things on his own Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking relatives, who, the artist recalled, had “huge yellowed eyes and stained mouths and hairs falling out of nostrils and boils and pimples and things that disgusted us as children.”594 Perhaps surprisingly, Sendak claimed to have created the book not with children in mind, but as a means of exorcising “a feeling” of his own, one he described as “the terror not so much of childhood, but of being alive. It’s a terror of unknown things. It’s the anxiety of being angry; it’s the depression of being angry; it’s the elation of being angry, it’s the joy of victory.”595 Like his immigrant parents and relatives, the Wild Things were both dangerous monsters and familiar members of his tribe.

As mentioned earlier, Sendak was sometimes frightened and irritated by the physically rough manner in which his mother attempted expressions of affection. One of his recurring childhood nightmares around age four implies that his relationship with his father might also have involved confusion between play and danger:

…a nightmare about being chased by a very frightening something and my heart is beating out of my chest. In the dream I’m desperate to get the cellar door open, but this thing is right behind me. And I finally turn. And it’s my father. And his face is hot on my face and his hands are out: murder. That’s all it is: he will kill me. And that went on and on and on. And then just this week, here I am seventy years later, and the dream came back, and even in the dream I was stunned to be dreaming this again! The same thing happened and—this sounds like a TV movie of the week; can’t be helped—I did something I never did before. I turned around and there he was, but I stood my ground and his face was so close to mine and his nose was pressing my nose and then I saw that he was laughing—that it was a joke. He wasn’t trying to kill me, he was playing with me.596 135

When designing for the 1980 opera version of the book with , Sendak would officially name the cast of Wild Things: Tzippy, Moishe (Sendak’s own Yiddish name), Aaron,

Emile, and Bernard; he would have them mutter “terrible things in Yiddish, the kind of things my parents said to me, and what you say to children, what you should never say to children.”

Max was to start his wolf call – a string of exclamatory phrases – with the words “vilde chaye,”

Yiddish for “wild animal.”597

As Harper editor Ursula Nordstrom would write, “Most books are written from the outside in. But Wild Things comes from the inside out”.598 It grapples with the line between pleasure and danger, familiar and foreign, made ambiguous in a culture of competing perspectives, one that imposed emotional innocence, cultural neutrality, and an exaggerated decorum of wholesomeness on children while also beginning to acknowledge the intensity of the child’s unconscious mind and the dangers of controlling children to an excessive extent, as was happening in fascist European nations during the 1930s. It also represented the emotional confusion of a child who both loves and fears his parents, sensitive to their fragilities and aware of the possibility that some external stimulus might elicit their rage, despair, or emotional undoing, transforming them from gentle caretakers into threatening monsters, both toward himself as a child, as well as in the eyes of culturally biased American public judgments.

Confronting the limits of what feels safe, Sendak’s children return from their journeys with a degree of internalized comfort but also with a greater acceptance of their serious, burdensome position as mediators between conflicting realities.

Witnessing wider social negations of parents’ religious, linguistic, and cultural norms in the mainstream public led Jewish American children to internalize the potential limitations of fully identifying with their Jewish immigrant caretakers.599 With the immigration quotas instilled

136 by the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and accompanying xenophobia, ethnic minorities were increasingly pressured to adopt American social norms quickly, and the Sendaks’ traditional,

Yiddish-speaking culture would become an increasingly elderly and disdained one in mainstream

America; acculturating American Jews largely dissociated from these elements in order to secure their social belonging.600 The pressure to loosen ties with parents and the Old World also came from an increasingly competitive economic context and an evolving urban American youth culture built on shifting trends and behaviors fashioned, by definition, beyond the influence of parents and the existing family structure. Walt Disney’s motion picture Pinocchio (1940), which

Sendak saw in theaters as a young adolescent and cites as an early inspiration, is based on the nineteenth-century Italian story, in which the puppet boy’s struggle to become a “real” human being and to ward off the dangers that compete with his “conscience” ultimately teaches the importance of education, work ethic, personal discipline, obedience to parents, and denial of easy pleasures and temptations. The child’s basic ambivalence between conscience and temptation, moreover, spoke to the continuous ambivalence of American Jewry, as it managed its dual identity in early twentieth-century America. Though situated in new contexts, American-born

Jews of the urban ghettos were torn between American identities and allegiance to Jewish roots, and to the mourning of Jewish tragedies in Europe.601 Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers illustrates this Pinocchio-esque dilemma of the Jewish immigrant’s child: “The struggle is strong because […] He is aware, and rather ashamed, of the limitations of his parents. He feels that the trend and weight of things are against them, that they are in a minority; but yet in a real way the old people remain his conscience, the visible representatives of a moral and religious tradition by which the boy may regulate his inner life.”602

137 The American-born Sendak internalized ways in which mainstream culture would have viewed his own parents and relatives. He painted a picture of insecure, ambivalent attachment with his mother, describing her as “so bewildering and strange, living “in another world.”603

Accordingly, Sendak saw her as awkward, distressed, and fluctuating between overbearing and removed, managing to impose herself on him without actually offering the sort of emotional availability he desired as a sensitive child, or that he felt she should exhibit by American social standards: “She was always worried. She also had a gruff, abrupt manner, because I think that any display of feeling embarrassed her.”604 Once, when Sendak’s friend Martin expressed confusion and concern seeing Sadie storm through the room in a fury, Sendak pretended that

Sadie was a hired housecleaner. Recalling this, he confessed, “that shame has lasted all my life.

That I didn’t have the nerve to say, ‘That’s my mother; that’s how she is.’” With greater perspective, Sendak would later conclude, “My mother was depressed and had trouble embracing us literally and figuratively. We were unkind to her as a form of revenge.”605 On the other, hand, he remained carefully and painfully attuned to her feelings, claiming, “Feeling sorry for her was my childhood.”606 His brother Jack, on his deathbed, would tearfully question Maurice, “Why were we so unkind to Mama?” To which Sendak could only answer: “We were kids, we didn’t understand. We didn’t know she was crazy.”607 The emotionally vacant, absent, harried, or otherwise obstructed parent would be a staple of Sendak’s creative work in the latter twentieth century, as would be the solitary, flying child whose fluid freedom comes with its own dangers.

Sendak’s illustrations for ’s The Animal Family (1965) and Fly By Night (1976) would interpret Jarrell’s words as expressing “a great hunger pain—[…] a looking-for-mama pain….[…] my pain,” the latter book featuring a nude, blonde American boy soaring past his lost mother – a carefully rendered Sadie Sendak holding the infant Maurice on her lap, as well as an

138 image of a younger Sadie tending a flock of sheep in what may be an imagined Old World pasture.608

Sendak’s Intersubjective Individuality

As mainstream interwar culture idealized talented, bright, and emotionally lighthearted children,

Sendak spent his childhood serious, timid, repeatedly ill, and psychologically intertwined with his parents’ burdens. As the artist put it, “when you live with immigrant parents, you’re always an immigrant. You grow up inside a ghetto, self-imposed by parents, in America.”609 A physically frail, highly sensitive, and closeted gay adolescent in the 1930s and ‘40s, Sendak lacked the social scaffolding of a separate American identity of his own until 1951, upon illustrating his first real children’s book at age twenty-three, which, he believed, finally made him “an official person,” allowed him to return to Manhattan, and drove him to further view his work as the source of his personal redemption.610 Sendak’s first therapist, Bert Slaff, may have been describing people like Sendak when he later quoted Glynn, Sendak’s partner: “the adult artist will have a ‘porous’ personality structure, one of polymorphous energies, where the primitive and the infantile will have ready routes toward consciousness.”611 Glynn may also have had his partner in mind when writing about the prototypically anxious psychology of the artist:

“He suffers from, benefits by, a weakness if his sense of self…. Creativity is the response to unbearable pains of loss and separation threatening to break into consciousness. Fusions and externalizations—the art work—repeople the world and recreate the self. […] The artist is parent to his work, his work is himself, and, more deeply, the work is parent to him.”612 Using metaphors of eating and devouring, Sendak’s art would dramatize the emotional and physical mergers that most small children feel with their intimate caretakers, as well as the sometimes

139 comical anxiety that accompanies the idea that this merger might lead to one party consuming the other, or the terror that an act of overstepping might terminate the precious relationship, leaving the other endangered. Raised to fear kidnapping and to mourn the traumatic losses of his relatives, nothing could be more comforting than a fantasy of fusing with loved ones. As Max exclaims to his mother in a moment of psychologically disorganizing rage: “I’ll eat you up!” As the Wild Things proclaim to Max when faced with the possibility of losing him, “Oh, please don't go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!” Additional work of Sendak’s, such as his Fantasy

Sketches (1970), a series of free-association drawings done to classical music, would also depict infants, parents, and animals devouring and regurgitating each other.

As I’ve argued, Sendak’s personal development was torn between an overwhelming, but beloved family unit, an impersonal public culture that clashed with the intense, emotionally dysfunctional tone of his home, and his own sensitivities, curiosities, and shame as a queer social misfit and a budding artist. It is not surprising that Sendak, whose drawings almost always took the form of a narrative, held early associations between literature and the act of fusion with important others in his early life. He once said,

When my father read to me, I leaned into him so I became part of his chest or his forearm. And I think children who are hugged, and children who are held on laps—will always associate reading with the bodies of their parents, the smells of their parents. And that will always keep you a reader. Because that perfume, that sensuous connection is lifelong. We’re only animals. And you watch puppies needing to be licked to survive. Well, we need to be licked to survive. And reading becomes a licking, if you will. When you not only hear a treasured story, but also are pressed against the most important person in the world, a connection is made that cannot be severed.613

As Glynn would write in 1977, the fantasy of narcissistic fusion, the “merging or fusing or blending of the self with the other—may be basic in aesthetic experience,” because it helps the artist feel a sense of mastery over the world and its objects – “a method of knowledge and control that allows the deepest form of empathy. Be the object to (re)create it.”614 In Higglety

140 Pigglety Pop (1967), Sendak more directly fuses himself to his mother, who was dying of cancer at the time of the book’s publication. Jennie, the protagonist, arrives at the home of an infant whose parents have “been away ever so long,” and no one else remembers her real name.615 As it turns out, however, the infant, drawn from baby photographs of Sendak himself, reveals herself to be the ultimate mother: she is in fact “Mother Goose,” drawn as a matronly and stout woman like Sadie Sendak, ascending into the sky as an everlasting moon. “To babies, mothers are cosmic,” he wrote, “You expect them to protect you from everything, become trees, becomes houses, become beds, become fountains of milk, become all the things that babies have every natural right to expect.”616 In Higglety Pigglety Pop, baby Maurice, disguised as female, fuses with his own cosmic mother, disguised as moon. As Glynn believed, the artist was one who regressed to a state in which the world is unified, adult discriminations temporarily abandoned in the service of “harmonizing, connecting modes in the thrust of creativity,” of consuming the world as a whole and vomiting it back.617

The psychological salience for Sendak of his emotionally overextended family – his parents’ losses and memories, as well as the passionate closeness he felt with his siblings – looms large in his most mature artistic works. His understanding of childhood as a difficult and confusing time of survival surely drew from experiencing the emotional inconsistency of parents who both sought to cultivate his American success and made their own suffering and alienation known to him, mixing it in with their expressions of love. As he put it, “They came from little

[shtetlakh] and they were living in America, which was the oddest thing of all. How do you get along with people? You don’t speak English, you haven’t been to school. Your kids are being drawn away from you by society. Their lives were unspeakable” (my emphasis).618 He once said that his relatives “showed us love in ways that were very heavy – when I learned their history, it

141 broke my heart.”619 The emotional mismatch that first-generation American children like Sendak felt with their foreign-born parents may have caused all the more reason to feel guilt-ridden attachments to them, as parents’ suffering and perceived social oddness in mainstream culture led their children to view them as vulnerable and in need of protection. Despite his lifelong frustration with his parents, Sendak held tight to them, participating in a tender emotional entanglement, which both overwhelmed him and offered him an early sense of self and meaning, fused with theirs.

The artist struggled to bridge his relocated parents’ emotional life with realities of his own in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village of the culturally tumultuous late 1960s.620 His mentor and Harper editor Ursula Nordstrom, who was raised by divorced thespians, continuously presented a view of “family life as an impediment to creativity,” but Sendak nevertheless strove to integrate the emotionally salient bonds of his family history into his artwork.621 In December

1965, Sendak’s brother Jack and his wife moved to New Jersey and bought a German shepherd puppy, Philip and Sadie moving in with them; Sendak helped them unpack and settle in, finding his Buck Roger’s space gun in a box of Sadie’s old gowns and hats.622 The following year, illustrating Zlateh the Goat (1966) by I.B. Singer, a Yiddish writer and contemporary, was especially therapeutic for Sendak, who cherished his parents’ shtetl stories and kept a framed photograph of Philip’s parents, his “rabbinical grandfather” and grandmother, in his studio.623

His illustrations for Singer included faces drawn from photographs of his parents’ Polish relatives, murdered in the Holocaust. As the artist explained, “I went through the album and picked some of my mother’s relatives and some of my father’s and drew them very acutely. And they cried. And I cried […] The photographs my father had of his younger brothers, […] and the women with long hair and flowers. […] I tried to give them back to my parents when I illustrated

142 some short stories by .” 624 The careful, intricate cross-hatching of those drawings is lovingly executed – the fine pen work gives a fuzzy softness to light and space, which, lacking harsh contours, hums like a dreamscape that dissolves at its seams. Zlateh delivered Yiddish folklore to mainstream American readers, and Sendak described it as a collection of Jewish stories that everyone could appreciate.625 The artist later exclaimed that “the only joy” his father ever had in Sendak’s career was “that I illustrated a book for Isaac Bashevis

Singer.”626 Thus, Sendak’s art functioned not only as a personal exorcism, but also as a living memorial to his family and to Old World Jewish tradition and culture. He would describe his

Higglety Pigglety Pop!, whose protagonist is Jennie, his then-beloved Sealyham terrier, as a means of glorifying her as she was dying.627 Similarly, he would immortalize his mother’s image in Fly by Night (1976), and his father’s memories by illustrating In Grandpa’s House (1985), which would compile translations of Philip’s stories and personal recollections of his pre- immigration life in Jewish Poland.628 Sendak would also decide to create My Brother’s Book when his beloved brother, Jack, passed away in 1995. He would describe his Bumble-Ardy

(2011), created as his partner lay dying, as his own refusal to die with Glynn, whose name lives on in various places in Sendak’s books, including on a kitchen calendar in The Sign on Rosie’s

Door (1960). As Sendak put it:

artists do have a marvelous way of recreating, of bringing back, of living through, of solving in a way that other people don’t have. It’s a tremendous tool and if used crassly, if used superficially it’s a waste. To use it spiritually and to use it creatively in depth is to find out so much about yourself that you don’t know, and to give yourself an infinite pleasure in knowing that you worked so hard and achieved a certain goal. I’m using just ordinary words to describe something which is very extraordinary. And I really don’t know how to do it, to tell you the truth. It certainly comes out of the absolute depths of my own childhood.629

In his old age, he would conclude, “It’s like I’m a receptacle, a repository for all people I love.

All I can do with them is keep them.”630

143 Studies of the Jewish family during WWII, under pressure to function in circumstances of extreme danger, are rife with accounts of the necessity to dissolve personal boundaries and social roles in order to pool resources together and care for each other, urgently and collectively attending to stressors as a group.631 Though Sendak’s immediate family was in Brooklyn during the Holocaust, Sadie and Philip suffered the deaths of their families and the destruction of their home communities from afar, infusing the home with a tone of ongoing mourning and exasperation, which led their children, instinctively, to step in, comfort their parents, and protect themselves and each other, even as they acted out in frustration against their parents’ difficult emotional demands; American childhoods were, according to popular beliefs of the context, supposed to be fun, optimistic, and playful, as I have earlier discussed. Sendak recalled the books he co-created and illustrated as a child with his older siblings, Jack and Natalie, as extensions of the makeshift plays the Sendak children improvised to entertain their world-weary parents. When

Natalie’s fiancé was killed serving in WWII, Sendak instinctively took on the role of providing

Natalie the support of a parent or lover; he recalled, “From that moment, I automatically began to take care of her. It became my full-time job.”632 Themes of parent-child role reversals, of children protecting endangered parents from external dangers or “parenting” themselves and other children, would pervade Sendak’s work in later decades. Max of Where the Wild Things

Are (1963) would become a sort of disciplinarian to the Wild Things, serving as their king;

Mickey of In the Night Kitchen (1970) would seize control of the symbolically maternal milk that gets dispensed in the Night Kitchen and, thereby, of the adult buffoons who tried to bake him into a cake; Ida of Outside Over There (1980) would save her kidnapped baby sister while her parents were away or too despondent to notice; and the children of Brundibar (2003) would set out to ward off a villain and to find milk for their mother, bedridden in the ghetto. Such role

144 reversals, in which children are tasked with mature responsibilities in the absence of adult protection, may derive in part from Philip Sendak’s shtetl stories, which handled related themes.

In one of Philip’s tales, for example, a boy named David finds his lost parents among a hunter’s kidnapped slaves and, despite being a vulnerable child eager to reunite with his mother and father – suppresses his worry and pretends not to recognize them so that the hunter will not suspect David of intending to free them.633 The same sentence might be uttered about Sendak in his own biography, as he strove, like other ashamed gay men of his generation, to minimize the suffering or social discomfort of his own burdened parents; for this reason Sendak shielded them from that taboo part of his identity and from his partnership with Glynn of half a century.

For a child of marginalized and traumatized immigrants, parents might have always seemed inconsistently available – repeatedly dismantled by their unprocessed experiences and losses from another world – thus making the relationship all the more fragile, inconsistent, anxiety-ridden, and tumultuous. Sensitive children become highly attuned to suffering parents, learning their psychological patterns and attempting to access them by sharing in their difficult feelings. As Bedingfield writes, these children of immigrants, as subjects of “trans-memory,” have an impulse to “return” – despite never having been to the place of origin – as a means of potential closure with unresolved emotions. She describes this impulse as “a hollow sentiment, a second-hand emotion, an abstraction without much relevance to their American life which is the only life they know, and yet one that has a profound effect on that life.” Subjects of trans- memory are thus “compelled to look for answers, sharing a sense that their parental past holds a key to their present, to the uneasy heritage they partake in, and to the future they wish to establish.”634

145 The phenomenon of emotionally laden, secondhand memory, in which a child comes to share in a parent’s post-traumatic fixation on events that the child did not personally experience, symbolically suggests the phenomenon of supernatural possession – a motif that shares much in common with theatrical performance and certain modes of performativity. In Yiddish folklore, dybbuks – named from the Hebrew root “davok,” which means to cling or adhere – are spirits that cling to the living through “ibbur,” the “impregnation of another living soul.” 635 Sendak was intrigued by the dybbuk trope, specifically. He described a favorite activity in the mid-1950s of “sitting in front of the record player as though possessed by a dybbuk, and allowing the music to provoke an automatic, stream-of-consciousness kind of drawing.”636 In 1997, he would illustrate the cover of Tony Kushner’s adaptation of S. Ansky’s A Dybbuk: and Other Tales of the Supernatural with a distraught bride in white and a solemn groom with sidelocks beside a

Hebrew lettered gravestone at night. Justin Almquist would also interpret the “ladies dressed in white” and the “ghostly lady” used in Sendak and Kushner’s stage production of Brundibar as possible dybbuks.637 Sendak was exposed to Yiddish folklore from the earliest days of his upbringing. Sadie fervently believed in dybbuks and recounted finding Sendak during a fever at age two standing up in his crib, speaking fluent Yiddish, and reaching towards a photographic portrait of his maternal grandfather, Moishe Schindler, hanging over him; Sadie believed that her son was trying to join his grandfather in the picture. A neighbor in the apartment building advised Sadie that her father’s dybbuk was trying to lure his grandson into the “yenne welt,” the afterlife, through his photograph, which led Sadie to tear the picture to shreds. Finding the torn picture as an adult, Sendak later had a specialist from the Metropolitan Museum reassemble the image, which he reframed and hung over his bed.638

146 Following his mother’s death in August 1968, Sendak wrote to I.B. Singer in despair. The artist complained of an inner chaos and the anxiety that his parents’ deaths would destroy something important inside himself.639 To another friend, he described a feeling of not existing, o having died along with his mother, and of lacking the drive to work. He yearned to express such feelings in a book.640 As he hoped, Sendak published this book, In the Night Kitchen, in 1970.

While working on it in 1969, Philip had become very ill and moved into Sendak’s studio. As pangs of gay rights activism erupted in his West Village neighborhood, Sendak worked on Night

Kitchen and cared for his ailing father, also transcribing and translating the Yiddish tales of

Philip’s childhood.641 Two months later, within steps of Sendak’s apartment, the dramatic

Stonewall riots catalyzed the gay liberation movement. At that time the artist was busy arranging to have his mother’s grave unveiled, expediting the date to ensure that Philip would still be alive for it.642 Philip passed away the following year, the year in which Harper published Night

Kitchen. Sendak seems to have been conflicted in these years about how to honor his dual reality as a gay West Village artist living with a non-Jewish partner, as well as a dutiful son to emotionally and physically fragile Jewish immigrant parents. He may have been linking himself with his father when he compared his role as an illustrator to that of a tailor, Philip’s profession, noting how an illustrator stitches together various elements of design and narrative.643 Years after Glynn’s death in 2007, Sendak would admit:

I dream of him constantly. I’m always feeling guilty that I didn’t do enough for him. I had my success, which was a distraction and disturbance for him. […] I wish I had been more demonstrative, but it’s not a thing I do very well. Being gay in the old days was hard, being gay later was weird. I very much wished not to be. I came from a regular depressing family. I was brainwashed.644

Sendak dedicated Night Kitchen to both of his parents but also infused it with feelings around his own suppressed sexuality and liberation from some of his childhood shame and early notions of

147 endangerment.645 On one page, a skyscraper named “Eugene” towers over one named “Philip.”

At the end of the story, a giant milk carton labeled “Glynn” is accompanied by the words “open” and “pure,” as though to celebrate his union with Glynn as itself a triumph worthy of open- mindedness and reverence. Night Kitchen was, Sendak wrote, a “good-by to a large part of childhood […], to New York, a good-by to my parents.” It was also “a victory over death.”646 On a literal level, Sendak had suffered a near fatal heart attack in England three years prior to Night

Kitchen’s publication and included “Q.E. Gateshead” on a building in the end of Mickey’s story

– a nod to the hospital that saved his life, Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead.647 On a symbolic level, Night Kitchen was a triumph over the social and emotional forces that had for decades suppressed and deadened the artist’s inner life.

Nordstrom supported Sendak’s decision to draw the protagonist, Mickey, in full-frontal nudity, because “the hero of a story about forbidden pleasures and the awakening sense of self needed to be naked.”648 Critics would deem Night Kitchen an “inappropriate” urban fantasy of a naked boy mixing batter and spilling milk in the moonlight among men while his parents slept at home in ignorance.649 As one book review stated, “Something very sexy is going on in ‘In the

Night Kitchen’ […] It celebrates eating and staying up late, and the child’s voracious desire to participate in those grown-up activities.”650 Nordstrom would respond by distributing a press release on June 9, 1972, which comprised 425 signatures of professors, librarians, artists, authors, and publishers, condemning librarians’ censoring of Mickey’s genitalia as artistic

“mutilation,” as it unfairly altered public engagement with the artist’s original work. To one mutilating party, she would personally write in Sendak’s defense: “Should not those of us who stand between the creative artist and the child be very careful not to sift our reactions to such books through our own adult prejudices and neuroses? […] I think young children […] will react

148 creatively and wholesomely. It is only adults who ever feel threatened by Sendak’s work.”

(Nordstrom’s emphases).651

Pointing to the emotional seriousness of very young people as well as to the external social forces that children perceive, Night Kitchen explodes traditional assumptions and expectations of modern American childhood and invites readers to take note of the processes by which society misjudges and acts upon the uninitiated and the powerless, as well as the creative vitality with which the latter might resist its advances and proclaim its worth. The determined young protagonist defies his bedtime curfew and flies an airplane that he fashions from dough, battling forces that threaten to consume his body, including three dazed bakers who all resemble

Oliver Hardy. Sporting Hitler moustaches, they almost bake him into their cake on its way into the oven.652 But it is a “Mickey Oven,” and Mickey takes charge of the narrative, ultimately towering above these men and distributing the precious milk they require. Warding off threatening reminders of mortality after his mother’s death, Sendak moves Mickey, a stand-in for the artist himself, from the endangered position of the kidnapped Lindbergh infant to the powerful position of the parents, Charles and Anne Lindbergh, celebrated aviators, authors, and inventors who fly high, create, and survive. Accordingly, Sendak claimed in 1973 that his Zionist acquaintances loved Night Kitchen and thanked him for what it “did for the Jewish people,” presumably for its representation of an endangered subject escaping death, building and flying his own airplane, and gaining a new level of confidence.653 Night Kitchen channels childhood sensitivities as a Jewish boy emotionally entwined with Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents in an era of intensified American immigration quotas, nativism, and news of Nazi Germany situated within a hypnotically captivating, speedy mass media culture and social pressures that separated children from their immigrant parents. It also negotiates Sendak’s ambivalence as an adult gay

149 man in the West Village in the late 1960s, in a time of historic, personally significant liberation movements out of sync with beloved family traditions. Leaving New York in 1972, Sendak and

Glynn chose a large home in rural Ridgefield, Connecticut – one that reminded Sendak of the grand estates shown in the 1930s movies he cherished.

Sendak’s early feelings of culturally laden separation anxiety vis-à-vis his parents would continue to occupy his work in later decades. If Night Kitchen bids farewell to the artist’s mother and unleashes reserves of individual power, We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993) lovingly remembers and celebrates his Jewish immigrant mother, synthesizing her values with the struggles of other queer outsiders. The hero of Dumps is a boundary-crossing, micro- managing moon, a stereotypical mother, as Sendak experienced his own. He described this sort of anxious, hovering mother as one who “watches and watches. It knows it shouldn’t come to earth and knows it’s a moon and can’t do anything, but the kids are so dumb in not solving the problem that it comes down and grabs them and says, ‘You shmegegies, come with me.’ So it does break the cosmic law. But then mothers—my mother anyway—always broke the law.”

Gregory Maguire has described this moon as “Old Testament in her sense of justice.”654 Sendak recalled his worried mother watching him play on the street from the window of their second- floor apartment building: “If I turned the corner, she’d run to the window on the other side of the building. Her head darted out of three windows, like a cartoon. I remember wherever I looked, her head was. […] I knew it was a worried, Jewish moon […] a nudgy moon.”655

Fiercely caring but also removed, the moon is the silent hero of this Sendak book, becoming a giant cat who destroys the greedy rats and carries Jack and Guy to St. Paul’s Bakery and Orphanage, where they are able to save a bruised, dark-skinned child and offer him a braided loaf of bread, a sort of challah. Sendak’s late twentieth-century rendering, reconfigures the

150 idealized suburban capitalist family to empathize with the boundary-breaking closeness and caring of unconventional families rooted in empathy and social justice. Amidst the mayhem of corruption, disaster, and filth, Jack and Guy are a sort of same-sex couple fighting socioeconomic injustice in their community under the cosmic sanction of a Jewish maternal moon, adopting a lost orphan boy of color and declaring: “LET’S BUY HIM SOME BREAD /

YOU BUY ONE LOAF / AND I’LL BUY TWO / AND WE’LL BRING HIM UP / AS OTHER

FOLK DO.” Though the abject Jack and Guy physically cling to each other and, visually, almost lose their individual boundaries, they also demand admiration as resilient, serious, and generous life-givers, especially in contrast to the giant rats, whose imposing robes and mammoth deck of cards suggest reckless competition and accountability for perpetuating the crises headlined in the newspaper fragments worn by the destitute children: “AIDS,” “WAR,” “SHOOTIN[G],”

“HOMELESS,” “MEANER TIMES, “CHAOS IN SHELTERS,” “FAMINE,” “BABIES

STARV[E],” “LAYOFF!”656

Conclusion

The creative vision Sendak expressed as his career matured in the latter twentieth century drew from an emotional internalization of personal, familial, and social forces at work during his interwar childhood. Having struggled to carve out a genuine place of social belonging as a sensitive, queer, and introverted son of Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants in a culture of mass media and looming political forces beyond his understanding, the adult Sendak remained invested in locating and expressing the emotional predicaments and triumphs of the excluded and the disenfranchised. He expressed himself somewhat surreptitiously, from within the “lowly” cracks of children’s literature, and between conflicting emotional perspectives and social realms.

151 His work from the 1960s onward most seriously conveys his childhood emotional internalization of 1930s New York as a devoted but self-conscious queer American son of Yiddish-speaking,

Jewish Eastern European immigrants. Against a wider social ethos of technological speed and the blending of “high” and “low” art forms, youth culture of the interwar decades urged the separation of first-generation American children from traditional constraints of their immigrant parents, offering them liberating, creative opportunities but also imposing new social expectations through popularized styles and codes of conduct. As interwar child psychology shifted from rigid behaviorism toward a more emotions-based individualism, American social commentators and middle-class parents fretted over the consequences of liberating children via more “permissive” parenting styles in a culturally diversifying nation, especially in urban, immigrant, and working-class enclaves. With the help of mass media, regulatory American social institutions helped naturalize a middle-class image of an American child ideal rooted in the gender-rigid, conservative family model and in the emotional restraint of Anglo-Saxon culture. In some respects, standards of modern childhood sought to loosen immigrants’ children from the influence of foreign parents and to subject them to greater influence by the nation, the public, and the state. For adults, childhood was a battleground for negotiating private and collective futures; for children, Sendak’s work declares, it was a battleground for self- preservation between liberating opportunities and socializing forces, between caretakers who were both beloved and feared or disdained, as well as public social realms that were both exciting and alienating. For queer people, Jews, Eastern European immigrants, impoverished, and ethnically-othered people more broadly, surviving modern American childhood required negotiation between preserving emotional vitality and personal loyalties and achieving some

152 level of belonging in a public social matrix that idealized and enforced conformity to heterosexual, bourgeois styles rooted in Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture.

Emotionally alienated from his immigrant parents as an American boy, yet deeply sensitive to their anxieties as Jewish immigrants in an era of social conservatism, Sendak experienced childhood as a “grappling in the dark,” amidst widespread social pressures to acculturate to specific ideals. Children’s relationships to the public sphere were increasingly regulated through specific media channels, enforcing a dominant vision of their emotional development. As notions of modern childhood solidified in the latter interwar years, painting childhood as frivolous, rose-colored, angelic innocence cultivated in the service of middle-class

Americanization, Sendak felt his reality misrepresented, complicating his ability to survive as a serious social misfit with limited resources. He felt the fear and confusion of a sensitive, queer,

Eastern European Jewish boy at odds with important aspects of the social order and obstructed from the tools that might help him survive its unwelcome advances. Adult realities, he felt, were important, pressing parts of a child’s life, especially when that child, like Sendak, struggled to exist socially or belonged to minority groups that lacked favor in the adult world – such a child especially needed to learn to understand the obstacles, anticipate dangers, and survive.

Thus, Sendak worked against dichotomizing ideas about childhood, insisting that children were not as different from adults as modern conceptions suggested. Children too experienced alienation, outrage, sensual excitement, and serious ambivalence. Children too struggled to endure a rapidly changing culture with limited understanding offered to them from their superiors. Sendak’s work in the 1960s and beyond, breaking out of the socially conformist era in which he came of age and began his career, and generated from an intersectionally marginal childhood subjectivity, insisted on children as bewildered, but resilient, dignified people torn

153 between the pulls of familial belonging, cultural-religious heritage, personal desires, national- social pressures, and the human instinct to survive. The dynamic urban landscape of New York offered an inspiring canvas on which to project his own personal negotiations of boundaries between “inside” and “outside,” fantasizing his way through early feelings of pleasure, familiarity, danger, and pain to better understand their concrete meanings for himself in a culture that was so often uncomfortable with Old World pasts and queer difference but that celebrated vibrant, self-made individuals.

154 Chapter Three

“Not for Children”: Child’s Play, Social Stigma, and the Creative Artist

This chapter dives deeper into Sendak’s artistic process, specifically regarding his cultivation of child-like emotional qualities, considering this tendency in relation to his social position. Sendak openly claimed, “I have the mind of a child.”657 , who would direct the film version of Where the Wild Things Are (2009), once concluded, “What I’ve learned about Maurice is that, however wise he is, he’s a kid. He’s sad, he’s enraged. He gets frustrated. When he gets angry, he bites back. Conversation with him is raw.”658 In the summer of 1961, Sendak wrote to

Nordstrom, “It would be wonderful to want to believe in God. The aimlessness of living is too insane.” Nordstrom’s reply reminded him that the cost of being a creative artist was the pain and struggle of needing to make order out of life’s chaos – a chaos that most people simply accept or do not even see.659 Like young children, the creative artist straddles different realities, sensing quicksand, gaps, and hidden meanings where others may mindlessly tread.660

Sendak’s intersectionally marginal position and ability to “pass” as an American insider, positioned him to understand the fragility and weight of any given social identity. It also encouraged him to “play,” making work that appealed to young children, who learn to function socially by testing different performances, roles, disguises, and attitudes while orienting to an outer world of overwhelming possibilities and social powers. Emotionally overextended from a young age, Sendak relied on private fantasy to generate ideas and find relief as he struggled to

155 actualize a coherent social identity and survive. The artist once stated, “I find that the very thin line between what is real and unreal or fantastic keeps coming up in my work. This wonderful playfulness of moving from one world to another. That’s why I prefer doing books for younger children.”661 The present chapter asks how, specifically, Sendak’s ability to engage with fantasy and ask difficult, honest questions helped him to approach challenges of modern American identity, especially for the ethnically and sexually marginalized. It is not surprising that narratives of emotional triumph, physical liberation, and flying pervade his work. The artist, like the child, is a master of “deep play,” of accessing states of transcendence and vitality that can diffuse overwhelming feelings and create new meanings by engaging deeply and freely with the available materials.662 Throughout his adulthood, Sendak cultivated his ability to play, engaging in make-believe with some of his written correspondences; retreating to the colorful, liberated beach towns of Fire Island, which functioned, in part, as a playful social oasis for gay people since the 1950s; and drawing in a stream-of-consciousness style to classical music.

The following analysis focuses largely on Sendak’s artistic process as it related to twentieth-century social stigma and queer shame, theories of early childhood, and the psychology of creativity, as discussed in the writings of Slaff, Sendak’s therapist, Bert, and

Glynn, Sendak’s partner, who was also a child psychiatrist and art critic. It argues that the artist’s paradoxically serious use of “child’s play” – including strategies of theatricality, “Camp,” self- indulgence, queer sentimentality, and fantasy – sought to relieve his personal suffering in ways that spoke to a wider public concerned with issues of self-definition, self-worth, and safety. It examines the influence of Rosie, the Brooklyn child Sendak observed in the late ‘40s who inspired The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960), and who exemplified for Sendak the powers and limitations of play. It also discusses the boundary-pushing, culturally taboo qualities that

156 generally characterize play, as suggested by Sendak’s public notoriety as a “controversial” artist:

I analyze his personal connection to Fire Island as a playful space of freedom; his flirtatious correspondences with intimate friends, such as the late gay American novelist Coleman Dowell; and his attraction to the performing arts. Channeling flamboyant, theatrical, and ultimately serious child’s play in his own picture books and social correspondences, Sendak championed approaches used by children, artists, and the “young at heart” to diffuse overwhelming feelings and oppressive or confusing meanings.

“Child View” versus “Creative View”

In an undated catalog from Harper & Row, which published Sendak’s most personal and successful books, Sendak is compared to Victorian outsider artists Lewis Carroll and Edward

Lear, because “he seems to have the ability to shed his adult self when he writes.”663 Sendak would agree, insisting, “I depend almost entirely on an uninhibited intercourse with this primitive, uncensored self.” But he also made sure to distinguish between “child view” and

“creative view,” differentiating “a fierce, first freshness implied in the former that is part of an elaborate sensibility in the latter.”664 Accordingly, Sendak’s friend Jonathan Weinberg, who now serves as Consulting Curator and Director of Research at the Maurice Sendak Foundation, has noted how not child-like Sendak was in some respects, having been so obsessively devoted to work and study.665 Much of Sendak’s work, however, was in the service of honing his access to the voice of his sensitive child self. An autodidact and extensive reader, the artist admired writers like Charles Dickens, William Blake, George MacDonald, and James, noting that underneath their sophisticated social and political depictions was “the intensity of a little boy staring out at everything and looking, and examining, and watching, and feeling intensely, and

157 suffering immensely,” that these writers understood what it means to be “a child inside your adult self—and how much better you are for being such.”666 Similar to that of his literary heroes in this regard, Sendak’s work evinces a child-like freshness of emotional honesty and ingenuity, tempered with the creative adult’s aesthetic restraint and erudition. Tony Kushner wrote that

Sendak kept alive “the child he was,” as if his books “had been drawn and written by a pre- adolescent prodigy possessed of an adult’s motor skills.”667

Sendak wrote through the child more than he wrote for the child. Although he knew that his largest and most responsive audience was below the age of eight, and he appreciated children’s harsh honesty more than he did most adult feedback, he denied writing “for children” specifically, insisting, “I don’t personally feel or believe in children’s books as a separate entity, as differentiated from adult fiction […] I see books as books, and some people who are peculiarly tuned in in such a way so that their books tend to be read by children rather than adults. That is the closest I’ll ever come to saying I write books for children.”668 Indeed, he would even declare, “I don’t like all kids. Some of them are as awful as their parents.”669 His

Outside Over There (1981) was featured in both children’s and adult catalogs, and some critics wrote that the book was suited more to adults interested in their own “inner child” than it was to actual children, who would likely struggle to relate to the serious child protagonist.670

Accordingly, three years after its publication, a book review noted that a third of Sendak’s sales were to “childless people in their 20s and 30s.”671 Sendak wrote primarily for the preservation and retroactive redemption of his own emotionally vital and suffering inner child, to offer care for his earlier self, who, as I’ve intimated earlier, felt forbidden and unable to grow up without becoming “someone else.” As Sendak saw it, his child self – an emotionally sensitive, queer, Yiddish-raised boy – was cut off, awaiting rescue through the adult’s art. For

158 Sendak, this child was preserved, split off from the socially uneasy, emotionally alienated adult that the artist had become. Indeed, Sendak claimed, “I don’t really believe that the kid I was has grown up into me. He still exists somewhere, in the most graphic, plastic, physical way for me. I have a tremendous concern for, and interest in, him. I try to communicate with him all the time.”672 Sendak sublimated that child’s suffering, allowing him to play and experiment in his picture books and in some aspects of his own adult life and relationships. In doing so, Sendak offered children and adults, especially those suffering exclusion or alienation, a direct mirror to acknowledge their difficult questions about the nature of modern social reality and ideas about how to survive emotional tribulations – topics insufficiently handled by the available American books or media of the twentieth century, which, at least for children, favored “safe” content over that which grappled with hard, interesting questions. As Sendak saw it:

Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something, not didactic things, but passionate things.673

Nordstrom, who offered unyielding support to this perspective, wrote to Isaac Bashevis Singer in

1966 that she believed that “most adults are dead and beyond hope by the age of thirty.”674

Nordstrom and Sendak, gay adults of their time, saw in children something that they felt was missing among adults in midcentury society, who stigmatized and conformed all too easily – children had an unalloyed emotional perceptiveness and openness. These sensitivities in children are politically complicated, as they may also relate to their vulnerable positions, as socially uninitiated dependents to inconsistently available parents and other adult authorities who determine the factors of their existence – an experience heightened all the more by children’s experiences of racial, ethnic, or queer difference.

159 The flexibility to surrender oneself selectively to others’ authority, to dispossess oneself of one’s self, while preserving a separate, private well of vitality, relates to the talents required of those who work in comedy, theater, and other realms of artistic performance. As writer Clifton

Fadiman articulates, children are experts at emptying their consciousness to become whatever role they are enacting; a child playacting as “Snoopy,” writes Fadiman, knows he is not actually

Snoopy but “can empty his consciousness of all except Snoopy feelings.”675 Sendak once proclaimed, “I see the creative act as […] a void into which one fearfully hurls oneself – hoping, at best, not to break all bones […] much like throwing yourself into your private ocean without an oxygen mask.”676 Literature, too, Roland Barthes claims, is a sort of void or ocean, a space that fuses an author’s voice with various elements of invention, cultural tradition, psychology, and philosophy, “that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.” Barthes believed that the writing of literature begins with a disjunction in which “the voice loses its origin” and “the author enters into his own death,” becoming an active vessel of symbol and creativity. 677

Interestingly, this precondition for literary creativity – of entering one’s own “death” – resembles Cathy Caruth’s conception of the traumatized subject. For Caruth, a traumatized person is a person of “unclaimed experience,” one who has passed through an overwhelming, unprocessed event or state that offers a glimpse into the impossible specter of one’s own non- existence. Such a definition of disruption implies an already established rooting in a given social reality or shared logic, in which certain experiences can “make sense” and others do not. It also implies a certain level of agency and self-control from which the subject is jolted.678 By this logic, children, as beings for whom “reality” is new and often overwhelming, are designed for literature and primed for navigating trauma –the jolts, surprises, unknowns, and shifts in “reality”

160 that they manage through play and fantasy. It is specifically the plasticity of young children’s conceptions of “reality” and “existence,” and their ambiguous levels of agency and self-control, to which Sendak’s creative work speaks, reflecting his own internalization of his stigmatized, chaotic emotional existence. Sendak argued that children – like comic-book heroes who can fly back and forth through time and across page panels – “do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way that we no longer remember how to do. And in writing for children you just must assume they have this incredible flexibility, this cool sense of the logic of illogic, and that they can move with you very easily from one sphere to another without any problems.”679 This flexibility in young children relates to their necessary capability to acclimate to an overwhelming world and to intuit the emotional moods and subtle cues of their adult caretakers as a means of their own survival; on the other hand, it also implies their emotional dependence and their potential susceptibility to adult manipulation.

Socialization is an uneven and subjective process. Published the same year as Wild

Things, Erving Goffman’s foundational sociological study of stigmatized adults in 1963 describes situations in which human beings grow under pressure to maintain a flexible, in some ways child-like plasticity, an ability to shift between realities and to intuit social cues that are not important to other adults. A contemporary of Sendak’s and also stemming from an Eastern

European Jewish family, Goffman paints socially stigmatized adults, excluded and ashamed, as masking their difference and, for their own safety and belonging, pressed to study realities that most people mindlessly accept and take for granted; they scan for and predict various possible outcomes in any given situation, and they analyze social situations for multiple meanings and contextual clues of how they might be allowed to behave, and what they may be allowed to reveal.680 Including Jewishness and homosexuality as social stigmas in his analysis, Goffman

161 wrote that stigmatized individuals who suffer a “secret differentness” – having learned that the

“normal point of view” disqualifies them – learn to pass in secrecy, navigating three types of spatial contexts: “forbidden” places in which “exposure means expulsion,” “civil” places in which public manners obstruct others’ underlying disgust or prejudice toward them, and “back” places in which concealment is unnecessary and secret differentness might even be indulged or celebrated. Among his examples are homosexuals, mentally disabled people, prostitutes, and addicts.681 Children might have also belonged in this list before the creation of modern childhood, which created and socially sanctioned a shielded, diminutive place for them within the wider society. Sendak sensed a synergy between his own stigmatized and guarded identity and that of children, to whom he could speak more relevantly and passionately than to adults. He once stated, “children read the internal meanings of everything. It’s only adults who read the top layer most of the time. […] Children know that there are mothers who abandon their children, emotionally if not literally. […] They don’t lie to themselves. They wouldn’t survive if they did. My object is never to lie to them.”682 He saw more freedom in creating the sort of work that children consumed, because, “when you write for children you don’t limit yourself; there’s no need to. They know everything. Or they sense so many things that, as adults, we presume they don’t know or don’t sense.”683

In their sensitivity to possibilities forgotten or ignored by normalized, world-weary adults, children are – within psychological literature and folklore alike – also like artists, perceiving harmonies and connections that surprise, comfort, and challenge others. They follow emotional and physiological rhythms that blur socially constructed boundaries between self and other, as well as between disparate external objects and modes of being. As Picasso famously stated, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”684

162 Slaff, the psychoanalyst to whom Sendak turned in his early twenties, would write in a 1981 journal of adolescent psychiatry that all young children possess “the qualities of poetry” in their primary “process-thinking,” despite the fact that not all adults become poets – not all manage to preserve their access to these primary processes through their socialization and coming of age.

Possessing qualities associated with children, the creative personality is, according to Slaff, “not afraid to dream, to imagine, to ‘fool around with,’ to play, to experiment, to try new combinations, juxtapositions, relations, to ‘defamiliarize,’ to ‘waste time.’” Slaff associated the creative individual’s ability to bounce between various levels of consciousness and time periods with the ability to relive “childhood experiences involving various unknowns. Fear of the dark, separation anxiety, primal scene experience or fantasy…”685 Glynn similarly wrote about the psychology of the artist, citing Ernst Kris’s influential concept of “regression in the service of the ego,” which is “the artist’s peculiar ability to abandon the mature ego’s ways to return to early modes of thinking and feeling, swift, fluid, imagistic, highly charged with simultaneous multiple meanings and emotions, however alogically or contradictorily. […] To be able to do so without going mad, to be able to return to shape and order, was the necessary precondition for creativity.”686 Sendak knew that for young children the world brims with possibility and anxiety.

His talent was, as he put it, the ability to remember “the emotional quality of childhood. Not the specific, visual scenes, but the qualities, the feelings.”687 Accordingly, Nordstrom discovered

Sendak because she knew that a great children’s artist was not necessarily one who had thoughts or feelings about children, but rather one who knew how to think or feel, in part, as children. A socially disempowered, sensitive, emotionally othered position was one to which children would urgently relate. Accordingly, the editor wrote in 1963, “I don’t expect creative artists who do

163 books for children to think about children all the time. They never do – the really great ones – because they do what they do for themselves” (my emphasis).688

It is also worth exploring how notions of “passing” relate to child’s play vis-à-vis

Sendak’s work. In some regards, the artist participated in a long tradition employed by historically endangered insider-outsider minorities, including Jews and queer people, whose difference could be selectively hidden in order “to pass” in the mainstream culture rooted in the heterosexual, white establishment through the present era; this tradition harnessed the anxiety and fear of a demonized insider-outsider status to analyze and articulate unspoken feelings and dreams in the wider society, as attested to, for example, by disproportionate Jewish and queer involvement in such fields as psychoanalysis, academia, comedy, and the performing arts, to name a few.689 The concept of “Camp,” which exaggerates reality to an absurd extent for a laugh, has been described as “a defense against homophobia and in particular the presumed ridiculousness of the gay male,” turning a potentially hateful or violent reaction into an amused one.690 Psychoanalysis universalizes the anxieties of self-policing and juggling multiple realities, insisting that any given subjectivity is inherently already divided, an interplay between at least three parts: conscious ego, self-policing superego, and submerged unconscious feelings and desires.691 Additionally, to use film as another example, it seems no coincidence that in 1927 the first feature-length “talking picture” told the story of a Jewish American juggling his identity as both Jakie Rabinowitz, son of Jewish immigrants, and Jack Robin, the stage name of the popular jazz singer he has become in New York.692 Parodying the Jewish American experience, Woody

Allen, in his film Zelig (1983), would also comically portray what Donald Weber calls the

“Gatsby-like passing” of a psychologically flexible “chameleon man,” an ethnic outsider who shape-shifts in order to survive as a socially disenfranchised, potentially despised person.693 This

164 film came two years after Sendak’s Outside Over There (1981), which explores the threat of a hijacked identity as goblins kidnap an infant from her cradle, swap her with a changeling made of ice, and attempt to turn her into a “nasty goblin bride.” Sendak helped universalize the emotional experience and significance of insider-outsider performativity by demonstrating to the wider culture how most young children related to it, even across social divides of class, religion, and ethnicity. Children’s ability, or need, to playfully suspend and temporarily replace their subjectivity – to switch emotional, psychological, or physical realities – is an optimal position from which to communicate creatively, as well as an experience to which alienated or stigmatized adults, as well as theater artists and other creative performers, could also still relate.

Creative artists and children regularly employ the strategies of disguise and play used by outsiders who learn to “pass” for their survival.694 To varying degrees based on social privilege and historical context, children all begin as developmentally vulnerable beings in a world of adult power and design, all the more foreign to a child of oppressed or culturally marginal parents, or to a child with personally queer orientations that set them apart. Sendak, in using the form of the children’s book to write “not for children,” but for himself, conveyed the synergy that exists between children, artists, and all cultural outsiders. They all learn to cultivate the modernist ability to be of (at least) two minds, to transcend any singular perspective of reality, whether ironically or, at the very least, with awareness of the differences that emerge between form and meaning, and between creator and audience. The artist is one who reveals hidden personal meanings beneath the symbolic and the vernacular – artists perceive and articulate feelings within multiple simultaneous registers, perhaps because they suffer feelings of not being able to sufficiently exist in any single context available within the social symbolic, consequentially driven to expose the hidden truths that limit and define those various human

165 contexts. In this regard we can understand George Steiner’s observation in 1983, that “There is simply no counterpart in mathematics, or physics or astronomy or engineering to set beside the high catalogue of homosexual poets, novelists, plastic artists, composers, aesthetes and thinkers.”695 What Sendak’s art accomplishes, whether through embodying foreign subjectivities or through revealing the expansiveness of a single subjectivity, is the widening of the possibilities of human existence – the clearing of space for previously denied, suppressed, unfamiliar, or impossible human needs.

Timelessness and the Theater

We might understand adults who revisit child’s play as, like actors or directors who traverse various identities and historical eras in their performance, perpetuating an artistic space of timelessness. As Bertram Slaff would write, the creative personality “may reject the tried and true paths of scholastic advancement” and “has an unusual capacity to bounce, so to speak, within the levels of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious mental functioning,” as well as “to bounce within the various time levels of his experience, actual, imagined, past, present, or future.

He is likely to be open intellectually and affectively.”696 If we can understand child’s play as temporarily shifting one’s conscious social orientation and emotional position in the service of trying on different costumes, scripts, and roles to diffuse overwhelming feelings and determine the contours of one’s personality, we can understand the serious role that play might serve within an emotionally strained, post-traumatic, or socially othered family. While working on set and costume designs for ’s production of “Hansel und Gretel” in 1998, based on the

Grimms’ tale, Sendak noted how the opera opens with the children singing and dancing, “We all know that an abusive mother is about to give them hell. In this light, it took courage for them to

166 sing and dance. Even when they are lost in the forest, they forget for a moment that they are lost, and they play. They can still find joy in life.”697 Yigal Schwartz, an Israeli literary scholar and son of Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors, describes the appeal of art and literature for subjects who learn early on to read multiple meanings of their surrounding realities, to play and imagine as a means to survive physical danger and overwhelming emotion. His depiction helps illustrate the appeal of the creative arts to children of traumatized families whose internal meanings fluctuate and confuse them:

Everything here is twisted, and invites murder. Again, one thing disguised as another. The mother and the witch. The father and the wolf. Doing one thing and meaning another. Someone once asked me why I studied literature. I said, Do you know that my sister also studied literature. Really, he asked, both of you? Yes, I said, we grew up on ambiguous, vague messages, that left us hanging in the air, always in between things, always in a thick fog, with no clear signposts: they do this and say the opposite; they say this and mean something completely different. We walked on the earth – as Aharon Appelfeld said in a different, much more terrible context – as human beings probably walked on it after the flood. We had to check, with every step, if the earth was stable, if it was even earth, or something else, non-earth. As adults we tried to train ourselves for years to dismantle and neutralize ambiguous messages. How to put love on one side and desire on the other. Father on one side and lover on the other. Mother on one side and a woman who is a lover/whore on the other. Family on one side and war on the other…698

Again we have here the description of an emotionally taxing situation that reads as both the experience of childhood in a traumatized family, as well as the prototypical formation of the gifted, creative artist, as described in the work of Glynn and Slaff. To experience important others as ambiguous or confusing is, like the subjects of Sendak’s work, to navigate a social context whose systems, values, and meanings are often out of reach, or out of step with the wider culture, leaving the subject in a psychological fog of potential isolation. Creativity and play help the forming subject emerge from that fog by testing out different roles and scenarios; this work requires the ability to symbolically shift identities and to move between periods of time, in order to belatedly access the specific emotions and situations of greatest concern.699 Fantasizing

167 himself into the identity of the Lindbergh baby in Outside Over There (1981), for example, allowed Sendak to grapple with early childhood fears around the possibility of being kidnapped.

Kushner has written much on Sendak’s set and costume designs for opera design, theater, and dance productions, which began in the 1970s. To varying extents, the world of theater, dance, and opera – like the field of children’s literature – have historically functioned as a “back” space, to use Goffman’s term, in which queer and ethnically marginal identities flourished since before the turn of the century, at least behind the scenes. It seems fitting that a person so plagued by feelings of spiritual dispossession and by the need to perform, “pass,” and selectively disguise himself would draw so much from the drama and playfulness of the theater. It was largely through the performing arts that, as David Shneer writes, queer Jews became “omnipresent in mainstream American culture” by the 1980s.700 As Frank Corsaro, director of Houston Grand

Opera, stated when convincing Sendak in the late ‘70s to design opera sets and costumes for the first time – for his production of Mozart’s – “opera is the biggest kiddy book in the world.”701 Indeed, Sendak described Magic Flute as the story of a young man and woman’s indoctrination into adulthood, “the sense of not belonging and having no place to hide.”702

Approaching his set and costume designs with the boundless experimentation and intuition that generated his picture books, Sendak even suggested additions to the cast of his first opera project, creating two harpy characters who would follow the Queen of the Night; both would be played by children wearing masks reminiscent of his Wild Things.703 Christopher Mattaliano, who assisted Corsaro at the time before becoming general director of the Portland Opera, saw

Magic Flute as Sendak’s “most glorious production” and his “most uniquely personal” and

“Sendakian” opera work, describing it as “irreverent, bawdy, sublime, sexual, deeply original and colorful and wildly creative.” A 1990 Los Angeles Times review of these set designs

168 similarly declared, “it was difficult to resist the fabulous flora and adorable fauna, the ever- inventive symbolism, the dark-edged cartoon whimsy and the clever mock-Egyptian accents of

Sendak’s unkitschy illustrations. If only they could sing.”704

Theatrical sensibilities also pervade Sendak’s picture books. The artist described approaching the picture book as a “tabletop theater,” a fantastical space that drew on children’s impulse to improvise and reinvent themselves, as Sendak and his siblings did in performances for their relatives.705 “The pictures,” Sendak said of his books, “are like the operatic stage, and the words are the orchestral accompaniment.”706 The act of fantasizing and playing farcically dramatic roles offers a cathartic feeling of wholeness and connectedness to one’s natural surroundings; it prompts one to step beyond one’s idea of oneself and to commit to the performance of other selves in the service of playacting. Theatricality reminds one of the inherently contingent and actively constructed, but purposeful nature of any given identity or reality. Recognizing the natural relativity and flexibility of the self, which is in some regards an ongoing and ever-changing performance, may offer comfort to a subject who is “stuck,” not allowed to exist or to gain credibility in a given context.707 Nordstrom would have also likely encouraged Sendak’s proclivity for theatrical play, having been herself the daughter of actors

Henry E. Dixie and Marie Ursula Nordstrom and completed boarding school at Long Island’s

Winnwood School, largely attended by children of theater professionals.708

Like a talented actor, Sendak repeatedly transformed his own voice across projects.

Leonard Marcus describes a younger Sendak in the 1950s as exhibiting a “restless, chameleon- like talent and need for self-reinvention,” each book “arriving under the flag of a different presiding spirit”: George Cruikshank and Gustave Doré inspired The Wonderful Farm (1951),

Marc Chagall and William Blake underlie Charlotte and the White Horse (1955), and Winslow

169 Homer greatly informs Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (1962).709 Sendak also repeatedly shifted his style with each loss of a loved one to exorcise feelings of endangerment and mortality. In August 1967, a month after the death of Sendak’s beloved first dog, Jennie, he confided in Selma Lanes about the changing tone of his work, feeling like he was almost becoming a different person.710 When Glynn lay dying, Sendak busied himself with Bumble-

Ardy (2011), a mixed-media work through which the artist clung to life and resisted the impulse to die alongside his long-time companion. Against an aunt who wielded a meat cleaver and forbade Ardy from throwing a birthday celebration, Ardy, like Sendak resisting the encroaching death in his home, broke the rules and hosted a carnival of pigs in costumes from different eras and geographic regions, helping him fantasize his way through feelings of entrapment and loneliness at age nine.

As children’s proclivity for dress-up attests, an obvious method for trying on any given role or identity is to fuse, or imagine fusing, with someone who successfully embodies it. As

Glynn wrote, “Art fills the gap between the self and the non-self as once the soft, fuzzy object had.”711 The fluid boundaries of the young Sendak’s subjectivity led him to over-empathize with endangered others and troubled or underappreciated historical figures sometimes to the point of confusing his identity with theirs. He felt compelled to imagine himself into the shoes of deceased heroes from bygone eras whose social tensions spoke to his own internal struggles.

Sendak wrote of Charles Lindbergh’s murdered infant son, whom he depicted in Outside Over

There, “I was that child—and my sister rescued me.”712 Such over-empathizing with other people, however disorienting, allowed him to enter into and convincingly convey the emotions of a child whose boundaries are continuously in flux and potentially threatened.

170 Sendak would have had reason to ponder the significance of clothing and costume, his own father having been a tailor and dressmaker. The young Sendak enjoyed the transformative potential of modifying his looks. Appearances are often not as they seem at first glance in a

Sendak book, lending to the reader’s child-like delight in experiencing shifts in reality. His characters use costumes and disguises to convey the transformative potential of creative play as a universal value most clearly expressed in childhood dress-up.713 Martin, Rosie, Max, and

Bumble-Ardy are children who captivate others through uses of dress-up and make-believe.714

Sendak’s most famous book, Where The Wild Things Are, spotlights a boy dressed in a wolf suit.

As Kenneth Kidd notes, tracing the psychoanalytic history of American boyhood, “the wolf is known through folklore as a creature who flourishes outside of human society.”715 “Outside” might refer both to the geographic fringes of civilization, as well as to the chronological barriers of an era. Max’s wolf suit equally recalls the costumes of the “lost boys” in Disney’s film Peter

Pan (1953) and the hooded donkey costumes used in Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts for Sebastian

Brant’s 1494 manuscript, Ship of Fools.716 Bumble-Ardy’s ninth birthday party is a secret masquerade of pigs who don extravagant costumes that range from the beaked masks of medieval Italy to the cowboy regalia of country western films and the fur-trimmed dresses of the

1930s and ‘40s. Sendak’s use of disguises and carnivalesque scenes in his work express an ironic knowledge of the unreliability of appearances and of the questionable, constructed nature of any given reality.

More generally, theatricality helped Sendak resist uncomfortable internal clashes related to his Yiddish-American position. It offered Sendak a means of honoring his emotional truth- seeking and Old World identifications within an emotionally restrained American context.717

Against a dominant midcentury climate of pragmatism that sometimes stifled European cultural

171 tropes of nostalgia, folk wisdom, and romanticism, the protagonists of Sendak’s picture books exhibited theatrical bouts of unrestrained emotion. Sometimes a shift in chronological era allowed these characters to more seamlessly perform moods associated with another place or time. Shifting away from mainstream, twentieth-century American cultural norms, Sendak subversively depicted children’s romantic flamboyance, spotlighting children who play the parts of royalty, nobility, monstrosity, and celebrity with passion and emotional seriousness. Peter

Dobrin described Sendak as an “unusual artist” for being “enamored of 19th century aesthetics in music, art, and literature even as he commented on modern societal concerns.”718 Since the late

1950s, his intricate cross-hatching and somewhat-sentimental depictions of early modern and

Victorian settings, as in his drawings for Else Minarik’s Little Bear series (1957-1968), departed from the splashes of color and futuristic abstraction that were in vogue at the time. Kushner described Sendak’s Little Bear drawings as “a world balanced between sturdy, bourgeois warmth, a summery coziness, and shadowy ineffability – memory pictures flooded with such feeling that the solidity and security they evoke seem on the verge of dissolving, suffused with susceptibility to time, to evanescence, to loss.”719 Like Sendak’s picture-book friend Edward

Gorey and his novelist friend Coleman Dowell, the artist also drew from a New Gothic aesthetic that brought emotional, sometimes disturbing echoes of history into the present moment.720

German romantics like Mozart, whose published letters Sendak devoured, and painter Philip Otto

Runge, whose work inspired some of Sendak’s watercolor illustrations, spoke to the gap between rational, mundane reality and the emotional profundity of an imagined past – the idealized order of antiquity or social harmony of the Middle Ages.721 Victorians like picture-book innovator

Randolph Caldecott and novelist modeled attractive negotiations between the romantic mysticism of orientalists and psychoanalysts, and the emotional confinement of a

172 growing bourgeoisie.722 An avid collector of nineteenth-century books, Sendak’s prominent antiquarian side gave him the appearance of one possessed by spirits of another time.723 Like a

Victorian parlor, his duplex displayed various treasures, books, and old curiosities, with rows of first-edition illustrated books from different eras, a hand-painted tin tray, seashells, antiques, and blue-plate tiles.724 Noting the contrast between the bustling Manhattan of the early 1970s and the dark stillness of Sendak’s Greenwich Village apartment, Muriel Harris described his home as “a time tunnel” and “a fortress against any of today’s distractions, a fortress for contemplation and immersion in one’s work” with books “lining walls, books lining staircases, books comfortably lying on almost every step.”725 Indeed, Sendak treated his homes like timeless hideaways, which facilitated his ability to play with history, chronology, and subject positions within his studio.

Having sometimes felt like a receptacle of his immigrant parents’ recollected memories of Poland, Sendak was practiced at contemplating the personal significance of once-removed realities of other worlds and eras – of coming into one’s own identity between the cracks of other people’s stories, so to speak. He viewed illustration as a means for illuminating hidden interpretations or expressing his own emotional truth between the lines of the text, like midrash, which creatively addresses gaps and hidden meanings between biblical stories and legal writings.

Sendak identified with children for the burdens traditionally placed on them by adult society to carry the timeless torches of the collective past, including those discarded cultural elements that adults no longer actively used.726 The original meanings of most Old Mother Goose rhymes, for example, are usually no longer comprehensible to the adults who relegate them to children in order to preserve those early modern lyrics, but they offer contemporary children a creative opportunity to make personally satisfying meaning of them beneath the radar of “sensible” society. Sendak enjoyed the illustrator’s prerogative in his Hector Protector (1965), which

173 enlivens an old, ambiguous rhyme: “Hector Protector was dressed all in green; Hector Protector was sent to the Queen. The Queen did not like him, Nor more did the King; So Hector Protector was sent back again.” His illustrations for this picture book created a face-off between a scandalized, rotund Victorian queen reading Mother Goose and a wild boy riding on the back of a lion. Sendak succeeded in animating a simple ditty largely discarded by history as a universally appealing personal mythology that drew from his own defiant emotional life. The archetypal

Sendak lion on which Hector rides might be inspired by Philip Sendak’s Yiddish tales, which included friendships between boys and lions.727 Sendak’s We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and

Guy (1993) also reinterpreted an old nursery rhyme for the contemporary context.728 Higglety

Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More To Life (1967) follows a protagonist to stardom on the stage of the “World Mother Goose Theatre,” where she performs a range of experiences from playing dead to affronting a lion. Sendak also valued fairytales as a serious genre actively claimed by children. Brothers Grimm tales, for example, were folk relics collected by scholars set on preserving a threatened culture; as Sendak enjoyed recalling, these tales only became associated with children after children themselves took interest in grappling with their meanings, attracted to how these stories handled pressing concerns around mortality, parental abandonment, sexuality, and brutality.729 Like illustrators activating a text with new complimentary meanings, children, Sendak felt, accomplished the task of remembering by reinterpreting and revamping the old, nonsensical material. They had the opportunity to either regurgitate what adults wanted, submitting to socialization into the existing order, or to reinterpret the available material in context.

Sendak’s drive to enter various worlds across time and space, as actors and directors do to convey feelings of other contexts, demonstrates his desire to solidify his status in the culture

174 and to connect himself with important artistic precedents. As already suggested, he took advantage of the illustrator’s prerogative to mix and match between various forms and styles as a means of accomplishing qualities of timelessness that would secure his status as a great artist, transcending any given period. Glynn described how the creative artist builds metaphorical bridges and doorways with his or her work, the art serving to connect the lonely or abandoned self to “tradition and convention that become equated with the [artist’s] non-self.”730

Accordingly, Derick Dreher, director of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, would recognize Sendak’s fusion of varying cultural and historical elements as an asset in exhibitions that spanned across various periods, offering “a way to connect some of the dots.

You could get from, say, Melville to Potter using Sendak, or Blake to Melville. You could connect artists of different eras and countries and backgrounds in ways that would raise different questions as you made exhibitions.”731

Sendak differentiated between those artists who invent and those artists who scavenge, identifying with the latter.732 He felt that a good illustrator, like a psychoanalyst, read the emotional meanings hidden beneath the surface of the text, rather than merely depicting the text literally. Indeed, as Kidd writes, Sendak’s achievement comes “not only from personal genius but also from his complex engagement with psychological discourse,” that he rewrote Freudian analysis “while making it more palatably American.”733 His exposure to psychoanalytic ideas came from his own years in therapy, from Glynn, and from Ursula Nordstrom, who, as Kidd writes, mentored Harper’s illustrators in conveying their deep feelings and “often joked about picture books as having psychotherapeutic power.”734 Accordingly, Sendak’s language is often strikingly psychoanalytic when discussing his art and process. When illustrating others’ work,

Sendak saw himself as one who interrupted and expanded the words on the page. His tendencies

175 of sampling and collage based on personal intuition sometimes struck traditionalists as disreputable. Kushner compared the illustrator’s impulse to that of the theater artist, understanding both as “amphibian” disruptors of the formal purity insisted on by painters and novelists:

illustrator and theater artist alike are compelled to respond by disrupting the silent literary dyad of writer and reader with the insertion of a third term, or a third party […] to unearth from written language, and to make manifest, its imagery, its iconography, its obvious or buried harmonic or antiphonic accompaniment. And this is why, perhaps, there’s something not entirely respectable about either profession.735

Sendak identified with the marginality of illustration and the theatrical arts, seeking to express himself so fully and profoundly within those fields as to elevate the fields themselves. The disruptive nature of the illustrator’s and theater artist’s role coalesced with his sense of existing socially “apart” and “in between,” as well as sustained the emotional isolation and narcissistic feelings of “chosenness” and all-encompassing grandiosity that ultimately generated his work, as further discussed below.

“Rosie Fever”: A Survival Act

A Sicilian Brooklyn child named Rosie epitomized Sendak’s belief about the nature of childhood as a time of grappling with fantasy and the nature of reality itself – a time in which play and performance could be more freely employed to work through overwhelming emotions and to create new possibilities of meaning. Sendak depicted Rosie “both literally and figuratively,” channeling her in both The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960) and in his portrayal of most other children, as well.736 As John Cech notes, Rosie was the first child artist of Sendak’s to function in the public sphere, performing outside on her block.737 Sendak recalled first observing Rosie as a “ten-year-old girl he spotted on the streets of Brooklyn in 1948,” during a time in which the

176 twenty-year-old artist had quit his Manhattan job, moved back in with parents, and started undergoing psychoanalysis.738 Rosie had saluted Sendak and thrilled him by loudly calling him

Johnson, including him in her game of make-believe.739 The artist was impressed by her inclination to invent his identity “on the spot” and at a time when he was perhaps least sure of who he was.740 As he would remember, “I was out of a job, out of sorts and money, and (worse) had to live at home with my parents, without a clue as to what to do next. Rosie occupied both hand and head during that long, languishing time and filled my notebooks with ideas that later found their way into every one of my children’s books.”741 For about nine months, Sendak filled a sketchbook with Rosie’s antics, labeling it “Brooklyn Kids, August 1948” and referring to the period his “Rosie fever.” As Sendak described her:

She must have been aware of the pasty-faced youth (me) watching from a second-floor window. It seems, on the evidence of that sketchbook and the ones that came quickly after, that the better part of my day was spent at that window, Rosie-watching. The [sketch]books are jammed with drawings of Rosie, her family and friends, and – along the sides of the pages – frantically jotted bits of precious Rosie monologue. […] Rosie was a fierce child who impressed me with her ability to imagine herself into being anything she wanted to be, anywhere in or out of the world. She literally forced her fantasies onto her more stolid, less driven friends. […] Her games were based mostly on the movies. She managed both the Charles Laughton and the Maureen O’Hara roles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.742

Sendak may have seen part of his own dramatic child self in Rosie; while generally a

“withdrawn, stammering boy,” he recalled sometimes enthralling the neighborhood children with highly exaggerated retellings of Saturday-morning movie classics like The Mystery of the Wax

Museum and of the Opera.743 After illustrating several works by other writers, Sendak’s first authored book, Kenny’s Window (1956), paid homage to Rosie’s house and street in its depictions of the protagonist’s neighborhood. Very Far Away, a year later, also takes place on

Rosie’s street, and Martin’s aggressive personality is based on Rosie’s.744 The male protagonists of Nutshell Library (1962) would also take Rosie’s male friends as their models.745 In 1960

177 Sendak finally created a picture book about his child muse directly, which he initially intended to call Alinda The Lost Girl.746 Published as The Sign on Rosie’s Door, the book exposes Rosie as a histrionic child with a proclivity for borrowing different selves as a means of fighting off her own potential insignificance, loneliness, and boredom. The archetypal theater artist, Rosie both coerced and delighted her peers by imagining characters and scenarios for them to enact – outlets for demoralized, lonely, or lost children to locate and spiritually unleash themselves. Sendak remembered her as suffering and pained – qualities he identified with real children.747

Rosie employs strategies of “Camp,” what Susan Sontag describes as a sensibility that celebrates artifice, exaggeration, and the unnatural for the edification of a knowing group of insiders.” Camp, Sontag writes, is a “sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience,” and it “refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.”748 Rosie embodies Camp when she throws on her preoccupied mother’s dress, a black feather boa, and an oversized hat and announces that she is

“Alinda, the lovely lady singer,” only to be overshadowed, ignored, and abandoned by the other children.749 Rosie quickly improvises by transforming into “Alinda, the lost girl,” waiting with a blanket over her head for her best friend, “Magic Man,” who will tell her who she is and what she should do.

“Please tell us who you are,” said Kathy. “I’m Alinda the lost girl.” “Who lost you?” asked Pudgy. “I lost myself,” answered Alinda. “Aren’t you though?” asked Pudgy. “I used to be Rosie,” Alinda said, “but not any more.”750

Rosie may be lost, but it is this very quality – her undefined, boundless self – that makes her the searching, passionate artist who can elicit emotion, interest, and energy in others. Her unyielding devotion to the values of Camp, what Sontag calls the “exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate,

178 and the naïve,” allows her to accomplish what Camp does: to “dethrone the serious,” to diffuse tragedy with style, theatricality, and frivolity.751 Rosie may be self-absorbed, as physically suggested by the way she sits outside with a red blanket wrapped over her head and announces that she is waiting to find herself, but she is also someone with strong feelings and purpose, someone creatively driven by her own need to survive, to exist, to matter. The neighborhood children turn to Rosie to save them from their own boredom and lack of direction. When they are not allowed to play with dangerous firecrackers on the fourth of July, Rosie saves the day by igniting their imagination. She proclaims that Magic Man has given her the power to become a

“big red firecracker” and for the other children to become “little silver firecrackers!” Fusing into the forbidden object of their desire, the children satisfy their emotional needs through creative improvisation. The book closes with Rosie switching places with her cat Buttermilk at bedtime.

Not ready to leave fantasy behind, Rosie curls up to sleep on the floor, Buttermilk tucked under the covers of Rosie’s bed.

As Sontag argues, Camp takes the irony and cool, cutting wit of the nineteenth-century dandy and adjusts it to the “low culture” of mass production and consumption – in this case, to children on the street, valuing self-indulgence, aesthetics, and pleasure (replacing the old dandy’s classist snobbery and moral superiority). Thus, Camp is a theatrical “modern dandyism,” building on the cynically witty and highly stylized culture of Oscar Wilde, whose The Happy

Prince Sendak once loved and privately illustrated as a teenager, and who famously characterized art as “a lie that tells the truth.” Though Sendak’s work is generally more rigorous and serious than “campy,” he drew from Camp strategies, which Sontag characterized as a “love for human nature” that “relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of ‘character’” without moralizing or condemning.752 Sendak’s portrayal of children’s

179 awkwardness and intensity as they negotiate acceptable levels of narcissism and endure the early traumas of wounded feelings and social exclusion through larger-than-life creative outbursts models the artistic power of Camp for an audience of emotional insiders – namely, readers who remember these aspects of their own childhood, including children in the midst of experiencing them. Animating the sentimental, domestic scenes of romantic, Victorian, and bourgeois family life with the dark and indulgent energies of a misunderstood and overwhelmed child, Sendak demonstrated the power of play, of treating the world, or at least the picture book, like a stage on which to diffuse excessive emotional pressures, to locate one’s sense of self through the improvisation of brushing up against exaggerated and dramatized boundaries, and to thereby gain insights about one’s limits, values, identifications, and desires, constructing personal meaning, as children do in play and in life, loosening the grip of shame and fear. Rosie exudes the stylized, awkward triumph of Camp, returning from a day of outside play with a red blanket draped over her head and announcing that she is a big red firecracker who is going to blow down the whole house, her mother chuckling at her diva daughter’s absurdity.

Sendak’s use of Camp also reflects the larger-than-life, speedy, spectacle-driven ethos of consumerism, early Hollywood, and advertising that colored his urban youth in the ‘30s, as discussed in the previous chapter. His In the Night Kitchen (1970) recycles “low culture” icons, like Mickey Mouse and Winsor McCay’s comic strips, and discarded cultural references, such as

Oliver Hardy, who sings and dances amidst a skyline of oversized, branded kitchen products in the book. In The Nutshell Library, a family of alligators engage in exaggerated behaviors following each letter of the alphabet, and a group of children colorfully romp through New

York’s brownstones and outdoor delights across the months of the year, watering flowers with chicken soup in June, becoming a pot of chicken soup in steamy August, and transforming into

180 Christmas trees adorned with soup bowls in December.753 In Really Rosie (1975), a film based on Sign on Rosie’s Door and The Nutshell Library books, with lyrics and music by popular musician , Sendak would name the protagonist’s little brother “Chicken Soup,” and

Moby Dick would appear, as in the original book, his blowhole “spouting chicken soup with rice.”754 Affectionately jabbing at his mother’s tendency to offer chicken soup as a universal medicine for all ailments, Sendak created a campy farce of Jewish urban childhood domesticity in which insiders and outsiders alike could revel. As Christopher Mattaliano confirmed, Sendak evinced a “very affectionate view of his upbringing and a very ironic and somewhat sardonic view of it too,” playfully imitating his mother and other relatives to his friends in a Yiddish- inflected voice.755 The flirtatious middle-aged Sendak usually called the twenty-something

Mattaliano “boychik” or “dahlink,” alternating in his demeanor between a warm, Yiddish elder and a self-indulged diva.756 Sendak, like Rosie, connected with others by speaking to their

“brutal, happy, rough roots,” which he envisioned as:

little quiet jets that go off in us and that make us respond to people, to government, to whatever you wish. For people to reject that, for people to say it’s coarse and vulgar to show a penis or a baby eating a mother, whatever, is to sadly reject those very primitive rough bursts in us. […] How important it is to confirm in children’s minds and hearts— up on the stage, in the book, on the screen—that we understand and we believe in them. We may not like the violence, we may not like the vulgarity. But we approve, we understand.757

Sedgwick identified Camp with a twentieth-century gay male project that connected with popular feminist efforts in the latter half of the century to rehabilitate “the sentimental,” which had been denigrated as a domestic, female mode tied to “relational and emotional labor and expression,” against more respected artistic modes championed by men. Seeing liberating power in queer expressions of sentimentality for gay youth raised in heterosexual families and societies,

Sedgwick writes:

181 The kid in Ohio who recognizes ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ the national anthem of a native country, his own, whose name he’s never heard spoken is constructing a new family romance on new terms; and for the adult he becomes, the sense of value attaching to a ‘private’ realm, or indeed to expressive and relational skills, is likely to have to do with a specific history of secrecy, threat, and escape as well as with domesticity.758

The sentimental spoke to a world of inside, of family, home, and feelings. Associated with nostalgia, melancholy, empty displays of emotion, and cliché, the sentimental as an artistic mode had become a form of kitsch by the twentieth century. But Sendak, among other children’s artists at midcentury, enlivened it by animating its inhabitants in startlingly honest, unruly ways that defied its constitution – children airborne and endangered, not protected at the hearth; mothers absent or threatening, rather than angels of the home; rage and ecstasy instead of empty displays of expected, tame feeling; the emotional storms of the individual over the emotional sweetness of the family unit. Sendak aimed to show how children suffered the emotional void of potential insignificance, confusion, and loneliness in a normalizing, socially conservative, commercialized society of pleasure and escapism, whose meanings are largely determined by preoccupied, inconsistently available authorities. Rosie’s mother, for example, is usually depicted from behind as a faceless figure doing the dishes, like Martin’s mother in Very Far Away, who is “busy washing the baby” and does not hear Martin’s pressing questions, leading him to don “a cowboy suit and a false mustache” and to run away in search of a place where he is not ignored. Rosie’s theatrical, flamboyant techniques for warding off loneliness and obscurity influenced all of

Sendak’s child protagonists. “A mere change of sex,” he once wrote, “cannot disguise the essential Rosieness of my heroes.”759 These children, Sendak explained, “all have the same need to master the uncontrollable and frightening aspects of their lives, and they all turn to fantasy to accomplish this. Kenny struggles with confusion; Rosie, with boredom and a sense of personal inadequacy; and Martin, with frustration. On the whole they are a serious lot.”760

182 Mixing strategies of Camp and the sentimental with romantic, psychoanalytic, and modernist sensibilities, Sendak breathed new life into what might have been vacuous depictions of childhood play and domesticity by infusing those scenes with emotional qualities generally misinterpreted, ignored, or forgotten by adults. Home was the battleground of childhood’s inner emotional wars, of helplessness, awkwardness, and pain. Home was also a site of warmth and comfort, as evoked by such mundane symbols as a mother’s dress, her chicken soup, a household blanket, or even the family pet. Against popular neo-Freudian ideas that spending too much time in the sentimental sphere of the home, with one’s mother, might cause a boy to “become” gay, which was, at least through the ‘60s, largely seen as a perverse and unspeakable mental disorder,

Sendak’s Night Kitchen, which he would describe as a farewell to childhood, would connect the stereotypically feminine, kitchen symbols of milk, dough, and oven with a boy’s sensual awakening in a fantasy of men baking together at night while parents slept in ignorance – Sendak described the book as expressing “a profound love of […] the lusciousness of cooking, […] of undressing and floating in the sentuosity of milk.”761 Similarly, Sendak’s later work Higglety

Pigglety Pop! (1967) would juxtapose the interior of a dairy wagon labeled “Ketzle & Company”

– modeled after Sendak’s favorite toy, given to him by his Aunt Esther, and filled with cheese, eggs, and yogurt – with an outdoor sign that displays the last name of Sendak’s partner: “Glynn.”

“Ketzle,” meaning “kitten” in Yiddish, was a pet name that Philip used for Sendak as a boy.762

These juxtapositions of sentimental Old World childhood nourishment and hints of the child’s budding, queer sexuality reflect an intensified version of a dilemma faced by all children straddling the opposing worlds of family history and personal desire, memory and individuality.

Creative Play in Discretion

183 Scholarly work has largely overlooked Sendak’s experience as a modern, discreetly gay person and the looming, sometimes explicit presence of his marginalized sexuality in his creative work and personal correspondences. In 1976, an article in the underground magazine called The Gay

Alternative proclaimed, "it’s no coincidence that three gay male writers and illustrators are at the fore of children’s literature today. I refer to Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak and James

Marshall.” 763 Despite the fact that gay community publications already claimed Sendak, who was exuberantly “out” to his friends, as “one of their own” since at least the 1970s, Sendak felt pressure to participate in the wider society’s desire not to see this truth about their favorite children’s book artist. His biography cannot be separated from the effects of internalized social stigma and cultural homophobia that characterize most of the twentieth century. As Ellen

Handler Spitz declares, “When an artist’s sexuality, or indeed any other core aspect of his identity, is denied public acceptance and affirmation, that denial cannot but find its way into his work.”764 Social scientists and cultural theorists of the latter twentieth-century, critical of the social conformity and materialism of the previous decades, increasingly sought to empathize with, rather than demonize, those who did not fit mainstream ideals, humanizing them as sensitive sufferers. Goffman’s influential study on stigma helped further discredit the social ethos of moralistic, middle-class conservatism. It illuminated how various sorts of individuals depart from approved standards of behavior and appearances but manage their social credibility and the impressions they make on others through concealment and sensitivity to context and to social beliefs:

he who passes will have to be alive to aspects of the social situation which others treat as uncalculated and unattended. What are unthinking routines for normals can become management problems for the discreditable […] The person with a secret failing, then, must be alive to the social situation as a scanner of possibilities, and is therefore likely to be alienated from the simpler world in which those around him apparently dwell.765

184 Interestingly, Goffman’s description, though reflecting the prejudicial attitudes of its time, paints the social alien as a sort of creative genius, sensitive and attuned to aspects of human experience unavailable to most people. As suggested earlier, this socially stigmatized person shares some key aspects in common with Slaff’s and Glynn’s understandings of the gifted artist and the young child; all of these perspectives respond to a state of psychological need by developing a talent for scanning for multiple possibilities of meaning, of quickly creating unusual connections and associations, and of approaching “normal” routines with sensitive, analytical minds in the service of survival, actualization, and belonging. The ability to draw connections between vastly disparate objects and ideas, even from an inexperienced position of

“not knowing” or lacking social credibility, is the ability to convey the universal experience of seeking personal meaning within a world of infinite sensory data, possibility, and chaos, as well as the particular struggle of those who grow up without the affirmation or role models needed to smoothly join society. Likewise, Sendak’s talent for channeling early childhood emotions, coupled with talents related to his own social stigma, personal alienation, and internalized feelings of endangerment, helped him create messages that spoke universally to the wider late twentieth-century culture, which increasingly rejected the homogenous, middle-class ideals of midcentury America.

It is no surprise that Sendak described being gay as feeling like “a dangerous, interloping kind of thing,” with contemporary writers like Goffman using the very word “interloper” to describe the stigmatized individual in “forbidden” spaces.766 Sendak seemed incapable of separating queer desire from feelings of impending danger and doom. After receiving the

National Medal of Arts in 1996 – the highest award given to artists in the U.S. – Sendak ruminated on how the queer pleasure of being seated beside then-President Bill Clinton quickly

185 shifted into paranoia about his physical safety. Enamored by Clinton like a “girl at a Frank

Sinatra concert,” Sendak remembered noticing that the President was a “very attractive man” with “a very big body.” The artist recounted that he

could feel the heat from his arm on my arm; I can almost feel the heat from his hip, and I was gonna [laughs] God knows what I was gonna do. And then I had a wicked thought, which is how I get out of feeling good (if I feel good for a moment, something bad has to happen): Oh my god. What if there’s an assasinator [sic] in the top row and he shoots and he fucking misses, and he gets me, and this is the only good suit I have. Then I calmed down, and I moved my chair as far from him as I could.767

This anecdote exemplifies how a stigmatized person’s queer desire shifts into shame and anxiety, which quickly takes the form of scanning for potential dangers based on context – in this case, the context of being seated beside a major political figure. Drawing on the historiographic trend of tracing the history of particular emotions, the following analysis explores how Sendak found artistic power in conveying, indulging, and fighting with what he experienced as inscrutable, overwhelming, or forbidden feelings – specifically those of queer desire, shame, misrecognition, and social obscurity.

In his personal life, Sendak played with the line between fantasy and reality through flamboyant, imaginative friendships. He enjoyed what he called “cackling gossip” with his picture-book friend James Marshall at “a table set brightly, exquisitely.”768 He also play-acted in a correspondence he exchanged with gay novelist Coleman Dowell from the late 1960s almost until Dowell’s suicide in ‘85.769 Creating a precious “back” space in his letters with Dowell, to use Goffman’s term, Sendak relieved himself of the limitations and pressures of his public image. Like in other forms of fantasy play, he found in role-play and sexually explicit conversation among confidantes a means of bridging the gaps in his subjectivity and easing the pressure of self-policing and “passing.” Goffman wrote that a stigmatized individual anxiously projects and manages “a life that can be collapsed at any moment.”770 In some of the letters

186 exchanged with Dowell, Sendak played a Slavic “Natasha” character to Dowell’s Aryan “Max” in a game of dramatic make-believe, drawing on the cultural differences of their heritages and jokingly submitting his Eastern European Natasha to the character played by the Anglo-Saxon

Dowell, whom Edmund White would deem “anti-Semitic” despite Dowell’s Jewish partner.771 In some ways an ideal playmate for Sendak, Dowell lived for fantasy, youth, and exploration of human nature and sexuality. According to White, Dowell, who often lied about his humble, rural family background to project a cosmopolitan pedigree that matched his extravagant dinner parties, did everything “flamboyantly,” turning a picnic supper into a “Calvary,” a tea-party into

“a martyrdom.” He juggled multiple lovers and performed an exaggerated machismo, despite his feminine mannerisms and sexually submissive preferences.772 Sendak consoled Dowell through his bouts of depression, offered him a “mazal tov” on good reviews of his writing, and entertained him, inviting him to indulge in describing his exploits with other men.773 Chris

Mattaliano, an artistic collaborator of Sendak’s in his opera work during the 1980s and ‘90s, also recalled Sendak’s overt sexuality as an essentially playful quality of his, endeared by the artist’s frankness and humor:

in terms of anything in conversation, or him talking about his partner, or him flirting with men, or him flirting with me, or him just talking about sex, about him getting laid, which he was, on one hand, kind of a filthy old man, and he loved to play that. He loved to play that - a kind of “dirty old man.” And there would often be jokes about, you know, “the kiddie book illustrator, who wants to go out on the prowl tonight, with, you know, whomever.” So there was that part of Maurice, which was kind of wonderfully X-rated.774

Despite his sexually explicit flirtations, it seems Sendak remained faithful to Glynn. Speaking of him in 2011, the year before Sendak’s own passing, the artist would insist, “I never betrayed him.”775

Boundary-breaking correspondences with close friends, like the role-playing moments between “Natasha” and “Max,” or the romantic flamboyance of the children Sendak illustrated,

187 who perform nobility, monstrosity, depravity, and stardom with passion and emotional seriousness, also demonstrate the artist’s engagement with strategies of Camp, which, Sontag writes, “sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a

‘woman.’ […] Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”776 This way of being was painfully familiar to stigmatized gay people expected to remain vigilant of their surroundings to determine whether an expression of affection or a verbal disclosure about their gayness might result in violence or discrimination. “Being-as-Playing-a-Role” might also describe the position of some children raised in traumatized families. As discussed earlier, narrative accounts of postmemory and trans- memory highlight the experience of a displaced or somewhat dispossessed self. With friends like

Dowell and Marshall, however, Sendak could refine the contours of his own subjectivity by playing exaggerated roles, as children and young people do to help them determine their identities. These imaginative friends participated with Sendak in trying on such stereotypical roles as the Eastern European romantic and the sexually liberated gay man free of shame or discretion.

The Island of Fire and Wild Things

Sontag connected the “Camp” vision of “life as theater” with “the situation of homosexuals,” writing in 1964, “The Camp insistence on not being ‘serious,’ on playing, also connects with the homosexual’s desire to remain youthful.”777 However, Sendak’s obsession with childhood conveys not the mere desire to remain physically youthful or to speak specifically to children, but rather the need to cultivate the flexibility and insight of children for his own psychological survival and self-determination as a sensitive, stigmatized artist. As a young man undergoing analysis, Sendak had revisited childhood feelings of terror, boredom, confusion, and pleasure

188 with Slaff, who specialized in childhood and had previously attempted a career in playwriting.778

As Sendak would admit in his old age, “I wanted him to hammer me straight, but of course that failed.”779 Gay and Jewish like Sendak, Slaff became a long-time friend of the artist in the years following treatment. Praising Slaff, to whom Sendak dedicated Kenny’s Window, Sendak would later tell Rolling Stone, “a large part of my 20s was spent on the analyst’s couch. And it enriched and deepened me and gave me confidence to express much that I might not have without it.”780

Coming of age in an era that preceded gay rights and mainstream gay acculturation, the covertly gay artist saw homosexuality as shameful and dangerous. As Sedgwick noted, even as late as the

1990s, “there are remarkably few of even the most openly gay people who are not deliberately in the closet with someone personally or economically or institutionally important to them.”781

Though open about his homosexuality to most of his friends, Sendak performed heterosexual bachelorhood for his family members, as well as for a twentieth-century public that, he felt, would cringe at the idea of a gay children’s artist.782 In a November 1992 article in Parents

Magazine, for example, Sendak seemed to be accounting for his own childlessness, explaining that his last name was Hebrew for “godfather,” describing himself as “the ultimate uncle…and a consummate watcher of children.”783 A 1973 New York Times article painted him in terms of a stereotypical bachelor, writing, “he copes with the intricacies of an elaborate kitchen as best he can. The bachelor has bought a beginner’s cookbook that doesn’t take for granted you know what a skillet is.”784 The fact that Sendak could neither drive nor cook did not hurt his public image as a tenderhearted, albeit eccentric, urban “bachelor” and “uncle.” Easing the discomfort of heterosexual readers who would prefer not to know about Sendak’s homosexuality or about the shared life he built with another man, countless articles and books, including Amy Sonheim’s

1991 study of Sendak’s career, refer to him as “a bachelor all his life” who “adopted Max, the

189 protagonist of Wild Things, as his own child.” Sonheim calls Glynn, who shared Sendak’s life and home for over half a century, “a friend,” a euphemism Sendak sometimes used, as well.785

Following the 1960 publication of The Sign on Rosie’s Door, Sendak turned to a vision generated in therapy, which he sought to convey in a picture book – a vision of “something, or someone, or some little animal, getting out of some enclosure.”786 This original idea, drawn in small cartoon sketches, followed a boy who searches for wild horses despite “signs that warn him to stay away, only to be thrown out of his clothes by the horses. Naked, he is chased by four creatures […] and eventually he winds up in water and hauls himself aboard a boat that takes him to an island where he finds a wife and child waiting for him.”787 The sequence evolved into a prose piece of approximately eight chapters about “a boy who leaves home on a short trip and goes to some place again, where he dreams that he is with wild horses.” Hard on himself in those years for the emotional nature of his work, Sendak was not satisfied with the piece, because “it was romantic. It was sentimental.” In 1961 he wrote to his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, that he had

“the sense of having lived one’s life so narrowly – with eyes and senses turned inward. An actual sense of the breadth of life does not exist in me. I am narrowly concerned with me … All

I will ever express will be the little I have gleaned of life for my own purposes. […] is furniture-less. It is all feeling.” Nordstrom’s reply sought to reassure him: “Yes, you did live

‘with eyes and senses turned inward’ but you had to. Socrates said ‘Know thyself.’ And now you do know yourself better than you did, and your work is getting richer and deeper, and it has such an exciting, emotional quality.” She calls his “vigorous emotional vitality” a rare gift.788

Sendak in the ‘60s was gradually beginning to value rather than judge his deep investment in his own emotions and inner workings. As suggested earlier, these Civil Rights years, preceding

Stonewall and much of the sexual revolution, were early in terms of American culture’s

190 willingness to empathize with the plight of particular groups beyond the mainstream. He re- wrote his wild horses story as a concise poem, which helped him realize that what he needed was

“a very abrupt and quick form, that it must not be a long story, it must not be a story without words. The poem was in the direction. Very tight and very immediate, and very breathless, like it was a child chanting...or fantasizing to himself.”789 Ultimately, this poem would evolve into the most famous book of Sendak’s career, and one of the most beloved artifacts of children’s literature of all time: Where the Wild Things Are, which he wrote in a single hour in Fire Island’s

Seaview neighborhood.790 Basing the visual depictions of his Wild Things on his disheveled

Eastern European relatives in a landscape that seems to have been influenced by an island famous for its sexually liberated enclaves may have reflected a desire to synthesize uncomfortably separate facets of his identity, allowing American, queer, and Jewish immigrant identities to waver, as most children and many adults do, between the space of a “normal” home and the wild emotion of an uncivilized realm.791 Several times Sendak referred to Max’s

“rumpus” as an “orgy” with sexual undertones. If these associations were not clear at the time, they became distinct in the book’s afterlife. would flatly ask Sendak in January

2012, “is ‘rumpus’ sex?,” to which the artist would playfully reply, “Sure. Yes. The whole bed going up and down […] and being happy.”792 The artist would also end his 1996 commencement address to Vassar College’s graduating class by exclaiming, “And when the hard work is done, have safe sex and let the wild rumpus begin!”793 Sendak would similarly describe the rebellious, party-throwing protagonist of his Bumble-Ardy (2011), like Max, as engaging in an “orgy” in order to test his limits and measure his own safety beyond the protection of his caretakers: “The orgy he has is a way of testing himself. How much can he resist? How much can he understand?

How much can he live through?”794

191 Sendak was first drawn to Fire Island by the founder of the New York Film Festival,

Amos Vogel.795 Departing by ferry, the artist made a habit of staying there in the warmer months for weeks at a time, beginning in the early 1960s. He went to write, to escape the city, and to vacation by the beach. Rather than staying in Cherry Grove or the Pines – which have been famous as gay spaces of liberation since the 1950s – Sendak chose to stay further west where he could more easily rest and write, sometimes in the Seaview neighborhood, known as the Jewish family area, and sometimes in the Ocean Beach neighborhood, inching in the direction of Cherry

Grove and the Pines but still maintaining some distance.796 In June 1964, expressing his desire to rest from the commotion of work, travel, and Caldecott Medal award festivities, he wrote to a friend of plans to spend eight weeks of summer reading and dreaming on the island.797 Back on the island in the summer of 1965, Sendak complained that he had needed to spend most of his island holiday in Manhattan due to his father’s bad health and back surgery.798 However, the following summer, Sendak recovered from the stressful production process for Zlateh the Goat by vacationing again on Fire Island. Norstrom wrote to him on August 25, 1966, “I hope you are well, and productive, and enjoying sun, sea, and sand. […] Be happy.”799 He wrote Higglety

Pigglety Pop! on the island that summer, informing a friend that he would be returning to the beach later that September to start rewriting.800 Depending on the recipient of his letters, or on his mood at the time, his writing sometimes expressed distaste for the Jewish, family-oriented neighborhoods where he did stay, and sometimes complained about the crowds of gay partygoers.801 In a letter from July 1967 he told cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife, Judith, that

Seaview was full of Yentas. The letter included a drawing of Sendak as one of the Wild Things, reclining on the beach beside the bones of a dead fish, a heavy older woman in a bikini passing by. Another letter mentions socializing with a sad-eyed Jewish wife.802

192 Sendak surely also socialized in the island’s gay neighborhoods, as they offered what

Goffman termed a “back” context, one in which his particular form of social stigma was normalized and even celebrated, even if, like Max on the island of Wild Things, he was more likely to find a rumpus there than a nourishing respite. To his friend and former lover, Leroy

Richmond, Sendak painted a picturesque vision of his lifestyle on the island, writing in August

1966 about reading Kafka on the beach and tanning his body in the sun.803 Not surprisingly,

Sendak became more focused on his fitness and physical appearance in these years, writing to

Selma Lanes in March ‘68, for example, that he was smoking less and dieting.804 Two months later, he wrote to his friend Mary Jarrell that he was growing his sideburns and that he had started to run at the YMCA, noting a decrease in his waistline and a flatter stomach.805 Shel

Silverstein, perhaps most famous for his collection of illustrated children’s poems, Where the

Sidewalk Ends (1974), recalled speaking with Sendak in Cherry Grove in 1965 while Silverstein collected notes for a cartoon travelogue for Playboy Magazine. The travelogue appeared with the title, “Silverstein on Fire Island: foot-loose Shel visits the gay side of Gotham’s offshore bohemia— where the fruits are unforbidden.”806 The vignettes playfully explore the island neighborhoods’ gay flirtations, social life, and drag. Silverstein’s article conveyed the liberating dimension of that community in the years that began the gay rights movement:

In the last few years homosexuality as a social phenomenon has emerged from the shadows, to the extent that today there are clearly recognized gay enclaves in most big cities…. Here, sans stares, homosexuals of every stripe gayly enjoy the amenities of a thriving vacation community. And here, through this summer fairyland, strolled our straight John, bewhiskered, bare-pated and bewildered, recording for posterity his walk on the Wilde side.807

Popular conceptions of homosexuality at the time emphasize child’s play and disguise. Midge

Decter, a heterosexual writer who frequented Fire Island’s Pines, recalled the population of that neighborhood in the 1960s as about sixty percent gay men, whom she observed as “taken up with

193 various forms of play,” which included “great elaborate celebrations, costume balls” colored by

“a fierce social competitiveness” and contempt for the entrapments of and mundane burdens of heterosexual family life. Noting their hairless bodies on the beach and their playful, competitive creativity, she concluded that “the reigning homosexual fashion” was based on “the worship of youth—youth understood not even as young manhood but rather boyhood.”808 The writer might have picked up on some superficial aspects of gay culture but failed to grasp the underlying meaning of youthful appearances for these men. For a socially suppressed demographic, physically idealizing youth was a means to proclaim the value of remaining “young at heart” and, in some ways, child-like, of playfully preserving a threatened, nascent identity against particular imposed ways in which one was expected to “grow up,” which might, for a queer person, mean “self-destruct” or “disappear.” Respectable adulthood in that era had no room for queer people.809 At a time preceding gay rights or positive cultural recognition, “growing up” for a gay person meant forcing oneself to live a heterosexual lifestyle in accordance with white

Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and against one’s physical drives and emotional orientations – a step Sendak did attempt, ending in a miscarriage and much psychological distress. More fundamentally, regardless of whether one married, it also meant jumping the hurdle of settling into a developmentally mature identity without experiencing the cultivation of a safe context in which to be honest about oneself with others, emotionally speaking. Thus, I read gay rejections of the expected adult roles that required one to remain closeted not as “immaturity” or as an indication of pedophilia, but rather as a creative act of self-defense and self-preservation in response to a social injustice and a lack of emotional understanding in the wider culture. To be

“young at heart” was to be emotionally honest, brave, and creative about how to overcome one’s lack of power or safety in a normalizing system that disapproved of one’s feelings, behaviors,

194 and personal dispositions. Accordingly, as discussed earlier, Sendak repeatedly claimed that his books were not written from the perspective of someone especially interested in actual children, but rather from the voice of his own rebellious, endangered “inner child,” and for the purpose of exorcising very personal, painful feelings from his childhood. He told one interviewer in 1973,

“Children were never consciously in my mind. I never think of them as an audience sitting in front of me. Or do I change my feelings or words accordingly [...] certain people write books that happen to appeal to children. Norman Mailer writes books that adults read; I write books that children read - and some adults read.”810

Queer, child-like, and culturally diasporic perspectives may serve as mutually influential devices for a kind of improvisational utopianism; their location outside of the normative structure encourages creative understandings and boundless dreaming about what might be – the

“the world to come.” Literary and cultural studies scholars have recently employed queer theory to understand childhood as a realm deemed queer by adult norms and perspectives. Inasmuch as they are disconnected from socialized adult behavior, all children are “queer” in normative society.811 Children, as human subjects largely excluded from mainstream, public society, fluctuate between embracing the boundless possibilities of play, beyond the public eye, and wanting to “grow up” to gain inclusion within the rules of the wider culture. In this light, the drag and costume balls of Fire Island need not be seen as infantile or morally corrupt; they resemble the campy, passionate feats of Sendak’s “Natasha” character, or of Rosie, a child forced to make meaning out of nothing, sidelined from any significant human reality, dumped on a boring Brooklyn block. Lonely and constrained, Rosie styles her mother’s discarded eveningwear into a showy sort of “drag” of her own to entice others with an inventive, farcically exaggerated performance. To be sure, Sendak knew that Rosie was not without her issues. She

195 struggled madly to maintain the star role and to guard her creative control as other children offered competing ideas about what to do and how to play. Sendak even associated Rosie with a certain dramatic “type” of person he knew in his own life, including his mother and her sisters; he described this “type” as narcissistic, unhappy, absorbed in sad things, crying, and prone to making dramatic scenes.812 But, when tempered with social awareness and empathy, Rosie delighted Sendak by using fantasy and theatricality to accomplish social connection and emotional survival through dreaming and fanciful performance.

As discussed earlier, Sendak’s work, for all its qualities of timelessness and play, might be read in terms of Halberstam’s notion of “queer time,” first generated by responses to the

AIDS crisis and shifts of focus to the present, as necessitated by an uncertain future for those suffering the effects of the virus. Queer time is theatrical in its pretense that chronology and history might comprise an unpredictable palette through which to play, rather than a steady, predetermined course of events. If Sendak’s queer use of time had worked as a coping mechanism to survive his own difficult feelings, this was certainly true of his Bumble-Ardy

(2011), the first picture book he would create after a seven-year break from the form. His return to what was considered a children’s form reflected his desperation to use child’s play to heal the pain, guilt, and fear he experienced as Glynn lay dying of lung cancer. The artist would admit,

“that amalgamation of emotions led me back to doing a book for children ... I had this little story in my head for a long time. I couldn’t figure it out, I couldn’t solve it. Then, during this horrendous time, I solved it. And it was like heaven sent to preoccupy me during a terrible, terrible, terrible time.”813 The protagonist of Bumble-Ardy exemplifies the notion of queer time when he promises his caretaker, Aunt Adeline, that he “won’t ever turn ten” – this follows his breaking Adeline’s rules, throwing himself a wild costume party for his ninth birthday, which

196 involves a cabaret of looks from different eras and regions, drawn in a mix of paints and crayon, as well as skeletons and the word “nine” spelled in Yiddish, Greek, Dutch, and Russian.

Suggesting Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theory of “growing sideways,” referenced earlier, Bumble-

Ardy realizes that his own emotional development and reward must be suspended or channeled elsewhere if he is to sustain the love and protection of his caretaker, Aunt Adeline, who, with crazed, gaping eyes and an aggressively contorted face, wields a cleaver and threatens to slice his fantastical friends into ham – the fate of Ardy’s own parents, who, we are told, “gained weight.

And got ate.” It is not clear whether following the rules keeps Ardy safe or closer to the source of danger and to his own potential death (did Adeline kill his parents too? To secure her protection, he needs to promise her that he will “never turn ten.”). Ardy’s predicament may exemplify

Stockton’s notion of queer childhood, with its “fascinating asynchronicities, its required self- ghosting measures, its appearance only after its death, and its frequent fallback onto metaphor (as a way to grasp itself).” Ardy, like Stockton’s queer child, experiences childhood as:

a frightening, heightened sense of growing toward a question mark. Or growing up in haze. Or hanging in suspense – even wishing time would stop, or just twist sideways, so that one wouldn’t have to advance to new or further scenes of trouble. Truly, one could feel that one more readily had a future with a word – homo, faggot, gay, or queer – words so frequently used by kids – than with the objects of one’s dreams.814

Like Martin in Very Far Away (1957), Ardy dresses up as an American cowboy. But unlike

Martin, who finds only a horse, a bird, and a cat for company, ultimately growing tired of them,

Ardy hosts a network of interesting characters like himself, a crowd of pigs dressed as humans – including a wide-eyed infant with facial stubble, a female sheriff in a fur-trimmed purple dress with a sheriff’s gold star, a Napoleon-like figure, and long-nosed Italian carnival masks. Ardy’s promise to “never turn ten” both explicitly protests the normative development his aunt expects of him, as well as slyly preserves the potential for queer pleasure: Ardy’s promise is that he will

197 never grow up, not that he will never party. Discussing Bumble-Ardy, Sendak stated that inspiration came from feeling unsafe as a child in a dangerous world with foreign parents who

“knew nothing” about how to properly protect or guide him: “You had to form a kind of fake life, to protect yourself,” he claimed, hinting at the dangers posed by Ardy’s birthday guests – the “orgiastic, crazy, fantastical creatures,” as Sendak called them.815 Clearly Sendak felt in need of protection as Glynn, his dearest companion, faded away from him in 2007. Like Bumble-

Ardy, a child cancer patient whom Sendak met in a London hospital, exemplified for the artist how children and other disempowered people dramatize, pretend, and occupy multiple roles simultaneously to placate the emotions of powerful others, negotiating between safety and authenticity. Introduced to Sendak by her mother, the child patient had offered Sendak a “chilly” welcome and answered his questions with shrugs. She then insulted the sketch that Sendak made for her alongside his autograph:

she watched out of the corner of her eye, and then, with a great sigh, murmured her astonishment that I drew so badly and couldn’t possibly be the real illustrator. There was just a faint hint of comedy in her voice, and I snatched it up and said it was a portrait of her. She yielded finally and giggled and, as though by accident, leaned up against me. […] I glanced at [her] mother and what I read in her face made me look quickly away. In her great dark, wet eyes, I read astonishment and wonder at her seemingly healthy, happy, clever girl so completely twisting me, the renowned artist, around her littlest finger. I read, too, the anguish of her knowing that this fine creature would soon die. Meanwhile, the girl laughed loudly, one arm encircling my neck. […] She never looked at her mother. Her face was, so to speak, in mine, her eyes shining with pleasure, her touch affectionate and trusting. Her other arm had a purpose of its own. It crept stealthily along the bed until it reached her mother’s arm —it drifted down that mother’s arm and gently, firmly clasped her hand. I watched. The clasp was tight, reassuring—it rocked the mother’s hand gently, knowingly. ‘Knowingly’ because she knew. The doctor confirmed this fact.816

Limits of Fantasy

“Fantasy,” Sendak wrote, “makes sense only if it’s rooted ten feet deep in reality.”817 We might also call “reality” the “symbolic order,” the socially shared set of symbols and meanings by

198 which a culture and civilization function. Accordingly, philosopher Eugene Gendlin writes,

“Meaning is formed in the interaction of experiencing and something that functions symbolically. Feeling without symbolization is blind; symbolization without feeling is empty.”818

Fantasy disconnected from any real experience was, Sendak felt, vacuous.819 He articulated this value when contrasting the characters of his The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960), noting that, while

Kathy was a normal child able to shift between fantasy and reality, Rosie was somewhat stuck in fantasy. The price Rosie paid was loneliness, a problem she addressed by further escaping her social reality, becoming different characters, and even different animals.820 Rosie enchanted

Sendak but also ultimately disturbed him with her suffering – she seemed stuck in the sideways motion of fantasy play, almost losing her humanity in her refusal to enter the world of human social reality, covering unhappiness and desperation with one-way departures into imagination.821 Sendak wrote that he bumped into Rosie in the late 1950s. Noting the older

Rosie’s high heels, heavy makeup, and the lethargic manner with which she hung on an unattractive man’s arm, Sendak was overtaken with sadness at what he perceived as evidence that Rosie, his muse, had continued to remain a victim of her fantasy play.822 Rosie was a cautionary tale – a child lost on her own metaphorical island of Camp and wild things with no means of return.

Sendak’s friend Coleman Dowell posed a similar case, succumbing to his emotional storm and isolating himself in self-destructive fantasies. Struggling with alcoholism, he continuously sought casual sex with strangers in “the ramble,” a designated cruising area in the bushes of Central Park.823 By 1985 Dowell’s sustained loneliness, internalized stress, and pain led him to jump from the window of the fifteenth-floor apartment he shared with Slaff.824 Sendak believed that, despite children’s proclivity for fantasy, “every child’s dream” was ultimately “to

199 survive and to become a grownup,” even if the category of “grownup,” so policed by social stigma and convention, needed some revision to make that feat emotionally plausible without requiring too much self-erasure for marginalized individuals. Though Sendak often described himself as a child who had stopped growing, he did so as a complaint, not as a boast. “To be an adult and live in childhood,” he once proclaimed, “is to inhabit a limbo land. Not a Peter Pan land, not a Disneyland. It is an eerie, truth-demanding land.”825 Working through fantasy was a serious means of survival, not an end in and of itself.826 Children like Sendak, Nordstrom, and other queer sorts, identified and desired in ways that made growing up particularly counter- intuitive, isolating, and painful. Some of these individuals creatively pioneered new pathways into actualization and belonging. They also struggled to resist the temptation of “too much” fantasy, which might keep them victim to their own emotional storm – a position Sendak sought to escape in his own life, even as he recognized the importance of staying connected to that storm in the service of creating his best, truest work.

Struggling periodically with depression, Sendak, at age thirty-three in July of 1961, confided in author Jan Wahl about his morbid aimlessness and lack of a personal philosophy.827

Sendak pointed to his “patron saint” Herman Melville, who compared the writer’s work to the act of diving into dangerous psychic depths. The artist explained, “you dive deep and God help you. You could hit your head on something and never come back up, and nobody would ever know you were missing. Or, you will find some nugget that was worth the pain in your chest, the blindness, everything, and you’ll come up with it and that will be what you went down for.”

Sendak claimed that doing the initial drawings for Outside Over There (1981) gave him “a mini- nervous breakdown,” leading him back into therapy and stalling his progress for six months.828

He felt that he “fell off the ladder” on his dive deep into the waters of his unconscious.829 Crucial

200 to his engagement with fantasy and his attempted negotiation of his early childhood self was his insistence that one take pains not to drown, as Narcissus does in the eponymous myth, hypnotized by his own reflection in a pool of water.

In 1981, Slaff wrote an article called “Creativity: Blessing or Burden?” for the ’s Adolescent Psychiatry journal. Without mentioning Sendak or Dowell, of course, he stressed the suffering of creative adolescents, moody and secluded but profoundly insightful.

He emphasized the importance of differentiating between the creative personality and the narcissistic character, and the importance of not pathologizing the former. Creative personalities,

Slaff argued, cannot avoid the stress and suffering inherent in the creative process; they can only be helped to cope with it.830 Despite the artist’s wishes, fantasy can only be so effective at banishing the psychological threats that haunt him and that lead him to obsess over his identity as a means of securing his sense of self. Sendak admitted in a 1986 interview, “Primarily, my work was an act of exorcism, an act of finding solutions so that I could have peace of mind and be an artist and function in the world as a human being and a man.”831 He described the act of making a picture book as “the only true happiness I ever, ever enjoyed in my life. […] It’s sublime.

Where all your weaknesses of character and blemishes of personality and whatever else torments you fades away.”832 But creativity did not always succeed in exorcising unwanted elements of the artist’s subjectivity. Glynn once wrote,

When creativity heavily serves the purpose of discharging aggression or of externalizing hated parts of the self, the artwork may be fantasized as destroyed. Rage then turns against the actual self; […] post creation all artists are sad. Psychic disintegration has been barely escaped, yet the healing process itself must fail…the artwork does not truly restore the lost, banish death, or make actual the ideal self….Sooner or later, with luck, guilts reassert themselves, conflicts resume, and the cycle of creativity starts again.833

Not surprisingly, then, Sendak often described a finished project as a cathartic release, only to return to a state of depression and frustration. After completing his pictures for I.B. Singer’s

201 Zlateh the Goat collection, he described the paradoxical frustration that accompanied completing a project. Disconnecting from a finished project could leave him feeling weak and disoriented.834

After finishing his drawings for the Juniper Tree collection in 1962, he bemoaned the inevitable experience of aimlessness and meaninglessness that would haunt him until he became involved in a new project, a new creative world.835 The trouble with finding emotional life only in fantasy,

Sendak knew, was the unsustainability of fantasy and the inability to exist meaningfully with others beyond it. Writing to Dowell in 1975, Sendak articulated his experience of emotional emptiness, of not being able to internalize or accept his worth to those who maintained relationships with him.836

Ultimately, fantasy, however useful it may be for survival and psychic development, was as ethereal as the waves of emotion that inspired it. Even Max grows tired of the Wild Things once his rage has subsided, opting instead for concrete nurture in the social reality of his family.

One wonders whether Glynn, the most intimate of Sendak’s companions, drew from his own relationship with Sendak when psychoanalyzing the late artist Egon Schiele, whom he deemed

“unable to achieve a stable identity, unable to ever take the self for granted in its functioning integrity. […] Schiele was an odd, isolated child, without friends, dreamy, absentminded, repeatedly failing the schools he hated. [He] never truly engaged the world; he seems to have been just emerging from adolescence when he died.”837 As Jonathan Weinberg, a mentee and close friend of Glynn’s and Sendak’s since the 1960s, noted, “Gene never wrote directly about

Maurice’s art, but, in a sense, he was always writing about it as he tried to come to terms with the origins of the creative act.”838

As much as Sendak’s literary disposition helped him empathize with others and envision a more harmonious world, it also threatened his boundaries and sense of self in everyday life – a

202 problem explored further in the following chapter. While fantastical child’s play served a therapeutic role in the process of working through a complex identity and exploring how one might exist and belong in the outside world on one’s own, when apparent meanings and dangers overwhelmed a person’s psyche, fantasy also offered its own sort of drug-like danger.

Conclusion

The worlds Sendak straddled – between participation in aspects of New York’s stigmatized gay subculture, a high public profile in children’s publishing since the 1950s, and an emotionally weighty interconnectedness with his immigrant parents – were, in some respects, dramatically far apart from each other, necessitating his experience of emotional overextension, self- concealment, anxiety, incoherence, fantasy, and self-invention. Accordingly, his artwork, interviews, and writings reveal his romanticist impulse to follow overwhelming, irrational bouts of intuition and emotion, fusing disparate elements in the service of visualizing, stabilizing, and preserving his identity, which was chaotically spread across different temporal, linguistic, and cultural contexts. As social liberation movements selectively afforded rights and recognition to gay people and ethnically distinct minorities in the latter half of the century, the already-middle- aged Sendak continued to convey the inner workings of his suppressed younger self, a queer, sensitive, interwar Jewish son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who had grown up emotionally displaced, without a means by which to actualize into a socially cohesive adult identity. The artistically mature Sendak cared for this child, offering him bouts of unrestrained creative play in which he could indulge his emotions, try on different costumes and roles, test his limits, and negotiate his own self-worth.

203 Conveying the emotional experience of early childhood and the queerness of a stigmatized, somewhat suspended adult self, Sendak’s works demonstrate his scanning for social possibilities, hidden meanings, and new associations. Like the artist himself, Sendak’s protagonists are overextended and emotive about their plights, unsure if growing up is even a possibility for them, given their alienation, social exclusion, and internalized anxieties. They solve the problems of violated boundaries, neglect, loneliness, and the overwhelming feelings of powerful others through their own emotional play and instincts. An intuitive and improvisational

“grappling in the dark” helped the artist reclaim emotional agency against internalized queer shame, ongoing social misrecognition, and self-policing. Camp and theatricality offered some strategies for celebrating the drama of human nature – its awkwardness, suffering, and gratifying pleasures – and of avoiding the emotional vacuity of “sentimental” cliché. These aesthetic approaches also resonated with Rosie, the muse of Sendak’s early Brooklyn sketchbooks, and with the bold, boundary-breaking arts scene and gay subculture that emerged around him in

Manhattan and Fire Island as he came into his thirties, offering opportunities to foster further personal cohesion as a gay man across “civil” and “back” spaces, to use Goffman’s terms. In an era that predated socially respectable roles for queer adults, what social commentators might have viewed as a “gay obsession with youth” might have actually reflected an interest in children’s talent for creative, playful resistance against threatening forces of persecution or normalization – a goal shared by many adult artists and social outsiders.

Balanced with the irony and artistic restraint of a serious critical perspective, Sendak used child’s play and its accompanying emotional qualities to work through and exorcise difficult feelings connected to his twentieth-century queer and ethnically marked Jewish American positions discussed in the previous chapters. The cultural context, through stigma and social

204 conservatism, had sustained and perpetuated his early childhood feelings of endangerment and loneliness through much of his adulthood, making it painful or impossible to “grow up” and to belong. Sendak spoke to young children’s psychological plasticity, testing various reactions to emotional and instinctual drives in an ongoing process of performative trial-and-error in the construction of early selfhood; he also spoke to those stigmatized or alienated adults who, no longer children but still dependent on strategies of child’s play and fantasy, struggled to maintain a hold on reality in contexts that might have alienated, shamed, or destroyed them. Professionally channeling the creative play, psychological flexibility, and fantasy of early childhood was a double-edged sword for Sendak: it allowed him to give voice to a subjectivity that felt chaotic, overextended, insecure, and strange, but building his name and identity through this work also perpetuated that internal chaos, keeping him in the very state of limbo required to continue to produce “Sendakian” art.

205

Chapter Four

“The Price of Love is Terror”: Sendak’s Interiority and Self-Preservation

Reflecting in his old age, Sendak described the book-making process as “an isolationist form of life.”839 A heightened differentiation between notions of “inside” and “outside” color the artist’s work, from the first book he authored, Kenny’s Window (1956), in which the protagonist is stuck inside and shuts out his toy soldier on the windowsill, through the artist’s posthumously published My Brother’s Book (2013), which conveys deeply personal feelings harbored for his older brother, Jack. Gregory Maguire has noted “the significance of proscenium arches in

Sendak’s work—starting with the many windows that frame the world (and the similar stance and mood of those caught inside).”840 As John Cech writes, Sendak channeled a wider postwar cultural movement of turning inward, as the nation began “to explore the individual psyche through visionary journeys into the unconscious.”841 Accordingly, Sendak’s children are often either left outside or constrained inside, almost always liminal and in need of creating their own meaning, separate from a wider society that would exclude, misperceive, or threaten them.

Sendak’s creative universe is paradigmatic of the Jewish diaspora experience, broadly conceived; the heightened fear of losing one’s self within the psychology of others or within a normalizing outside world complicates relationships and social actualization, and encourages self- preservation.

206

Critics like Ellen Handler Spitz appreciated Sendak’s tendency to capture and mirror children’s “often well-hidden but inescapable feelings of being misperceived, overlooked, and estranged […] alone – an outsider, a victim,” as well as the resulting need “to retreat into some sort of a private space, some refuge far away from others.”842 However, they also worried about the message Sendak’s work sent about indulging personal feelings at the expense of social participation. Spitz argues that “Sendak’s children inhabit a vacuum that, as we go from Max to

Mickey to Ida, becomes increasingly obtuse, freakish, and unintelligible,” that these child protagonists are “profoundly alone” and “remain mentally isolated and apart,” none of them satisfactorily returning to a real relationship or sense of belonging, that they “need never make sense of or negotiate with anybody else. They remain within their own heads from start to finish

[…]. They do nothing more than retreat into the private worlds that give them transitory pleasure

– when that – and delusions of grandeur.”843 Jean Perrot similarly concludes that Sendak’s Dear

Mili (1988) “shows the same allegiance as Outside Over There...to the principle of writing based on the hermeticism of quotations and personal humour.”844 Sendak, on his part, bemoaned critics’ tendency to focus on what his books taught children, rather than to see them as inspired works of art, emanating from a particular subjectivity. In 2001 he complained, “Everything I’ve done is so personal. God, if people could read what I’ve written about myself [...] it reveals everything. But they don’t.”845

Considering the last chapter’s discussion of the socially liminal, psychologically challenging aspects of harnessing childhood feelings, this chapter focuses on the intensification of the always-present notions of “inside” and “outside” in Sendak’s life and work; these notions are also stereotypically characteristic of Jewish and gay lives, as suggested by Jewish concerns

207 about endogamy and distinctiveness, as well as by the symbols of the closet and of “coming out” in gay life narratives. The following analysis explores how Sendak drew from his upbringing in a trauma-stricken family and his own hostilities toward bourgeois conservatism to creatively re- conceptualize such sentimentalized familial notions as pregnancy, sibling relationships, aging, and mortality. The chapter begins with an analysis of what “inside” meant to Sendak through a study of his close bonds with his siblings throughout his lifetime and the somewhat incestuous undertones of some of his work. It then surveys his unconventional, interwoven conceptions of family, aging, interiority, and death in the second half of his life, starting with his retreat from

Manhattan in 1971 to Ridgefield, Connecticut in the wake of the emerging gay rights movement, his parents’ deaths, and his own near-fatal experience of a heart attack in England. I focus especially on the period after 1980, as the wider culture reacted to the social liberation movements of the previous decades and to the AIDS epidemic, retreating into anxious stances that recalled the zeitgeist of Sendak’s 1930s childhood.

Inside Sibling Bonds

As suggested earlier, Sendak’s passion for literature began with his brother and sister, who created homemade books together as extensions of the improvised plays they performed for their often-exhausted immigrant parents, Sadie and Philip. As Sendak recalled, “My brother wrote weird stories and my sister bound the weird stories into beautiful books which we sold on the streets.”846 From a very young age Jack drew pictures and wrote stories, sitting by Sendak’s bedside, painting and cutting cardboard images for him. Sendak “wanted to do everything that

[Jack] did,” so it became “an utter necessity” that his “whole life be devoted to being an artist.”847 Sendak’s sister, Natalie, on the other hand, introduced him to reading – an activity that

208 the artist experienced with semi-erotic undertones: “as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book; the beauty of the binding. The smelling of the interior. Happy. […] A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful.”848

As is widely known, the romantic coupling of relatives, so stigmatized in modern

American culture, has pervaded European history and folklore for centuries, conveying drives of collective self-preservation through consanguine endogamy. As ChaeRan Freeze notes in her study of marriage and divorce in imperial Russia, “Judaism even encouraged cousin marriages, particularly during the Middle Ages, when relatives were given priority over strangers. These marriages were deemed advantageous not only because they strengthened common bonds but also because they provided an opportunity to combine assets and expand markets.”849 One could also write an extensive genealogy of eroticism between relatives in the history of distinguished literature. In the 1950s, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg led a revolution against a hypocritical, censoring government, insisting on the “sexuality of the primal family,” and recalling his

“incestuous relation” with his own brother and father “in fantasy and partial fact,” gesturing to

“nights when I slept with them through puberty.”850 In “Fool’s Paradise,” a Yiddish folk tale that

Sendak illustrated for I.B. Singer’s 1966 Zlateh the Goat collection, a boy lives with a distant female relative, an orphan girl, and the two play husband and wife as children. Singer writes, “It was taken for granted that when they grew up they would really marry.”851 In 1972, Singer’s novel Enemies: A Love Story depicted incestuous passion between siblings in the face of existential chaos and Holocaust-related trauma.852

209 Perhaps most pertinent to Sendak is the case of Henry Roth, who wrote Call It Sleep

(1934, republished in 1960), in which David Schearl, the six-year-old protagonist, experiences a

Yiddish-inflected boyhood navigating the urban slums of New York and the overwhelming emotions of his acculturating immigrant parents. During the course of the story, Schearl is coerced by a neighborhood girl to “play bad,” to touch each other’s genitals in secret, in a dark, narrow space reeking of mothballs. Infatuated by a Catholic boy named Leo, David also becomes unknowingly complicit in Leo’s rape of David’s step-cousin, Esther. Roth’s biography points to childhood foul play with his own sister, Rose Broder, who was close with her brother and typed the original manuscript for Call It Sleep. His editor confirmed that the writer did have something of a “sexual relationship” with his sister.853

Jonathan Cott understands the literary tradition of intensely close sibling bonds – erotic or not – as symbolic compensation for parental neglect in emotionally strained families, perhaps most epitomized in the Grimm Brothers’ tale of Hansel and Gretel.854 Sendak would design the set and costumes for the 1998 televised opera production of “Hansel und Gretel” by nineteenth- century composer Engelbert Humperdinck and directed by Frank Corsaro, emphasizing elements of parental abuse and neglect and the vitality the siblings maintain by playing together in the face of danger.855 Boundary-crossing closeness between siblings is a prevalent theme in narratives of post-traumatic families and of families in which the children must band together to compensate for parents who are absent, abusive, or unwell. For example, a common trend in Holocaust survivors’ narratives is the perception that creating a tight-knit, loving family offers redemption from the wartime deaths of one’s previous, destroyed family. Such survivors emphasize the importance of protecting sibling bonds at all costs. Descendants of traumatized survivors also rely on sibling bonds to share the responsibility of caring for emotionally fragile parents, as well

210 as to support and protect each other against those parents, who may have invaded psychological boundaries, acted out their traumas in frightening ways, or who were altogether emotionally unavailable.856 Accordingly, the contrast between the Eastern European Jewish family and the

American family surprised Jewish immigrants to America for decades after the era of mass immigration. American individualism contrasted the tightknit relational styles required of some

European families facing persecution during WWII and needing to function as a codependent unit, interchanging family roles when necessary to maintain collective safety. Eva Hoffman, for example, immigrating to the U.S. as a teenager after surviving the Holocaust in hiding, wrote,

“[F]amilial bonds seem so dangerously loose here.”857

While Sendak’s family was not a survivor family per se, the motif of intensely close family bonds cultivated “inside,” against a dangerous “outside” world, pervade the artist’s work.

As already discussed, the Sendaks were drastically altered by the Holocaust after surviving the

Depression as lower-middle-class Jewish immigrants. Kushner describes Sendak’s childhood home as “an atmosphere of pressurized familial closeness.”858 Sendak looked up to his siblings, channeling emotional energy into them in ways he could not so easily do elsewhere. The Sendak siblings were extraordinarily close – the artist sometimes referred to Jack and Natalie as his “real parents,” the people who spent the most time and emotional energy on him during early childhood: “I felt more parent affection coming from my brother and sister [than from my own parents],” he once said, “I was very lucky to have two siblings of opposite sexes, so I could have another mother and another father and ones I really adored.”859 Sendak called Jack his “best friend” and his gentle and wonderful “savior.”860 In a room with two beds, Jack and Sendak shared one bed, Natalie sleeping in the other. Some nights all three siblings chose to huddle into one of the beds together. Sendak shared, “My parents would come in – sometimes with my uncle

211 and aunt – and they’d say: ‘Look, see how much they like each other.’”861 Sendak also recounted memories of holding onto his own brother in bed at night: “There was no privacy. And we had bed bugs. And to protect me, my brother said, ‘Lie on top of me.’ And I said, ‘I’ll fall.’ And he said, ‘No, you won’t, not if you clamp your teeth on my nose.’ I didn’t fall to the left, I didn’t fall to the right. The bed bugs didn’t get me. They got him.”862 Later, speculating about Jack’s sexuality, Sendak would share, “He used to hold me close; we never did anything, but it was the happiest time I remember. We intended our lives to be entwined like those of the Grimm brothers.”863 As children, Sendak (at around age seven) and Jack (about twelve) wrote “We Are

Inseparable,” a story about a brother and sister who fall in love, much to their parents’ dismay, and ultimately commit suicide together by jumping from the seventeenth floor of the Brooklyn

Jewish hospital. As Sendak described it:

A brother and sister are madly in love and intend to marry. This made perfect sense to me. My sister is nine years my senior and utterly beautiful, still is. What could be more natural than my older brother wanting her in marriage? As you can see, Sigmund Freud passed over our house in Brooklyn. In any case, as the wedding day approached, my brother— instinctively smelling trouble, I suppose —contrived to have the young hero mortally injured in an accident.864

Sendak said the story was “dedicated to their sixteen-year-old sister with whom they were both infatuated.”865 He once admitted, “I imagine that all siblings have such feelings” before one learns the incest taboo.866

From the start of the artist’s illustration career, he depicted close-knit sibling relationships. In Happy Hannukah Everybody (1954) a brother and sister share a room, talking at night across their beds. Good Shabbos, Everybody (1951) also featured a drawing of a brother and sister clinging to each other in a dramatic, tight embrace. About a decade after Jack’s return from military service in WWII, during which the young Sendak had mourned his brother’s absence, the artist depicted a boy cared for by soldiers in tender, almost romantic poses for

212 Dutch-American writer Meindert DeJong’s The House of Sixty Fathers (1956), in which Tien

Pao, the boy protagonist, is separated from his family and tended by a group of sixty American soldiers during the second Sino-Japanese War. In one of Sendak’s studies, a soldier with a gentle expression carries the barely-clothed Tien Pao in his arms, the boy shy and gleeful as the soldier gazes at him, their faces almost touching, Tien Pao’s hand curled around the soldier’s neck. A frowning second soldier follows them, carrying a squirming pig with one arm. In the published illustration, Sendak would draw a shirt on the boy and change his gentle smile to an anxious frown, perhaps to minimize the level of intimacy that the image invoked for him as an artist who saw his affectionate older brother as his “savior.”867 For George MacDonald’s The

Golden Key (1967), crosshatching a lighter ink, Sendak carefully rendered a brother and sister holding hands as together they “struggle through fog.”868

By the 1980s, close sibling relationships took on a mystical, jarring quality in Sendak’s work. In Dear Mili (1988), the girl protagonist meets a sister spirit in the woods in her symbolic journey to the afterlife, as a child lost in wartime. This “guardian angel” looks “just like the poor little girl, except her eyes were larger and brighter and she may have been even more beautiful.”

The illustrations, rife with oversized blossoms, tangled tree trunks, and intricately detailed expanses of vegetation, emulate Van Gogh’s pantheistic style, which, Sendak felt, infused nature with a lively spiritual element. Sendak had devoured Van Gogh’s letters in the 1960s and frequented the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in the ‘80s. He may have also related to Van

Gogh’s biographical closeness with his own brother, Theo; Studying Van Gogh’s letters, Glynn wrote that Theo became a “mother-father-wife-husband-other self” to Van Gogh in his adult years, especially against the difficult relationship the artist had with his parents.869 Having suffered his parents’ grieving and their comparing of him to his cousins murdered in Nazi

213 Europe, Sendak likely also related to the emotional ambivalence Van Gogh felt toward his unborn older brother (a year before his own birth, Mrs. Van Gogh had given birth to a stillborn also named Vincent). Van Gogh, by Glynn’s estimation, also struggled with homosexual shame and parents who, the painter felt, disapproved of their son’s animal nature and emotionally neglected him, always grieving their stillborn child and burdened with guilt for having replaced him. Thus, Glynn wrote, Van Gogh “felt unloved, unwanted, outside […] a big, rough dog with wet paws everyone feared to have in the house […] an intruder, hopelessly inferior to the idealized lost child, forever inadequate, himself fixated on the dead as rival and model [and with] unmanageable conflicts over homosexual and passive urges” (my emphasis).870 Close sibling bonds in this iteration help a child alienated by parents to remain “inside” the constructed spaces of family and domestic safety.

Sendak channeled feelings of endangerment, loneliness, and redemptive sibling bonds into dystopian limbo worlds that sought to capture the emotional qualities of his memories. In

We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993), he imagined himself and his brother, Jack, as the eponymous abandoned children, who form a sort of makeshift family in a wasteland of corporate greed and poverty, rescuing an abandoned child to adopt as their own. On one page, their heads press against each other, without contour to distinguish one head from the other.

Even in Spike Jonze’s 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are (based on the 1963 picture-book by

Sendak), on which Sendak worked as a close consultant, two of the Wild Things, Carol and KW, would be presented, in Eichler-Levine’s words, as an ambiguously “estranged, perhaps romantic

(or sibling) couple.”871

The blurring of romantic and familial love might have also helped Sendak express the experience of one who suffers socially misunderstood expressions of affection and desire. To

214 love “incorrectly” is to be like the Wild Things and Sendak’s elderly Yiddish relatives, whose affectionate advances were mistaken for aggression – the Sendak children were “petrified of them,” not understanding “that [their] gestures […] are meant to be affectionate.”872 In their inability to express love without eliciting terror, the Wild Things, whom Sendak called

“foreigners, lost in America, without a language,” are also like queer people, loving or lusting in

“wrong” ways, according to the dominant social authorities. Entranced by boundary-crossing, ambiguous emotions that – on the surface – ring of incestuous eroticism, Sendak staged apocalyptic, alternate worlds to embody forbidden longings from the safe distance of a theatrical set, which both channels and diffuses overwhelming meanings. His intense closeness with his siblings, as expressed in his work, speaks to the survivalist importance of clinging to “one’s own” to survive the demands of traumatized parents and the threats of a world potentially hostile enough to have traumatized those parents in the first place. When viewed as an imagined alternative to heterosexual coupling outside of the nuclear family context, it also exemplifies

Stockton’s theory of “growing sideways” – moving in playful, alternative directions when the traditional, enforced paths do not fit.

Sendak cultivated select, intimate friendships throughout his old age, but as he neared the end of his life, he seems to have longed most for Jack, who had passed away on February 3,

1995. Throughout his old age, the artist mourned this loss, crying, “I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World’s

Fair in 1939 out of wax.”873 He claimed that Jack’s death dealt a humbling blow to his emotional feelings of grandiosity, leading him to feel more rational and less “chosen by God.”874 Five years after Jack’s death, Sendak began the text for My Brother’s Book, which would be published posthumously in 2013.875 Stephen Greenblatt introduces the book as Sendak’s “final expression

215 to be reunited with his dead brother.”876 Sendak again depicts himself as “Guy” journeying to the afterlife to find his brother Jack and bite his nose once more.877 The frontispiece of My Brother’s

Book includes an illustration of “Jack and Guy, two brothers dreaming the same dream,” their sleeping bodies almost fused together in a surreal abstracted landscape. The stumpy, cartoonish children of Dumps have become muscled, sexually mature, and balletic, writhing in William

Blake-inspired poses. Sendak admired Blake’s ferocity, controversial depictions of sexuality, and his ability to simultaneously convey “two worlds”: a surface world of “what we approve of ourselves to be like when we’re with other people” and a world of “what we’re really like, what we dare and reveal to other people.”878

My Brother’s Book begins with the trauma of the brothers’ separation from each other, the earth split in two as Jack is catapulted to “continents of ice.” Illustrations show a bewildered younger brother strewn on the ground and then nude and small in a winter landscape, his despairing head in his hands, with Jack embedded in a block of ice in the foreground. The book reveals Sendak’s longing for the early childhood feeling of playing with and creating stories with his brother, who in adulthood became traumatized by his military service during WWII and estranged from his younger brother as the latter rose to great fame. Creative play with Jack in childhood was perhaps Sendak’s deepest experience of integrating uninhibited fantasy with a sense of shared social meaning – of merging his notions of “inside” and “outside” to achieve a sublime sense of harmony and connectedness beyond himself. My Brother’s Book glorified and ambiguously eroticized this relationship with Jack, the brothers longing for each other when separated, even to the point of following each other into the afterlife. The book concludes with

Jack “enfolded in his brother’s arms,” Guy whispering, “you will dream of me.” By the time My

Brother’s Book was published, critics observed a blatant fusion of feelings Sendak held for Jack

216 with emotions reserved for Glynn.879 Sendak himself suggested the similarity between these two men, admitting that Eugene was “so much like my brother. He was a psychoanalyst. I was very proud of him. He was a man who loved music and reading. And when I worked in the studio, he would be reading.”880 Tony Kushner called the book “Maurice’s elegy for his brother Jack, for his partner of fifty years, Eugene Glynn, and for himself…”881

As Glynn had written, “The danger of the artist is […] to remain fused with objects.”

While such fusion with others might, in the context of endangerment, promote survival strategies

– the pooling of resources, the flexible sharing of roles, and a “hive mentality” that helps one anticipate and respond to dangers – in the psychological literature, the condition of being unable to distinguish boundaries between self and other subjects “is to be psychotic.”882 For Sendak, the risk of being an artist who conveyed childhood emotion was the necessity of repeatedly flirting with psychosis. As Sendak explains to in the comic strip they co-created for The

New Yorker, “Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!”883 Accordingly,

Sendak struggled to distinguish between himself and the objects of his affection, including the people he loved. After inciting Coleman Dowell’s annoyance, for example, Sendak pleaded for his forgiveness in February ‘69, comparing himself to an infant and apologizing for his inability to understand boundaries between himself and those with whom he formed close relationships.884

An appeal of cultivating “inside” spaces for Sendak was to maintain a fantasy in which he could remain fused with the objects of his obsessions and desires. In a vacuum, the artist could blur or reimagine painful divisions: between the living and the dead; sibling and lover; “kiddie” books and “serious” art; emotional truth and social taboo. But he was also, in his own words, “trying to learn how to be secure and alone at the same time. And not depend on other people for anything.” He fretted about getting “sucked back into a system that I know is false, that has

217 nothing in it for me.” As Katie Roiphe understands My Brother’s Book, this late project also helped the aging artist work through “a fear of being consumed, obliterated,” the question of whether one can “be close to another person without being consumed.”885 Sendak’s work had asked this question since his The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960), which, as Jesse Green writes of its manifestation as an off-Broadway musical, Really Rosie (1980-), was “a parable of community, as children discover how to be a part of something larger without losing themselves.”886 In some regards, isolationism might have also kept Sendak closer to the memory of his deceased partner; he recalled Glynn as a man who usually preferred to sit alone with a book, shutting the world out. Sendak had based the protagonist of his Nutshell Library book One

Was Johnny (1962) on Glynn, dedicating the book to “Gene” and centering it on a boy who, in a world of interruptions and distractions, “lived by himself / And liked it like that!”

Particularism and Self-Preservation

In a 2004 interview, Sendak reflected on why he worked in the picture-book form. He concluded that he “picked a modest form” that allowed him to “explode emotionally” in the freest way possible:

I didn’t have much confidence in myself – never – and so I hid inside […] this modest form called the children’s book and expressed myself entirely. I wasn’t going to paint, and I wasn’t going to do ostentatious drawings, I wasn’t going to have gallery pictures. I was going to hide somewhere where nobody would find me and express myself entirely. I’m like a guerrilla warfarer in my best books. (Sendak’s emphasis)887

It is easy to draw connections between Sendak’s personal struggle, both as an artist and a socially insecure individual – a struggle to remain distinct but connected to others – and that of the wider Jewish American conundrum regarding the preservation of Jewish distinctiveness in an accepting American cultural context. If part of Sendak’s task as an artist was to retroactively

218 rescue or give voice to his queer child self, a subject who had been deemed impossible and kept psychologically “on hold” for the safer ground of adult expression in the latter half of the century, the same might be said of the Yiddish- and Holocaust-related elements of that child’s identity.888 As already discussed, Sendak grew up in insular 1930s Brooklyn neighborhoods of

Jews and Sicilians; he told Selma Lanes in 1989 that he was raised as a “ghetto kid” with a confusing psychological dichotomy, taught by his parents to fear Manhattan’s gentiles as strong and dangerous people, but also to feel inwardly superior to them.889 However, by the time

Sendak reached middle age, historian Eric L. Goldstein notes, Jews had intermarried and integrated into American society in record numbers, synagogues and Jewish federations increasingly fretting over the preservation of Jewish distinctiveness. Also by the late twentieth century, for many American Jews, Jewishness had already transitioned from a predominantly public communal identity to a private, emotional, and familial one.890 Largely acculturated and viewed as “white” Americans, Goldstein writes, “Jews no longer have the language of ‘race’ to express [their particular] deep attachments, but instead rely on the echoes of Jewish racial identity, a discourse of ‘tribalism,’ which gives voice to the feelings of loss Jews are experiencing in a world resistant to seeing them as a group apart.”891 As a public figure and partner to the non-Jewish Glynn, Sendak would have experienced firsthand the tensions of belonging “too well” in some respects to take his Jewishness for granted.

Similarly, though much work remains before transgender and other “queer” identities obtain widespread rights and recognition in the American mainstream, major political and cultural leaps since the era of Sendak’s youth have offered gay and lesbian identities the option of an acculturated, socially dignified place in the mainstream, at least in certain geographic regions and cultural spheres of the United States. In 2015, eight years after the death of Sendak’s

219 partner, for example, same-sex marriage became legal by rule of the Supreme Court. Sendak’s biography, as an artist grappling with concerns of non-acculturated Jewish immigrant and queer identities, offers a useful springboard for thinking about how incoherent or socially intangible subjectivities operate and survive. It also raises difficult social questions about the nature of integrating or acculturating identities built on a minority status, a need to remain distinctive and apart in order to be “authentic.” As Goldstein writes of American Jews after the 1960s, “The more distant they became from their minority social status, the more Jews felt the need to highlight their difference from white society.”892

One means of maintaining distinctiveness has been to “discuss, read about, and memorialize the Holocaust with zeal,” to sustain a “sense of difference from non-Jews.”893 It is perhaps not surprising that Sendak’s work became more explicit in its references to the

Holocaust by the end of the century, including Anne Frank, concentration camp elements, and ghetto scenes in works like Dear Mili (1988) and Brundibar (2003).894 Participating in the liberal confessional culture of the latter twentieth century, Sendak was among the many American Jews who negotiated between bold forms of individual expression and specific collective articulations of public Jewish memory—for example, mourning Holocaust losses and nostalgically idealizing the Old World and the Lower East Side.895 Sendak’s work from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century also evinces a tendency to creatively protect precious, endangered elements of identity against assimilation into the mainstream. These endangered elements, the artist’s

Jewish Old World and queer identifications, continued to speak through the figure of the sensitive, disenfranchised child, the standpoint from which he most directly remembered those identifications. However, as I discuss below, they sometimes also spoke through the more

220 physically empowered forms of muscled, sexually potent adult figures who expose their desires, wrestle with death, and wage bloody wars.

Staunch supporters of Sendak like Tony Kushner also read his work through Harold

Bloom’s notion of Jewish interiority, of “Being a self, alone, committed to one-ness, whether through predilection or through a conviction of the necessity of the condition of aloneness […]

God is to be found in the world but pursued finally, decisively, only in one’s heart, in one’s mind, in one’s neshoma, one’s soul.”896 One cannot help but see the romanticism of such a sentiment, but also the implication of endangerment and trauma – beauty and truth exist in an inner world that has been repeatedly threatened and must be sealed off from harm, constantly analyzing, processing, and working through difficult questions and problems. In 1991, two years prior to Dumps, Sendak’s Night Kitchen Theater, which he formed with Arthur Yorinks, collaborated with Pilobolus Dance Theater on a piece called “A Selection.” The Pilobolus dancers’ “playful, almost shameful use of the body” reminded Sendak of babies and young children.897 Last Dance (2002), Mirra Bank’s documentary about the production process shows

Sendak improvising and interjecting with dark, sexual, and Yiddish-inflected humor as he expresses his artistic sensibilities, exposing his intersectionally internalized feelings of endangerment and desire as a queer Jew who came of age during the Holocaust.898 When disagreement erupts between the Pilobolus artistic directors and Sendak, who refuses to budge on his desire to include a scene of a family waiting for a train to Auschwitz, one of the directors tells the camera, “he’s a sensitive guy, and if we want to work with him fruitfully, we should take that into account and deal with him differently than we would one of us.” Watching the dancers improvise, one reaching into the folds of another dancer’s torso to pull out an imaginary object,

Sendak cries, “Dr. Mengele!” When another dancer puts on a hat and makeshift sidelocks, the

221 artist declares, “Yeshiva bocher!” Later, playing a folksy tune, Sendak has the dancers chant,

“Jews, Jews, Jews, I’ve got news for yous!” Sendak’s costume designs for the piece include a portrait sketch of Anne Frank at age thirteen, as well as a glamorous, swastika-patterned dress in a style reminiscent of Eva Braun and Marlene Dietrich.

Last Dance conveys Sendak’s intent on making visual connections between Holocaust elements and queer sexuality, as if to imply danger in both. As a wartime family is torn apart in

“A Selection,” a dancer named Otis, personifying the villain of Death, wrestles the father out of his clothes, gripping the exposed, naked male dancer from behind. The costume for Otis is a white, skin-tight bodysuit worn under a striped concentration camp uniform. Behind the scenes, we see Sendak hand-paint the spandex or Lycra as it sits directly on Otis’s attractive, muscular body. Sendak likens Otis to a “Chippendale” when the latter places a handkerchief over his groin to smooth out the lines that his genitals create on the Lycra canvas. Bending over as the artist paints the dancer’s rear-end, Otis jokingly compares himself to an “Assyrian boy” among “the

Greeks,” proclaiming, “canvas is too expensive; the boys are cheaper.” Finishing the drawing,

Sendak steals a pat on Otis’s rear. The figure of a shrieking child dangles from the crotch of the painted bodysuit, as though being simultaneously devoured and birthed by Death’s loins – explicitly, and perhaps ironically, linking a stigmatized or “unnatural” male sexuality with child endangerment, but also with a child’s origins. As discussed, Sendak despised criticism of his work as “too sexual for children,” and, as an artist marketed to children, he felt pressured to stay publically discreet about his gayness until his old age due to homophobic associations between gay men and pedophilia. In “A Selection,” the costume of Death is a queer conflation of the powerful male artist, who, Zeus-like, births his own creations, and the menacing, demonized

222 forces of unrestrained passion that, connected to romanticism and totalitarianism, might also threaten the most politically vulnerable subjects.

As Katie Roiphe notes, Sendak’s obsession with death may also be explained by his lifelong knowledge of his parents’ attempts to abort him in utero, as well as his nearly fatal illnesses as a young child and the resulting message from his family that “he should be grateful to be alive, that his continued existence involved some aspect of luck that should not, if he was smart, be pushed.” Roiphe notes Sendak’s stereotypical Jewish diasporic instincts of reserving personal information from the public, expecting the worst, and not “jinxing” good luck – instincts bred by internalizing a history of expulsions, the Depression, and the Holocaust.899

Enjoying the free-flowing, improvisational qualities of the performing arts setting, despite the clashes that ensue around creative differences, Sendak reflects in the documentary on the fulfillment he gets from the distinctive vantage point of the artist, “I’m very inhibited, I’m very uptight. I seem to give off negative signals to people most of the time. But when I’m working and I’m in this situation, I become the person I want to be. As long as I’m an artist.”900

“Pulling Up the Drawbridge”

In 1970, a journalist visiting Sendak’s Manhattan duplex noted that the artist “limits his friendships” and “lives an ascetic life.”901 The following year, suffering health problems and puritanical criticisms of his In the Night Kitchen (1970), the artist moved to Ridgefield,

Connecticut and began to reserve months at a time to work on creative projects, refusing to leave home or accept speaking engagements.902 He counted the reclusive, never-married Emily

Dickinson (1830-1886) among his most favorite poets, claiming that she taught him, “Don’t open the door, don’t let them in!” and that she “kept the world OUT.”903 Sendak used his

223 answering machine as a buffer to filter the outside world; his dear friend Brother James Bohlman recalled needing to announce who he was before Sendak would answer: “Each time he did that I felt wealthy beyond any tabulation, rich and privileged that I was allowed into his private life.”904 Bohlman, a Russian Orthodox priest, met Sendak while living at the New Skete

Monastery of Cambridge, New York, which bred German shepherds, including the ones Sendak would adopt.

Dog ownership in Connecticut was one means by which Sendak developed a greater capacity to transcend his own personal concerns, to recognize others more clearly as separate individuals. He disclosed a tendency to see all of his dogs first as extensions of his own infant self, a problem he finally overcame with his last dog, Runge. Sendak recounted in 1991: “the dog was first Philip and Sadie Sendak’s baby before it was the dog. Runge is the first dog I’ve had who has been fully transformed […] He’s not me anymore; […] he’s finally a beautiful German shepherd and no longer a cranky kid. […] finally my vision is focused and I see a dog.”905

Sendak treated his relationships with his dogs as unusually emotional and meaningful, stating:

You wouldn’t dare reveal to your friends what you reveal to your dog. With our dogs, we wear no masks. A dog is so ruthlessly and unashamedly honest in the demands it makes of you; it is entirely dependent, and that need can provoke some surprisingly strong reactions from us. And so, in seeing myself through [Runge], I see how many unpleasant aspects of my nature have to be repressed simply because I love him. Because of the way he has developed, I’ve had to try to give up certain bad habits, out of real respect for him. […] And, of course, I benefit from that repression or self-discipline. […] losing my temper, for example. […] the way you relate to your dog is a subtext to the way you relate to everything and everybody. Since dogs are so transparent, they mirror you back to yourself, and the challenge for us is to take that seriously.906

Because a dog, like an infant, is nonverbal, the relationship was “incredibly intense and basic,” allowing for the creative, primal intimacy connected to early human emotions and also inviting a

“self-training.” His dogs’ transparent, basic physical dependence on him allowed Sendak to experience “very primitive feelings” in himself, forcing him to recognize and control them, or to

224 sublimate them through art-making, leading him to feel “emotionally calmer, more conscious.”907 Accordingly, in 2010 the artist would admit, “I’m learning how not to take myself so seriously.”908

But as he worked on locating and reshaping his own boundaries, the “outside” world became increasingly intolerable to Sendak in the twenty-first century, representing elements from which he urgently wished to differentiate himself and to separate. He would write to his friend and former lover Leroy Richmond in the early 2000s, apologizing for shutting Richmond out as he slipped deeper into hiding from the public.909 Sendak complained that “just being alive is troublesome. […] I’ve been ready to die since childhood. […] It’s time to go […] I’m old enough to die. I despise religion in all forms, so I have no hope of an afterlife. […] I will be nothing and nowhere, and that will be such a relief. To be something and somewhere is very tiring.”910

Sendak’s move to the country also took place during a pivotal moment in American attitudes toward censorship, as the nation negotiated ideas of decency following the liberal social revolutions of the 1960s. The 1973 Supreme Court case of Miller v. set the parameters for defining obscenity, and thus determining censorship guidelines. An obscene work, according to the Miller or “SLAPS” test, needed to have an “indecent” main theme, a lack of serious artistic or societal value, and a perceived offensiveness by community standards.911 Sendak suffered those who deemed Wild Things too frightening and Night Kitchen (1970) too explicitly sexual. “I have this idiot name tag,” he complained in the early ‘90s, “which says ‘controversial’

[…] I’ve had it since 1965, with ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’ It’s like Pavlov’s dogs: Every time I do a book, they all carry on. It may be good for business, but it’s tiresome for me.”912

Ironically, tapping into the emotional qualities of early childhood – its uninhibited rage,

225 unabashed sensuality, and boundless self-indulgence – were exactly what led the adult artist to be named “inappropriate for children.”

Fellow picture book artist Tomi Ungerer, once known for children’s books like The Three

Robbers (1961), became a tragic warning to Sendak about playing with the boundaries of

“indecency” as the nation pushed back against the liberal movements of the ‘60s. Once a beloved figure in the U.S., Ungerer self-published works for mature audiences that destroyed his reputation in America as a children’s artist and made him the object of scandal; these works included radical posters against the Vietnam War, controversial erotic drawings, and a satirical book called The Underground Sketchbook. Ungerer’s books were “virtually banished in the

United States” in the early ‘70s, banned from libraries and pushed out of print.913 Unable to find work, he left the U.S. in ‘71, later concluding, “At that time, my European sensibilities weren’t appreciated or understood by the Americans.”914 Sendak would say that Ungerer “left America because they treated him like shit,” that he went through “hell.” In his old age, Sendak would sit with Ungerer on a bench outside the former’s Connecticut home, and they would cry together over what had transpired.915 Sendak would continue to fight for the cause of subversive artistic freedom in his own way. In the mid-1970s, having already suffered scandalized reactions to

Mickey’s frontal nudity in In the Night Kitchen and anticipating negative criticism for choosing to depict the protagonist of Fly by Night (1976) in the nude, Sendak would complain to a writer from Rolling Stone, “I had a picture showing a girl with her vagina in full view in The Light

Princess, and nobody made a fuss about that, which makes me think that the whole world is male chauvinist – vaginas don’t count.”916 Sendak would indeed receive criticism for depicting David nude in Fly By Night. With hints of homophobic suspicion, would write, “The

226 nudity is unspecified in the text but looms specific in Sendak’s illustrations, one of which shows a prepubescent penis and another a rather inviting derriere.”917

Gay Sex and Death

In a 1976 issue of one gay magazine, an article describes “tha gay sensibility” as “the capacity for flashiness either actively exploited or sloppily concealed, the constancy of wit and awareness of contrariness.”918 In Sendak’s correspondence with Dowell, the artist could be most contrary about his biggest resentment: the culture’s moralistic eagerness to censor certain universal aspects of human experience.919 Dowell provided Sendak with a rare respite from a public he deemed superficial and hypocritical. He would write to Dowell in ’71 that Dowell’s letters were the only meaningful letters he received, as Sendak could not allow himself to communicate as openly with anyone else.920 As suggested earlier, though Sendak was openly gay, his choice not to explicitly announce it to the popular media until 2008, after Glynn’s death, related, in part, to his concern as a children’s book artist about bigoted public associations made between gay men and pedophilia – associations that prevented the public’s desire to question the beloved artist’s sexuality in the first place. But in the space of their letters, Dowell and Sendak could mock the cultural pedophilia that ironically colors the foundation of the very society that re-conceives pedophilia as a specific evil of modern gay men. They would have bemoaned the ways in which modern society re-routed those foundations stemming from Greco-Roman pederasty as a model of education. In the privacy of his intimate correspondence with Dowell, Sendak bit back against the modern demonization of gay men as pedophiles by playfully imitating roles of receptive boy and pederast teacher.921 In February and March of ‘71, Sendak jested about seducing young people at his university talks and in other imagined spaces.922 Switching into the complementary

227 perspective of the receptive student, he expressed yearnings for a wise man who might arouse his mind from aimlessness into action.923

In the outer world beyond the artist’s studio and correspondences, the 1980s saw the

AIDS crisis, which massacred many of Sendak’s loved ones and ushered in a new kind of homophobia from a public that often framed AIDS as a “gay disease,” a punishment for sexual sin, and a problem not worth seriously addressing. Sedgwick and others have written of the terror and grief that gay men and their friends and families experienced in the late ‘80s, as “wave upon wave of renewed loss, mourning, and refreshed personal fear, left many people feeling as if at any rate one’s own particular car had finally let go forever of the tracks of the roller coaster.”924

In 1986, for example, the Supreme Court’s Bowers v. Hardwick decision upheld the constitutionality of criminalizing gay sexuality, responding in part to the AIDS public health crisis and its concentration in the gay male community.925 Around this time, Glynn worked at the

Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) to help those fighting the disease, and Sendak visited close friends and colleagues who were dying.926 A 1999 Poz Magazine interview with Sendak lists him as a longtime donor to the GMHC; it also celebrates a of his Wild Things, which, along with a three-dimensional Wild-Things tree, he painted in the “Child Life Program” room of the organization’s Manhattan building, inspiring imaginative play for the children who congregate there – children with HIV and children of GMHC clients.927 Sendak emotionally connected his feelings of outrage and endangerment as a gay man during the AIDS crisis with his memories of growing up Jewish during WWII, stating, “having my parents’ families wiped out in the Holocaust, and then another holocaust later in my life—it’s a hideous century.”928 He once also remarked, “It’s amazing, just dumb luck, that I didn’t die of Aids. Some of my very dearest friends died.”929 In 2010, seven years after Brundibar and three years after Glynn’s passing,

228 Sendak would donate a million dollars in Glynn’s name to the Jewish Board of Family and

Children’s Services to aid mental health and social services in the New York metropolitan area.

A notice about the donation published that year in the Chronicle of Philanthropy would note that

Glynn had treated young people at the Jewish Board for about thirty years, as well as “helped people affected by the AIDS epidemic throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.”930

Sendak’s personal correspondences demonstrated his tendency to increasingly seclude himself by the end of the century. Replying to a card from Bohlman in 1993, he wrote that the card had moved him to tears because of its tone, which felt like a goodbye; this made sense to

Sendak, acknowledging that he had failed to stay in touch.931 James Marshall, a best friend and colleague of Sendak’s perhaps most known for his “George and Martha” picture books, died of

AIDS-related causes in October 1992. Sendak wrote to Bohlman in August ’93 about the feelings that would inform his forthcoming We Are All in the Dumps. He described the emotional crisis that had befallen him in the wake of so many friends lost. At the time he felt that Marshall had been his last genuine connection to book publishing. Sendak now felt himself emerging from his emotional fog, he wrote, with a new forceful energy fueled both by rage and by acquired wisdom.932 Understandably, death seems to have occupied much of Sendak’s thoughts and feelings in the ‘80s, AIDS losses fusing with early internalizations about the fragility of human life and the pain of losing loved ones, as modeled by his grieving parents who lost their relatives in Poland during WWII. Moreover, Sendak’s health further declined in these years. In 1980, he suffered nearly fatal blood poisoning, writing to Selma Lanes about his inability to walk.933 In

1988 he wrote to Bohlman about the tendinitis he suffered in both hands and the drug he took for it that was destroying his gut, as well as fears about his dogs dying. Wondering whether he loved with too much intensity, he concluded that the price of excessive love was terror.934

229 Sendak’s portrayals of homoerotic sexuality and death become more explicit in the late

‘80s and ‘90s, reflecting his sensitivity to mortality and his internalization of sexual danger in the

AIDS era. As Tony Kushner notes, only after the first years of the AIDS epidemic did Sendak create older boy protagonists who confront social perils without the safety net of a loving family or home.935 We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993) fused the artist’s amazement at his own survival with feelings of social abandonment experienced by gay men condemned during a media-sensationalized health epidemic despite the social gains of the gay liberation movement. It channeled Sendak’s “misery over the loss of gifted students and colleagues to

AIDS.”936 As he stated in an interview for Poz Magazine in 1999, “my later books will be haunted by AIDS. […] it’s because of the need to […] keep it up front and to stop it.”937

The epidemic encouraged Sendak to step beyond his private world, if only temporarily.

Speaking about Dumps, the artist called it the first book of his that was “not preoccupied with my private concerns and dilemmas. By being absorbed in politics for the first time in a long time, by watching friends die of AIDS, […] I’ve become a more social, political animal. Dumps reflects this [...] getting out of myself into a place where real things happen, not psychological, magical things anymore.” The artist lamented, “it’s 1993, and children get shot on the way to school, children contract AIDS, children are in the most vulnerable position imaginable. If we aren't honest with them, they’ll die . . . . If we don't look, and if we don't listen, and if we don't do something, kids will be lost.”938 The book integrated memories the artist had of seeing the feet of dirty, naked, homeless children sticking out of cardboard boxes at night on peripheral cities off of the posh Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, as well as the brave, bald-headed children fighting cancer in the London hospital he once visited.939

230 While preparing to publish Dumps, it seems Sendak was almost on the verge of coming out to the public, an act he reconsidered, postponing it until 2008. Art Spiegelman met with

Sendak that year and told , “I knew that Maurice was about to have a book come out called ‘We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy,’ that he felt had to do with AIDS. And he was wondering whether he was going to come out of the closet at that moment publicly.”

Spiegelman recognized Sendak’s motivation in the ‘90s as one of retreating from society for the sake of emotional liberation and pleasure, stating that Sendak “stayed more protected from the ongoing popular culture than I was.” But he also recognized this tendency as a product of aging, adding, “now that I’m his age, I’m doing the same thing. Pulling up the drawbridge and trying to figure out that pleasure principle.”940

Following Dumps, Sendak’s illustrations dealt more explicitly with sexuality and its connection to death and doom: he completed violent, sexually graphic paintings for the 1995

Kraken edition of Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852) and for Heinrich von

Kleist’s Penthesilea (1998) – which follows the attack of warrior Amazon women on Achilles and his men, whom they take as prisoners and sexual servants. Sendak’s drawings for

Penthesilea delight in the sensuality of gore and sex; he paints the captured Achilles embracing his clothed Amazon captor, his own nude form rippling and ruddy, his uncircumcised penis engorged.941 For the following lines, Sendak painted a row of raging blonde Amazon women with flaming torches behind a shadowed foreground of crouched, androgynous Greek men with smooth bodies, long blonde hair, and a mix of strained, forlorn faces reminiscent of Leonardo da

Vinci’s drawings of the Virgin Mary: “The crop of young Greeks stands as if awaiting / A nimble harvester to mow them down”.942 In his illustrations for the Melville, Sendak dressed

Pierre in a skin-tight bodysuit, like the costume for Death in “A Selection,” emphasizing his

231 muscular body and pronounced genitalia. Pierre moves from poses of confidence and bliss to ambiguous romantic entanglements with male and female figures.943 Photographer John Dugdale collaborated with Sendak to help him prepare this project, selling Sendak photographs of male nudes posed according to the stances Sendak needed in his drawings. In Sendak’s final illustration for Pierre, the protagonist crouches fully nude, holding up a falling, dark sky that threatens to consume him, his eyes panicked and pained. As one reviewer wrote of Sendak’s paintings for Pierre:

The AIDS epidemic and America’s panicked retreat from liberalism […] pushed the artist into a stronger commitment to sexuality in his work. Until now, Sendak’s orientation has not been hidden so much as warily positioned vis-à-vis homophobic America. But in illustrating Pierre, Sendak found that rendering Melville’s battened down sexual content allowed him to articulate the torment and exuberance of himself […] Nowhere else in the history of Melville illustration do we find such openings into the latent sexuality of Melville’s prose.944

Sendak read between the lines of Pierre, understanding its coded motifs of secrecy and brotherhood used to propel the narrative drama; the protagonist hears a spirit call, “Come into solitude with me, twin-brother; come away: a secret have I; let me whisper it to thee aside; in this closet...” This leads him to a secret, “gay-hearted” portrait of his deceased father from his youth, hidden in “a locked, round windowed closet” connected to Pierre’s room.945 To mark the book’s publication in 1995, Sendak read selections from Pierre in one of Manhattan’s gay bookstores.

Considering the underlying themes of incest and homosexuality involved in the story, it is interesting that Sendak was first introduced to Melville’s writing by his brother, Jack, a Melville aficionado whose relationship with Sendak seems to have had somewhat of an erotic undertone, as already discussed. Jack encouraged Sendak to read Melville when the latter was in his twenties, a time in Sendak’s biography in which he began to accept his own homosexuality.946

Tony Kushner, who first became friends with Sendak also due to a shared love of Melville, wrote

232 that “Melville idolatry has historically been a calling card, a point of introduction, particularly among gay men,” describing Melville’s character Pierre as a fatherless, beautiful man “engulfed in a moral, sexual, political and artistic fog.”947 Sendak likely saw these associations as well, stating that he believed Jack was “probably gay but he married, and his wife hated me because I was more famous than him” (after writing a few books for children, two of which Sendak illustrated, Jack worked at the Emerson radio company and at a post office).948 The ambiguous conflations of sibling bonds, sexuality, and morbid danger in some of Sendak’s later work reveals how he allowed elements of his “inside” world – home, family, sex, and death –to mix in unrestrained, intuitive ways.

If Sendak was afraid of death and shaken by the wider culture’s impulse to paint homosexuality as deadly, he also embraced these associations and reimagined them on his own terms. The letter he owned from Mozart to his father stated that death was “the best and truest friend of mankind.”949 Stockton directly links the queer impulse for crooked, or “sideways” motion with the Freudian death drive, as both locate “energy, pleasure, vitality, and (e)motion in the back-and-forth of connections and extensions that are not reproductive […] as moving suspensions and shadows of growth.”950 In J.M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird (1902), the story that would inspire his Peter Pan, all children are birds before they are born; house swallows,

Peter’s favorite birds, are dead children punished for disobeying the rules and staying in

Kensington Gardens overnight.951 The paradox of the queer artist’s death-like fantasy realm beyond “real life” is that fantasy’s ambivalence between operating as a source of obliteration or vitality. Populated by pirates, mermaids, fairies, and wild things the “sideways” spaces that queer subjects inhabit are places to which they are both banished by social rejection and attached by emotional and erotic investment. In Brundibar (2003), even the Holocaust ghetto functioned as

233 this sort of space for Sendak, an abject and quarantined realm of death in which children also sing, fly, chase off villains, and save their mother’s life.

A Romanticism of the “Inner Child”

Childhood functioned as something of an organizing device for Sendak as he navigated an inner emotional limbo, because children are inherently in a state of grappling with unrealized social identities, confusing feelings, and unreachable structures of power. Removing himself from the

“outside,” he worked through confusing boundaries internalized as a child in a tightknit Jewish immigrant family in which his close sibling relationships held overwhelming significance against an intimidating and impersonal public culture. Private feelings of same-sex desires and the mourning of Jewish relatives in Nazi Europe made it harder to grow up and actualize in his environment.

Working in the latter twentieth century, as notions of the “inner child” and the

“subconscious” invited deep self-exploration within a confessional culture, Sendak romanticized his connection to his own childhood emotions. As an artistic paradigm, romanticism – like folk superstition, psychoanalysis, or “the sentimental” – prioritizes passionate feelings over “reason” and social norms, subverting modern scientific, systematized knowledge and power in order to privilege emotional urges. Romanticist works are characterized by an eruption of feeling that cannot be sufficiently contained within the language or practices of the social order. As a mode of creating, romanticism thus poses a means by which a subjugated person might survive the danger of their own obscurity without a facility of language, a wealth of social capital, or a mastery of political tools. Kushner described the children of Sendak’s picture books as culturally ambiguous romantics:

234 eyes often closed, stiff-gaited, top-heavy, and heavy-footed, smilingly sensual, obviously bright, theatrically temperamental, self-satisfied tiny egoists vulnerable in bare feet or in their parents’ shoes, prone to stomping, dressed and groomed in a style neither American nor European, neither familiar nor unfamiliar. They are immigrants’ kids, Brooklyn kids, the most kid-like of any kids ever to march through a children’s book, exasperating and delightful as children are and know themselves to be, preposterous and lovely in equal measure. These are the kids described in the best, richest developmental literature, the kids in Piaget and Winnicott, doing the tough work of holding themselves and their world together.952

Sendak expressed the romanticism of early childhood in all its awkward vulnerability as a state of ego-formation, self-determination, and negotiations of one’s own abilities and self-worth. His books came to him as feelings and fantasies that “well up,” like a dream at night, leading the artist to “rush to put them down” in physical form. He described the story as a “house” built around a fantasy, the bookmaking process as “the painting of the house.”953 As he further explained,

There are such people who can conceptualize, literally, an idea, and then build a body or a book or a framework around that. Ideas are not such things to me. And so I never use the word in my own work. An idea to me is an emotion, a need, that gets louder and louder and more demanding that I must express myself in a certain way. [...] Every once in a while I will be caught up and get very excited. I will find I’m tuning into different things – certain film that I go see gets me excited, certain music I suddenly get all enamored of, and I know I’m going through the beginning, you know, it’s like, the beginning birth pangs [...] the conception has occurred; something is moving within me that has to be expressed.954

Discussing Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Sendak claimed that children’s potential reactions were not on his mind when he created the book, but rather, it “was written to exorcise certain things in myself”.955 Like all creative work, he believed,

it’s simply done for yourself. I mean, you have a need to express some particular feeling. […] It’s an emotion, simply, and I would never break it down into: Did I try to do something like perhaps frighten children in an attempt to activate that? No such thing. I never even thought that it was frightening. […] It came as an enormous shock to me that people could conceive that this could be a scary book, since to me it was such a matter of exorcism and such a good feeling to do. And the monsters were so clearly within my control and apparently within Max’s control. These things grow in a very peculiar, inarticulate, unconscious kind of way. And you have to let them grow. And when it’s time

235 to try, you try, and you find you’ve been too fast. It’s the wrong timing. And then you wait again, and then you wait again. It’s very frustrating, but when you know an idea’s good...when an emotion is good, so both books were not ideas, Wild Things is not an idea, it’s a feeling. And you have to catch the feeling in both words and pictures. (Sendak’s emphasis)956

The artist applied this feelings-oriented approach to much of his work. Describing the inspiration for Outside Over There (1981), which Sendak created in the style of the German romanticist painters, he offered a window into his creative process, which relied heavily on an intuitive integration of separate, but important components that he felt needed to speak to each other, collapsing chronology and context:

So I have a kidnapping [the famous case of the Lindbergh baby in 1932], which has obsessed me; I have a girl in the rain [the girl depicted on the Morton Salt shaker], who has obsessed me; I have a few feelings about my own childhood, which always obsessed me; and now I want to make a book and bring all these things together. They seem to be very disparate elements, but somehow as an artist you have a funny kind of faith that they will come together. The unconscious has such a need to make an artistic whole out of these disparate elements that it’s going to happen.957

He similarly explained how one of his favorite lines came to him for his book Bumble-Ardy

(2011): Aunt Adeline’s rebuke, “OKAY SMARTY YOU’VE HAD YOUR PARTY! BUT

NEVER AGAIN!”, answered by the boy-pig protagonist with, “I PROMISE! I SWEAR! I

WON’T EVER TURN TEN!” Sendak insisted, “It came to me, which is what the creative act is all about. Things come to you without your necessarily knowing what they mean.”958

Sendak’s talent for grasping onto an interesting or personally meaningful feeling before even understanding the intellectual or symbolic meanings associated with it may reflect the particular psychology cultivated in states of hermeneutical marginalization, a phrase used by

Miranda Fricker to describe the experience of “growing up in a fog,” separated from the processes of meaning-making and removed from the systems necessary for earning political credibility and social status.959 Having already suggested connections between the creativity of

236 children and that of socially stigmatized adults, we might understand hermeneutical marginalization as a motivation for fantasy play. Sendak’s subjectivity formed incoherently, in contexts in which distant political actors determined important meanings for his direct experience, while immediate social contexts failed to recognize or validate his own forms of personal suffering. Sendak may not have been talented at stoopball or making friends, as he often recalled, but he was well exercised at navigating important sensory data and pieces of information that he did not fully understand, creatively organizing fragments of elusive meaning, and responding with emotion and intuition. In his middle and old age, retreating deeper into his private world, Sendak continued to harness the creative potential of modern childhood, of making meaning from the outside of mainstream culture and its social norms.

However, the artist’s intuitive, open-ended approach of uniting disconnected elements could be personally maddening. Kushner once noted “how deeply Maurice suffers a picture book.”960 Sendak’s description of the mania that accompanied his creative periods suggested the phenomenon of working through disorganizing feelings that were difficult to master:

It’s like having a fever; it’s like going a little crazy, and really there’s nothing else you want to do. […] It becomes some monstrous thing that’s got its fangs in your neck. It is all consuming, it really is. But while you’re miserable and while you’re suffering, you are very happy because you know your misery and suffering is special and you’re very proud of it and you’re very vain glorious about it. But it’s hard. It’s damned hard!”

During this all-consuming creative state, Sendak would work morning until night, seven days a week, isolate himself from other people, and read only works of history, biography, or other general interest topics so as not to be distracted from the emotional wave of inspiration. He described his workday as being “like a zombie’s,” working about ten hours a day, on and off until midnight or 1:00 AM.961 In the midst of working on his In the Night Kitchen (1970), for example, Sendak eliminated his social contact with the outside world, feeling like he was “under

237 some magic spell.”962 But this state of “seizure” also offered “great pleasure” and “a tremendous chorus of celebration.” As Sendak explained, “I was caught up in something so intoxicating, I didn’t know where it came from. I just believed totally in its reality.”963 This creative state also seems linked to the early developmental grappling that happens when a child learns to distinguish self from other, to learn how to see oneself as distinct without feeling superior or inferior to all others – the necessary negotiations of a healthy level of narcissism. Glynn’s analysis of the late artist Egon Schiele’s creative mania may have drawn from his direct experience of Sendak: “It is a state fertile—perhaps essential—for artistic creation, but hellish to live. Forces within and without threaten disruption; the ordinary dangers of eroticisim are just further menaces. Art—and artistic activity—discharge tension and, as fundamentally, reassure.”964

As suggested above, we might conceptualize the artist’s creative investment in terms of trauma and attempted mastery through a child-like flexibility between fantasy and reality. Glynn believed that “The matrix of creativity is now generally taken to lie in the artist’s very earliest relationships, to others and to the self. [...] The artist, it has been suggested, is like the patient who suffers from a traumatic neurosis: both return repeatedly, compulsively, to the causative trauma in generally vain efforts at mastery and release.” Art-making keeps the artist “tied to reality, a defense against psychotic breakdown.”965 If Sendak’s early traumas, as discussed in the previous chapters, revolved around internalized feelings of endangerment, forbidden desires, and a lack of possibilities for actualizing and existing authentically in “the social,” his artistic attempts at mastery and release involved fantasizing his way into defeating mysterious dangers, as well as moving from shame and obscurity into power and grandiosity. As suggested earlier, the experience of coming of age as a sensitive queer person, especially in a traditional Jewish

238 immigrant family and before widespread public social acceptance of gay identities, paradoxically required a level of self-absorption in the service of understanding oneself and actualizing as an individual without much external help from parents, peers, or the wider culture. Overcoming the traumas of queer shame and emotional obscurity happened in secret, in the cracks of respectable society, and it sometimes involved the self-protecting defense mechanisms of inflated narcissism

(convincing oneself that one is not a defective misfit, but rather a special, even magical superior).

The protagonist of Really Rosie (1975), the CBS network television special Sendak created with

Carole King based on his picture book The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960), exemplifies this position. In her opening song, Rosie, a lonely urban child dressed in her mother’s eveningwear and a comically oversized hat, repeatedly commands the others with the phrase, “Believe me!”

While the other children giggle and snicker at her antics, she shakes her hips, closes her eyes, and unflinchingly declares, “Yes! My name is Rosie. I am a star! I’m famous, and wonderful, and everybody loves me and wants to be me. Who can blame them?” She then plays at casting, directing, and starring in a “movie” that she declares will be all about her life. Sendak described his own creative bursts in narcissistic terms, as moments of possessing a secret, almost supernatural energy that sets one apart from others – a position he associated with both ecstasy and torture.966 Accordingly, Sendak would write to Dowell at age forty-three that he needed someone to help him think beyond his own inflated ego.967 Ideally, art could help one find a satisfactory balance between feelings of insignificance and grandiosity, rather than perpetuate the maddening experience of alternating between the two. As Tony Kushner writes, “One of the liberatory powers of art is its capacity to mirror, to help the self name itself, to recognize itself and see itself as one among others.”968 As a “director,” Rosie must respond to the actors’ desires,

239 and she must learn to accept that they will abandon her fantasy when their mothers call for dinner.

Glynn wrote that the artist has two selves: the “citizen self,” which identifies with the examples of early family life, and the “artistic self,” who seeks identifications from the cultural past, usually beyond what the family can supply.969 Sendak nourished the latter during his spells of romantic inspiration with dramatic departures from the culture and sensibilities around him, including those of his family of origins. Despite being “force-fed on anti-German feeling,” for example, he would admit in 1975, “German music and German writing have always been unquestionably my favorite.” The German language, he wrote, made him dizzy – “I just like it.

There is a passion, no question about it.”970 In November 1978, while working on sets and costumes for The Magic Flute at Houston Grand Opera, Sendak would purchase an original handwritten letter from Mozart to his father (dated April 4, 1787) through Sotheby’s for over

$47,000.971 Graphically, Sendak deemed Der Struwwelpeter (1845), a German children’s book depicting fatal choking, cutting off of fingers, and the burning of people alive, “one of the most beautiful books in the world.”972 In the summer of 1948 he and his older brother, Jack, created six animated toys in the eighteenth-century German lever-controlled style.973 Many of Sendak’s early books were strongly influenced by German illustrators. In an unused study for Kenny’s

Window (1956), during a scene in which Kenny travels to Europe to find his “only goat,” Sendak depicts the boy, his back to the viewer, in a reflective stance over a misty, mountainous landscape; the pose is highly reminiscent of “Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer” (Wanderer above the sea fog), painted in 1818 by Caspar David Friedrich.974 To his father, Philip’s fury and disappointment, Sendak had also visited Germany in his twenties (during the 1950s) for the

Salzberg music festival, as well as for an opera festival in Munich and Bayreuth featuring

240 Wagner.975 As though directly associating Germany with his father’s disapproval, Sendak returned there in May 1971, the month of the unveiling of Philip’s gravestone. Referring to this trip as his “Grimm Reise,” he went in order to look at German illustrations of Grimm Brothers stories at the Grimm Museum in Kassel, West Germany – including those by Otto Ubbelohde – as visual research for his Juniper Tree (1973), an illustrated collection of tales by the Brothers

Grimm.976 After moving from New York to Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1972, Sendak acquired what he called his “goyishe dogs,” German shepherds, one of which he named Herman, joking that the name came from Hermann Göring, a powerful Nazi leader, reminding an interviewer visiting his home that the dog could have been trained to kill Jews.977 A later shepherd was named Runge, after the German romanticist painter Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810).978 Sendak also fashioned his country house like a German landscape, circling it with ash, sugar maple, dogwood, and locust trees, as well as roses, lilies, irises, and phlox. He told one interviewer,

“Mahler went into the woods to write his symphonies in his little Waldhütte, [and] Mozart, too.

When he was alone in Vienna writing The Magic Flute, he was invited to live in a tiny summer cottage outside the theater grounds to continue his work... The only way to find something is to lose oneself.”979 In 1981, James Marshall would playfully inscribe a copy of one of his books as a gift to Sendak “For Wolfgang, Carl, Gustav Maurice.”980

Sendak’s identification with German music and culture as a Jew descended from families destroyed by the Holocaust may have also reflected his conception of himself as a stigmatized queer person, invested in “inappropriate” interests as a means of mastering overwhelming feelings about his own inappropriateness, his stigmatized self. Germany is a strange love object both for Jews who came of age during WWII, as well as for a child of an Eastern European,

Yiddish-speaking family. Even before the world wars, since the eighteenth-century Haskalah,

241 Berlin and its secularizing influence on the Jewish world had posed a threat to the traditional way of life that characterized the families of Sendak’s parents for generations in Eastern Europe. In the 1860s-1880s, as contact between maskilim and traditional Jews increased via individual travel and the growth of Eastern European Jewish presses, depictions of Germans in Eastern

European literature came to reflect the ambivalent, satirical, and disapproving attitudes held by shtetl Jews about the influences of western secularism.981 If Sendak’s art helped him work through traumas of continuous shame and internalized endangerment, there is a queer sort of logic in his love of the German romantics. His love-hate relationship with Wagner, whose

Teutonic, “über alles” mentality underscores the composer’s grandiose, epic Ring Cycle, likely reflected Sendak’s own inner fluctuation between an inherited victim identity and one of near- limitless artistic power in the American cultural landscape.982 Losing himself in German culture, or at least separating himself from his parents’ conception of him as a living reminder of the relatives murdered by Germans in Europe, may have helped him connect in a more direct, genuine way with his own creative energies, as well as with Jewish memory on his own terms – loosening himself from the weight of internalized feelings of endangerment and obscurity, channeling some of the romantic narcissism of Teutonic hubris, but in the service of his own aims as a queer Jewish artist. As Glynn wrote, “The artist, repeating a long forgotten pattern of linking up, serves his originality and history together, belonging, yet working himself free.”983

His paradoxical relationship with German culture helped Sendak playfully generate universally engaging articulations of his particular feelings as a post-Holocaust, Yiddish-infused, queer man in midcentury America.984 For example, the artist’s friendship with Justin Schiller and

Raymond Wapner, collectors who ran a Manhattan antiquarian rare books shop, led to his discovery of a four-paged autographed letter by from 1816. This would inspire

242 the artist’s Dear Mili (1988), which he illustrated in a German romanticist style with inspiration from Philip Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich.985 Fairytales offer an ideal literary context for articulating feelings about things that are both beloved and frightening, like traumatized parents or socially forbidden desires. As Donald Haase notes, “The settings of fairy tales are polarized and valorized according to whether they offer characters familiarity and security, or threaten them with exile and danger [...] including imprisonment and death. Even familiar locations—including home—can become defamiliarized and threatening.”986 Dear Mili was the wartime story of a mother who is arbitrarily separated from her daughter in the midst of feeling safe and blissful in their forest cottage.

Despite loving German art and the Grimms, he struggled at first to relate to the Christian elements, seeking advice from a friend at the New Skete monastery in Cambridge, New York, who reminded Sendak that Saint Joseph was just a good-natured Jew who wedded Mary. So the artist decided to base Joseph’s likeness on Sam Perles, a Brooklyn friend of the family from

Sendak’s childhood. He would also base his depictions of the cemetery in the story on the Czech cemetery where Rabbi Loew (of the Golem of Prague legend) is buried, including a lion of Judah on one of the gravestones.987 Sendak thus embellished the Grimm story with his own history as an American Jew whose relatives had been taken by the war.988 Conscious of the fairytale genre’s utility for handling emotionally salient but factually unclear content, Haase writes, “the ambiguity of fairy-tale spaces creates an imaginative geography that lends itself to the representation and mapping of wartime experience.”989 The story of Dear Mili conveyed

Sendak’s own sense of emotional displacement experienced as an adolescent whose parents forced him to see his own problems against those of his Polish cousins’ as they died in gas chambers. A strange synergy existed for Sendak between his perception of those Jewish children

243 whose lives had been forcibly cut short and those queer, excluded, or terrified children, like himself, who struggled to “grow up” but found it difficult in a society that ignored, misunderstood, abused, or rejected them. He originally intended to depict children being marched to Auschwitz in his illustrations for Dear Mili, which he envisioned from the start as a

Holocaust story that would feature Anne Frank.990 Practicing restraint, however, he settled instead on drawing a group of children crossing a shaky bridge with a guard tower looming behind them. He also depicted Anne Frank and the children of the French town of Izieu – who were murdered under Klaus Barbie at the end of WWII – as a choir led by Mozart in Heaven, at the far reaches of St. Joseph’s garden.991 In 1989, at age sixty-one, he noted that Frank would have been sixty at the time, and that she had dreamed of being a writer. He insisted that he carried her with him in his own artistic career.992

In a wider sense, Sendak’s work conveys an embodied struggle to preserve a cultural past laden with collective and personal traumas, characteristic Jewish types and personas, and cultural traditions within an American social reality that threatened to neutralize those elements in an ongoing modern project of transforming foreign peoples into American individuals. He believed that Jewish artists “piggyback” or carry those fellow Jews of the past who did not survive, like

Anne Frank, helping them fulfill what they could not live to do.993 The artist would continue to carry forgotten Jewish personalities and archetypes throughout his career, describing the child protagonists of his Some Swell Pup (1976), for example, as “an aggressive and hysterical yenta” girl and a passive, “real vaserdiker gornisht type” boy.994 Illustrating a group of tiny people described in his father’s book, In Grandpa’s House, he drew what Tony Kushner believed were

“memories of relatives and neighbors of Philip Sendak’s generation, […] malnourished homunculi.”995 Against social pressures to disconnect from a heritage of immigration and foreign

244 cultural traditions, as well as from some of his own “queer” feelings as a sensitive, gay, and unconventional person, the Sendak child’s fantasy accomplishes supernatural feats of fusion in order to preserve and integrate embodied, emotional investments in both personal identity, including queer experiences of gender and sexuality, and inherited cultural and familial identity, including the most socially vulnerable or difficult aspects, such as immigration and Jewish losses in Nazi Europe – all while also playfully diffusing the weighty meanings and difficult emotions connected to both.

Sendak’s “Pregnancies”

Though young boys like Sendak’s Kenny, Martin, Max, and Mickey do openly fantasize and playact, children grow to learn that, by the standards of mainstream culture, play-acting is

“childish” and, thus, queer to adults’ ideas about manhood – inasmuch as play-acting implies a porous, malleable personality, receptive to emotional whims and disconnected from the laws of the social order. As Cech articulates it, “it is masculine logos, the law-giving, reality-accepting, reason-seeking aspects, that needs to be balanced with its creative, feminine, feeling aspects of the psyche”.996 Perry Nodelman wrote that fantasy is even perceived as “an un-American activity, an indulgence in impractical foolishness that interferes with the serious business of getting ahead by means of hard work and discipline.”997 In the first few decades of the twentieth century, Kidd writes, “the so-called fairy tale wars” saw disagreements between traditional librarians like Anne Carroll Moore who valued fantasy and those who saw fairy tales as harmful to children’s development, championed by Lucy Sprague Mitchell of New York’s Bank Street

School.998 Popular midcentury pediatrician and “child expert” Dr. Spock had warned the mid- century American mother “delighted to find how imaginative her child is” not to “overfill him

245 with stories,” lest they both “live for hours in fairyland.”999 It did eventually become popular by the 1950s to integrate fantasy in children’s lives through neo-Freudian narratives about releasing and mastering difficult feelings; however, the modern American context remained skeptical of the romantic, which it deemed “silly” or “hysterical,” even “pregnant” with another spirit and driven by supernatural forces beyond “reason.” In 1995, Cech noted “attacks against fantasy that are currently occurring in this country,” that:

Elementary school teachers, media specialists, librarians and editors all report that they are under considerable pressure from highly vocal, aggressive individuals and groups who have attempted to remove from library shelves and curricula works that ask a child to “imagine,” or “pretend,” another state of being or an imaginary world. In public schools across the country, for instance, parent groups have combed kindergarten bookshelves, eliminating, among others, the works of Sendak. The battle of today’s books has once more been cast, as it was in seventeenth-century America, as a struggle for the control of the child’s mind, if not the salvation of the child’s soul.1000

Against such conservative ideas about children’s socialization, Sendak insisted on the necessity of fantasy as a means for surviving impossible social positions and imagining alternatives. He modeled imagination in both the work he produced and the way he described his creative process. Indeed, Sendak described how it felt to have a new idea for a book brewing inside him as a feeling of irrational frenzy and symbolic pregnancy, like “getting pregnant when you’ve just gone crazy and you’ve found out your house has burned down.”1001 Despite the public’s desire not to see Sendak’s homosexuality, he eschewed the stereotypical emotional resolve and restraint of American masculinity ideals for most of his career, flamboyantly emulating children, women, and foreigners who inspired him – including his own Eastern European Jewish immigrant mother and refugee relatives.1002 As Leslie Tannenbaum notes in his study of Really Rosie (1975),

“Sendak presents us with a markedly skewed version of the male vision and a more direct reflection of the trends we find in Jewish women’s writing. Anxieties and ambivalences about breaking away from the home environment and forming a new identity are revealed.”1003 The

246 artist “acted out” the emotional tribulations of his Jewish immigrant family’s parent-child relationship in his personal conceptions of the bookmaking process. With the “qvelling” of the stereotypical Jewish mother, Sendak described Max, the protagonist of Wild Things, thusly:

“How many people have a child who goes out and does so well by them? Max is the kind of son

I should have been for my parents.”1004 As Cech and others have noted, Sendak described the creation of his books explicitly in the terms of delivering a baby, of extracting a creation from deep inside of his being.1005 As Eichler-Levine argues, “Sendak does not just experience and portray Jewish mothers; on a metaphorical level, he becomes a Jewish mother himself.”1006

Gregory Maguire has also made this connection, characterizing Sendak as possessing “the hectoring, scowling affection of a Jewish mother—one who wields a cudgel-like rolling pin against her enemies as adroitly as she might lean over a table with a sable-haired paintbrush, to draw her loved ones again, and again, and again.”1007 While working on Outside Over There,

Sendak admitted,

we men are all so jealous of birthing—and making a book becomes having a baby. I talk about it endlessly, and my friends have taken up the habit. They ask, “How’s the baby coming? What month are you in?” Well, I am now deep into pregnancy. I’m definitely going to have a full-term child, but whether it’ll be alive or dead, I don’t know yet. And that’s the state I am in with the book.1008

Something complex is at work in Sendak’s tendency to understand his artistic work as a process of pregnancy and birthing. To speculate on a superficial level, imagining himself pregnant may have helped him work through the pain and guilt he experienced, having, he believed, ended a past fiancée’s pregnancy in their youth, as mentioned in Chapter One.

Additionally, as I’ve argued through Glynn’s writing on psychological “fusion,” artists seek to emotionally embody or “fuse” with the objects of their obsession in order to recreate them in their art (become the mother to represent her). Phantom pregnancy also helped Sendak indirectly

247 articulate and find some control over the process of emotional impregnation involved in what might be called postmemory or trans-memory, of growing up with the secondhand trauma and confusion of his parents’ Old World losses and wartime terrors. Gaining some control and more direct personal meaning of his own emotional experience of emerging as a person in a context of indirect trauma and shame, Sendak described his finished books as his offspring, which he birthed with intense care and suffering.1009

Additionally, from a queer perspective, Sendak’s male “pregnancy” lends to understanding and appreciating the unusual interiority of his work as a socially unconventional, deeply personal harvesting of an American man’s buried emotional content. The product of such harvesting is a queer birth, constructed in a language available only to those able to access feelings usually forgotten or suppressed by the socialized adult. In this way, according to

Sedgwick, it follows a tendency of the British realist writer Henry James (1843-1916), one of

Sendak’s favorite authors. Sedgwick writes that James repeatedly “invokes Frankenstein and all the potential uncanniness of the violently disavowed male birth […] in order to undo it […] by offering the spectacle of—not his refusal—but his eroticized eagerness to recognize his progeny even in its oddness.” Sendak, like James, may have used the motif of male birthing to affirm the worth of the “maimed or slighted, the disfigured or defeated, the unlucky or unlikely child.”1010

In other words, the specter of a man birthing might symbolically deem his offspring “queer” in their odd, exceptional nature, and it might position Sendak as a parental protector of those who do not belong in conventional, bourgeois families that restrict social possibilities. Sendak’s pop- up picture book Mommy? (2006) would depict a small boy seeking his mother (“Mommy?”) among a cast of male creatures. One of them, strongly resembling Frankenstein’s monster, stands beside his own framed baby picture, complete with diaper and pacifier; another monster shares

248 Sendak’s short, wide build and wears red high heels like Dorothy in Oz (another queer child birthed by men). As Sedgwick describes in her reading of James, a tendency toward “reparenting or ‘reissue’” might also work to absorb the artist’s queer shame through the performance of an empathetic narrator embracing the embodiment of that shame in one or more of a story’s characters:

The reparenting scenario is also, in James’s theoretical writing, a pederastic/pedagogical one in which the flush of shame becomes an affecting and eroticized form of mutual display. The writing subject’s seductive bond with the unmerged but unrepudiated “inner” child seems, indeed, to be the condition of that subject’s having an interiority at all, a spatialized subjectivity that can be characterized by absorption. Or perhaps I should say: it is a condition of his displaying the spatialized subjectivity that can be characterized by absorption. For the spectacle of James’s performative absorption appears only in relation (though in a most complex and unstable relation) to the setting of his performative theatricality; the narcissism/shame circuit between the writing self and its “inner child” intersects with that other hyperbolic and dangerous narcissistic circuit, figured as theatrical performance, that extends outward between the presented and expressive face and its audience.1011

Narrative art, in other words, with its conventions of a narrator conjuring and relating to characters who embody and perform the objects of the artist’s concern, dramatizes an inward- looking process of locating and recovering buried elements of experience and personality that were cut short or insignificantly honored. If the queer or allegedly threatening child is forbidden from existing as such during childhood, that child might be retroactively recovered in the embodied performances of artistic expression.

Sendak’s biography also reflects a tendency to mentor and care for the queer, the unlucky, the forgotten. The artist even cared for ’s original death mask, which he kept in his guest room, occasionally stroking its forehead, which made him feel “maternal.”1012 He also helped many artists begin their careers, including James Marshall, Richard Egelski, Peter

Sís, and Chris Raschka. Studying early editions of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

(1900), Sendak would, in the early 1980s, cultivate a relationship with antiquarian bookseller

249 Peter Glassman, a gay twenty-year-old Brown University dropout, helping Glassman establish his Hudson Street bookstore in Manhattan, Books of Wonder, and illustrating the cover of

Glassman’s edited volume for Harper Collins, Oz: The Hundredth Anniversary Celebration.1013

In 2010 he would create the Sendak Fellowship, which gave aspiring illustrators a room in a house neighboring Sendak’s and a month to pursue a project, as well as opportunities for direct feedback from Sendak himself.1014 In his old age, he reflected on the connection between his queer social position and his proclivity to mentor,

I can make friends with young people much more easily than with the people who are older, who normally would be friends of my age, but I’m an unmarried man, I’m a gay man, my choices are limited. I don’t want to belong to anything. I don’t want to be anybody. I wish I could be disembodied. But it’s only my body that’s going to die and decay. That’s all there is. […] I don’t know why friendships are so hard to be made. I feel useful to the younger people. I can help them.1015

Engaging in the depiction of internal meaning above all else may perpetuate the feeling of disembodiment and of not truly existing beyond one’s interior world, about which Sendak complained throughout his career. This perspective again relates to stark contrasts felt in emotionally strained subjectivities between the “inside” world of indulging queer feelings and the threatening “outside” world in which the public’s wider mentalities color, shape, and potentially neutralize or destroy individual desires. Sendak described the jarring emotional confusion between “inside” and “outside” worlds that he experienced upon finishing a project:

And then finally it is a book. And you become extremely depressed, because you realize that what was so superb and different is really just another book! How strange. It looks like all the other things you’ve done. And then it goes out into the world, and your child, who was so private and who was living with you for two years, now is everybody’s child. Some people knock him on his head, some kick him in the rump, and others like him very much. It’s a totally different experience. It takes me a long time to shift gears.1016

Sendak saw the rhythms of the traditional nuclear family as directly at odds with the needs of the creative artist. In his old age, he contrasted himself to Melville, who was “ill equipped” to be a

250 husband or father but did so anyway, causing suffering to himself and his family: “I was careful not to do the things most people do, and I preserved myself to be an artist so that I don’t have to be anything else. And that doesn’t really make you a great artist or an important person; it makes you somebody who has accepted the limitations of what the artist’s life imposes on you.”1017

Moving into a focused analysis, the remaining discussion examines the dramatization of inside and outside spaces in relationship to endangered family bonds and sexual desires in Sendak’s

Dear Mili (1988) and Outside Over There (1981). The latter took Sendak seven years to complete from beginning it in 1972, upon retreating to greater solitude in Connecticut.

Venturing Outside

Reviewing the mechanisms of the fairytale genre, Donald Haase has noted how the “fundamental themes of separation and exile” signal inner journeys, as isolated characters endure the travails of the outside world.1018 Sendak’s attraction to fairy tales is evident in his depiction of endangered children faced with supernatural forces in romantic German landscapes, as in Outside Over

There (1981); he also illustrated actual Grimm fairy tales, including Lore Segal’s translated collection, The Juniper Tree (1973), and ’s translation of a lost Grimm tale discovered in 1983, Dear Mili (1988), which he dedicated to his sister, Natalie. In Dear Mili, a blissful mother-daughter relationship is interrupted by warfare, forcing the mother to send Mili alone into the forest to hide: “You can imagine how the child felt at being left all alone,” reads the text, beside an illustration that recalls Snow White’s escape from her evil stepmother in Walt

Disney’s 1937 animated film, which had made its lasting impact on Sendak as a child viewer.

The jagged, gnarled branches of trees frame Mili’s small figure from both sides and from above, like a menacing trap against a darkening sky: “she was terrified, for she thought that wild beasts

251 had seized her in their jaws and would tear her to pieces. […] the farther she went, the heavier her heart grew.” The following wordless page spread is an overwhelming tangle of roots, tree trunks, branches, and shadows, the recesses and hollows in the lumpy trunks resembling orifices or hooded figures, like the goblins of Outside Over There, or Snow White’s Evil Queen in her cloaked disguise. In the distant background, a group of children march solemnly across a bridge held by crooked tree trunks, a concentration-camp guard tower behind them. Mili makes her way to St. Joseph’s hut, deeper in the woods. Interestingly, Sendak draws St. Joseph’s house without doors, the overgrown lilies, sunflowers, and vines making their way inside, even under the bed.

The artist repeatedly stated that he did not believe in an afterlife, but the realm in which he placed this dead child was one that blended notions of inside and outside, as if to imply, by contrast, the separation between inner and outer worlds that exists among the living. The nursery rhyme he would illustrate for his apocalyptic vision of homeless children in We Are All in the

Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993) included the lament, “the houses are built without walls.” In

Sendak’s vision of Heaven, one need not fear letting the “outside” in, so to speak. It recalls his idealized space of creative play he experienced with his older brother, a deep integration of fantasy with shared meaning between separate hearts and minds. St. Joseph’s home, in which nature creeps indoors, recalls Max’s room in Where the Wild Things Are, in which the harsh feedback of the external world could be safely worked through via imagined scenes and conflicts, Max’s bedposts turned to tree trunks, his rage into monsters. In a letter accompanying the original text of Dear Mili, sent to comfort a child grieving her lost mother, Wilhelm Grimm wrote that the outside world of “meadows, cities and villages […] cannot be moved, and humans cannot fly. But one human heart goes out to another, undeterred by what lies between.”1019

252 In Outside Over There, for which Sendak created both the text and images, the artist created his own original vision of an interior world split apart and corrupted by threatening outer forces. It responded, in part, to his memories of seeing MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) on the big screen at the onset of WWII. In a talk he offered in 1989, Sendak recalled a formative moment of recognition in that theater, as a ten-year-old, likely within weeks of Germany’s invasion of Poland, where most of Philip’s relatives and some of Sadie’s remained and ultimately perished. Two particular moments of the film initially caused him to cry and scream so much that he had to be escorted out of the theater, returning to see the film several times afterward.1020 In the first scene, Dorothy, captured by the wicked witch, sees her distraught

Auntie Em in Kansas crying out to her from within the witch’s crystal ball. Dorothy, even more desperate, calls back in tears – “Auntie Em! Here I am!” – but Auntie Em can neither see nor hear her. Sendak says that the scene entered his life and flooded his work. The scene “broke his heart,” because Dorothy and her caretaker were in the same space but could not reach each other.

This scenario dramatized that of Sendak’s parents who, having immigrated to New York as teenagers, would be separated from much of their families when the Germans invaded Poland and would also feel so far away from their own offspring, in some respects, as the latter acculturated. It also mirrored feelings of Sendak’s own childhood as a boy who, despite his devotion and proximity to his parents, felt so emotionally misunderstood by and secret from them, leaving him lonely or overwhelmed, forced to fend for himself, even in their company, and ultimately forced to lie to them about his homosexuality and his partner. When Dorothy is returned to her bed, none of the adults care to listen to her dream about Oz, focusing only on the fact that she has woken up alive from her trance and returned to their version of reality; at the

253 film’s end, Dorothy is still in some respects as far away from her caretakers as she was when calling to them through the crystal ball in the witch’s tower.

It seems Sendak was doubly struck by the tragedy of this “happy” ending, which conveyed how adults miss important pieces of their children’s lives, even life-changing pieces; children must learn that their intensely felt and imagined experiences are theirs alone, and no parent or aunt or uncle can save them from or fully share with them in their own life-altering fantasies. All it takes is one moment of her caretaking sister’s distraction in Outside Over There for the infant to find herself in the clutches of goblin intruders. The final words of Wizard of Oz,

“There’s no place like home,” speak to the dynamic tightrope that must have reminded Sendak of his own childhood, torn between the drive, on the one hand, to artistically express his own unusual imagination, his “Oz,” even without the understanding of parents or peers, and, on the other hand, the ingrained survivalist mentality of “these people are all I got.” Even if the child feels that “there’s no place like home,” the child might also face a home in which parents sometimes forget, ignore, or abuse them. But the alternative – remaining forever in Oz or among the Wild Things – was perhaps more frightening in its implications of chaos and meaninglessness, its obfuscation of love, boundaries, and understanding. Some of Sendak’s most powerful works depict moments in which a child and parent are, like Dorothy and Auntie Em in the witch’s crystal ball, physically proximal but emotionally separated.1021 In one of his page spreads for Outside Over There, Sendak even mirrors the composition of that shot from Wizard of Oz, whether consciously or not; Ida, the child protagonist, hovers above her distraught mother, who appears in a globe-like section of the bottom right of the page, as though trapped in a crystal ball.

254 Sendak created the paintings for Outside Over There with a four-hair brush that enabled incredible precision with watercolor.1022 Ida’s blue dress took inspiration from Dorothy’s, and the yellow brick road inspired the protagonist’s stretching out of her yellow cloak across the sky at the start of her frightening journey.1023 Like Night Kitchen’s Mickey and Fly By Night’s David before her, Ida can fly, connoting the “fairy” archetype associated with queer men who float across conventional barriers and transgress social norms, or Dorothy, who, as Kidd notes, is linked to the tornado and, bird-like, given the surname “Gale.”1024 Sendak’s goblins, who look like human babies, recall the munchkins of “Munchkinland,” as well as the guards of the wicked witch’s castle, marching solemnly with spears. Sendak called the process of making this book “a religious experience” that changed his life, and he called Outside Over There “unquestionably the hardest book I ever worked on. It caused me the most pain.”1025 He would admit, “Something went amiss in me, a kind of panic, a kind of fear. I had touched on a subject, which is not in the book, but which had to be touched on to do the book […] I went back into therapy…”1026

The story follows Ida’s journey to rescue her infant sister, kidnapped by goblins that have left a changeling ice baby in the infant’s place. The story’s setting, in a luscious, rolling landscape populated by oversized German shepherds, is at once dangerous and intoxicating.

With all its symbolism of backwards motion, marriage, honeymoons, hornpipes, sailors, dancing, babies, churning, and eggs, Outside Over There spins a wild reversal of childbirth within a cave- like womb in the moonlight. It works backwards to investigate the meaning of the artist’s own birth and identity. While the union of Ida and the horn – of feminine and masculine – leads to a living, natural baby – the discovery of her sister – the goblins and ice babies with which Sendak identified are products of perverse or ambiguous marriages in secret, womb-like darkness – they are hooded babies who carry spears and kidnap other babies. As Sendak writes, they are like wild

255 sailors beneath an ocean moon – men in homosocial, fluid waters “outside” of conventional society, connoting homosexuality and death. Ida’s backward motion, after all, might be read as

“widdershins” motion, of moving counter-clockwise, or against the prescribed order – an act that

Christian folk superstition deemed unlucky, because defying “patriarchal centuries of time keeping” could unleash powers “beyond reason,” including demons from the underworld.1027

As Lee Edelman argues, popular imagination has metaphorically positioned gay men against reproduction, representing them as the gravediggers of society, living only for self- obliterating pleasure and the destruction of the future. According to Edelman, the symbolic childlessness of homosexuals earned them a lasting cultural association with “the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic, enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning” and contrary to all collective, future-oriented human values, like the image of Death in “A Selection” as a sexualized man whose loins birth and eat a shrieking child.1028 New York popular culture of

Sendak’s early youth and Fire Island of his middle age were possible sources of inspiration for

Outside Over There’s bizarre mix of imagery, which is obscured by the “high” style of German romanticist painting. Conflating sailors with homosexuals, tabloids of the 1920s and ‘30s depicted the prevalence of sailors, “fairies,” and prostitutes that populated certain areas of the city and participated in Manhattan’s erotic cultural underbelly. Satirical cartoons that caricatured the competition between gay men and female prostitutes to win sailors’ interest combined themes of military, nautical journeys, sexuality, and social degradation, and they may have been some of the first artifacts of popular culture to which the young Sendak was exposed.1029 Artists like “Tom of Finland” (Touko Valio Laaksonen) also popularized homoerotic images of sailors during the latter half of the century.

256 But on the other hand, Sendak’s hooded, dancing goblins are also misunderstood human beings, “just babies like her sister!”1030 Sendak even likened his process for Outside Over There to that of a miner’s work: “At that point in my still-young life, I felt I had to solve this book, I had to plummet as far down deep into myself as I could: excavation work.” But unlike in the creation of Wild Things, in which he felt “like a miner getting out just before the blast occur,”

Outside Over There overtook Sendak in a full-blown psychological crisis.1031 Sendak’s fearful confusion about connections between his sexuality and social endangerment resound beneath the surface of this stormy, oceanic story. Like Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), the book uses the word

“honeymoon” with ominous undertones. Much speculation surrounds Melville’s sexuality, his

Moby-Dick sometimes read as a man’s fight to suppress the homosexuality lurking in his unconscious and embodied by a sperm whale lurking in the ocean’s depths whom he strives to kill. While Melville’s novel describes two men intertwined in bed, “in our hearts’ honeymoon,”

Sendak’s Ida cries that the goblins are turning her sister into “a nasty goblin’s bride” and ventures to interrupt their “honeymoon.” 1032 The goblins turn out to look like naked human babies, all crying and wailing in a dark, womb-like cave filled with cracked eggshells, and “in the middle of a wedding.” Perhaps most of all, the goblins of Outside Over There convey the madness and vulnerability of unchecked, infantile emotions and irrational fantasies – of the overwhelming emotional storm experienced by the unhinged artist or by the forgotten child, neglected by caretakers and thus either incapable or afraid of integrating into society, especially when that society is blind to the humanity beneath their hooded cloaks. Outside Over There became, as Sendak described it, “the pursuit of the theme I had been tracking since Kenny’s

Window, but now I had it trapped in a corner. I was really like Sherlock Holmes, sniffing it out in myself.”

257 Ida’s caretakers are also consumed by an “Over There,” the same phrase used by the traumatized and reticent survivors of David Grossman’s See Under Love (1986) to describe

Europe during the Holocaust, leaving their descendants to imagine its worst possible connotations. Fearful of the emotional distance between himself and his mother – enforced both by shifting conceptions of childrearing and by his mother’s lack of emotional resources – Sendak felt like the unnatural changeling “ice baby” the goblins exchange for their kidnapped victims, switched and replaced by some false version of himself to which his mother had no awareness.

Ida’s father is present only in words, in the instructions he shouts: “If Ida backwards in the rain would only turn around again and catch those goblins with a tune she’d spoil their kidnap honeymoon!” All Ida needs to do to reconnect with the lost infant is to change her direction from backwards to forwards and to play her musical horn. It is as though Sendak means to say: to save your inner child, you must pay attention to where you are headed and fight demons that pressure you toward inauthenticity and shame – fight them not with unchecked impulse, but with the sublimation of strong emotions through art, play, and creativity.

Sendak repeatedly claimed that Ida and the infant symbolize two separate stories. One of

Sendak’s diary entries states, “I was the ice baby—and my mother didn’t notice that I’d been replaced. She could have done the magic trick to get her real baby back but she was too distracted and I stayed an ice baby.”1033 The infant in Outside Over There was a fusion of the murdered Lindbergh baby and the child Sendak himself, feeling emotionally cheated by his immigrant parents and physically endangered by external interferences against which they seemed unprepared to defend him.1034 Sometimes his parents even were the threat. As mentioned earlier, Philip told Sendak during his early childhood that Philip and Sadie had unsuccessfully attempted to abort him in utero.1035 In Outside Over There, The infant’s kidnapping and near-

258 death experience – which take place while Papa is away at sea, Mama despondent and neglectful

– may, in some regards, relate to Sendak’s understanding that his own parents neglected and even sought to eradicate him before he was born.

Ida, on the other hand, was another sort of conglomeration. She was, in part, the artist’s older sister, Natalie, who was forced to babysit him from a young age. She was also Ida Perles, a beloved Brooklyn Jewish woman and friend of the family – a cheerful, humorous, and resilient woman who, in addition to being the only pet-owning Jew that the child Sendak knew, was emotionally available to him in ways his mother could not be.1036 Ida may also be the miscarried child that Sendak nearly fathered in his youth while engaged to a woman – a time close to his own emotional breakdown and initial entry into therapy, through which he originally hoped to be cured of his homosexuality. Indeed, as he reflected in the last year of his life, Sendak “never saw the fetus” of that miscarried child. The would-be mother had kept in touch with Sendak until her death, enduring “a very sad marriage,” perhaps in the vein of Ida’s mother, despondent while her husband is off at sea.1037 For Sendak, Ida was “the favorite child he never had” in his own adulthood, a child he imagined would rescue him, emotionally.1038 Sendak once claimed, “I have lived my whole life with a dream daughter.” He fantasized, “A daughter would be drawn to me.

A daughter would want to help me.”1039 He believed the miscarriage was his own fault: “I blame myself. We had a fight. I pushed her after she pushed me and she fell. I assumed it killed the baby.” Sendak had a recurring dream about the lost child, imagined as a teenager who had in fact survived the fall. In the dream, he would be on a train arriving to Saint-Izaire, France, and “My eyes are looking for my daughter. I know she is waiting for me. I get off the train, I see her, she is pretty, I don’t talk to her. The dream fizzles out.”1040 If Ida is, on some level, the unborn offspring of Sendak’s would-be heterosexual life, it may be that the stormy sea raging

259 throughout Outside Over There, linked to Ida’s own emotional distress, is what connects her to her lost seafaring father, Sendak himself, who has left Ida’s mother despondent.

In Outside Over There, Sendak used art to have his own creation retroactively save his infant self from doom. Instructed by her father – who may be the adult Sendak himself – to turn around, Ida finds a way to outsmart the goblins. On “hornpipe,” Ida plays “a frenzied jig” that

“makes sailors wild beneath the ocean moon” to churn the babies into “a dancing stream” – all but Ida’s sister, who remains “cozy in an eggshell” just “as a baby should.” This dancing stream, which dissolves the goblins in their cave of cracked eggshells, might be read as a birth reversal, whether a miscarriage, an abortion, or a leap from baby back toward initial seminal fluid. In any case, Ida’s backward journey ultimately returns the goblins, like the melting Wicked Witch of the

West, to the stream from which they came, revealing her sister – the last remaining baby – in an eggshell in the cave: a natural, young creature, saved from the goblins’ fate.

If Sendak identified himself with the rescued infant, he created Ida as his rescuer, the one who brings this infant back home. Perhaps she is freeing Sendak from the dishonest and divided life that he almost led, from a union that would have exacerbated his shame and isolation – an existence split between inauthentic feeling, on the one hand, and demonized, abject pleasure on the other. Ida, as Sendak’s unborn dream-daughter, has the imaginary authority to relieve the artist of shame, as well as of the threat he felt from beloved parents who also emotionally frustrated him and who had tried to abort him. Fitting Sendak’s belief that “A daughter would want to help [him],” Ida, like Sendak’s actual older sister, is a symbolic rescuer who can access his deep feelings, even when his parents cannot.1041 Ultimately, she is a fantasy, never born in life, but immortally present in the book – a redeemer from pain, guilt, and isolation. Ida might symbolize therapy or the artist’s own capacity to redeem himself through art, succeeding in his

260 struggle to conquer his own fears and achieve his own agency. As Sendak would declare about

Ida and the effect that her journey held on his own life:

what she did is what I did and what I know for the first time in my life I have done. The book is a release of something that has long pressured my internal self. It sounds hyperbolic but it’s true; it’s like profound salvation. If for only once in my life, I have touched the place where I wanted to go and, when Ida goes home, I go home. No other work of art had given me this inner peace and happiness. I have caught the thing that has eluded me for so long, so critical to living […] I’m not a happy man. I’m notorious for that. ‘Outside Over There’ made me happy.1042

Sendak was, during the making of the book, creating his own unusual variation of “home” and family in Connecticut, developing a household that blurred boundaries and relational styles.

Lynn Caponera, who first came to Sendak’s home as an eleven-year-old neighbor to help with yard work and with Sendak’s dogs, may have manifested his unborn “dream daughter” to some extent. Caponera dropped out of high school to live and work at Sendak’s home at age sixteen and began running the household two years later.1043 Sendak came to depend on Caponera to remarkable extents, claiming that he felt sick if she came home late and insisting that only Lynn prepare his sandwiches. As Roiphe writes, “The dependence was absolute, draining, flattering, consuming; the quasi-maternal care demanded of her was magnificent in scope. The particular quality and seductiveness of the need will be recognizable to mothers of very small children, most of whom won’t rise to it.”1044 In his old age, Sendak called Caponera “my best friend, the person who has sacrificed herself for me, the person who thinks I’m worth the trouble of being cared for. She’s everybody. She’s everything. She’s the most devoted friend I have, and I’d like to think I’m her most devoted friend.”1045 Roiphe writes that Caponera was “a servant and not a servant. [...] She was a part of the household in a way that could not be defined or pinned down with pedestrian words like ‘daughter’ or ‘mother’ or ‘friend’ or ‘lover’ or ‘assistant’ or

‘housekeeper.’”1046 Roiphe describes Caponera’s job as “the constant caretaking of larger-than-

261 life, kvetching theatrical characters,” but a job that she enjoyed. Like Ida’s father, who ends

Outside Over There by sending a letter from across the seas – “my brave, bright little Ida must watch the baby and her Mama for her Papa, who loves her always” – Sendak would arrange to have Caponera become the legal executor of his estate and president of his foundation after his passing in 2012. His will would instruct her to destroy his personal letters, journals and diaries immediately upon his death.1047

Conclusion

Reflecting in 1993 on why he devoted his life’s work to picture books, Sendak would offer that he experienced his life as being in a constant state of emotional limbo as an artist who constantly risked insanity by reaching inside his own murky depths for material; as he understood it in his old age, the chaos of limbo denotes childhood, and childhood had thereby become the framework underlying his career.1048 This chapter has examined the artist’s conceptions of reaching “inside,” against a perceived “outside” world, vis-à-vis notions of home, kinship, and mortality in his

Holocaust-marked, traumatized Jewish family and as a gay man of the twentieth-century, experiencing the gay rights movement and the AIDS epidemic as a middle-aged person from the sidelines of American society. As Sendak dove deeper into his own interiority in the latter half of his life, the themes of greatest concern to him – survival strategies of fantasy and play; unusual, makeshift relationships within traumatized families; the endangerment of socially discarded subjects; and irrepressible, potentially dangerous queer desires – further comingled and expressed themselves in fascinating, unusual ways. Sendak’s life and work convey a history of following urgent feelings intuitively, evading the influence of mainstream ideals and social structures. For him this meant eschewing bourgeois expectations and cultivating love for his

262 siblings, his own creations, and his chosen family in unexpected, passionate ways. Even as he became more overtly political in the 1990s and sought to transcend his own self-involvement to speak more directly to social issues “outside” of himself, as an artist he continued to preserve himself from unwanted influences, retreating into his work.

Sendak’s personal concerns about remaining distinct from the forces of a generic public and a potentially dangerous “outside” world, as well as his creative attempts at resolving those concerns hermetically from the “inside,” positions him as a sort of symbolic example of wider tensions experienced by Jewish, queer, and other American minority groups of the twentieth and twenty-first century that negotiate acculturation and the preservation of distinctiveness. Fighting to survive a society whose subsuming acceptance might neutralize his creative talents, he reflexively built walls and empowered his “own kind” against a potentially insensitive or hostile world in which he experienced his personhood as an endangered rarity. In 2011, a year before his death, he would tell an interviewer, “I think the whole world stinks: everything is decaying, the lack of culture depresses me most. I’m happy that my career is over and I can do what I like. I don’t want to be part of anything.”1049 His emotional tendency to focus on those with whom he identified or felt kinship manifested symbolically in his expression of same-sex desire; motifs of incest, sibling bonds, and pregnancy; as well as his devotion to perceived victims of Jewish history – of the Holocaust and assimilation pressures alike.

The artist’s cultivation of interiority, differentiating in stark ways between “inside” and

“outside,” liberated Sendak to rethink and creatively push back against imposed iterations of family, mortality, and homosexuality, especially as a twentieth-century gay man raised in an urban family marked by the Depression and WWII losses. Role reversals, invaded boundaries, unborn daughters, and sensuality between siblings served as some of the wild, symbolic means

263 by which he protected a threatened individuality as a queer and ethnically marginalized person.

Exploring the meaning and boundaries of various relationships and desires, Sendak sought to define and preserve the contours of his own elusive and historically tenuous identity, to express the survivalist impulses of an intersectional minority subjectivity predicated on distinctiveness, interiority, and the love of one’s “own” against limited public acceptance and understanding.

264

Conclusion

About three hundred people were present at Sendak’s memorial service at the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York, according to James Bohlman, who attended.1050 Sendak’s legacy is vast. He helped create , which changed television and children’s engagement with learning. He influenced ’s creation of the Muppets and inspired new directions in humanizing “othered” and “monstrous” figures in media for both children and adults.1051 Where the Wild Things Are (1963) has inspired several literary adaptations; it was read by the late

American President Barack Obama at the White House’s 2015 annual Easter Egg Roll (a tradition that dates to 1878); and it has been used successfully as a tool in art therapy for children, as it encourages children to empower themselves through expressing difficult feelings in secure environments.1052 Though the connection has not been explicitly made, it seems that

Sendak’s work opened the door for the positive archetype emerging in popular culture of the wild, dark, and unapologetic child sensitively attuned to menacing forces beyond their understanding. Usually neglected, underestimated, and abused, these children battle “evil” sometimes with supernatural talents, and sometimes by becoming invisible or entering alternate, dangerous dimensions. Some popular examples include “Jonas” of Lois Lowry’s The Giver

(1993), “Harry Potter” of J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series (1997-2007), the Baudelaire siblings of A

Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2006) by Lemony Snicket (the pen name of Daniel Handler);

“Arya Stark” of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (1996-, adapted to HBO’s

265 television series, Game of Thrones, 2011-), and “Eleven” of Matt and Ross Duffer’s Stranger

Things (2016-).1053 The message of Sendak’s creative vision remains poignant and vital as the contemporary global climate revives old feelings of endangerment for marginalized human subjects based on their geographic, bodily, and spiritual positions. A new age of polarized social anxiety threatens cultural recognition and human rights for immigrants, refugees, racial and ethnic minorities, women, and queer and transgender people. Sendak was perhaps most prophetic of the present moment in his choice of rhyme for his We Are All in the Dumps With Jack and

Guy (1993), which depicts a dystopian future vision of vulnerable subjects, drawn as children, suffering at the hands of a greedy, duplicitous social order: “We are all in the dumps / For diamonds are trumps / The kittens are gone to St Paul’s! / The baby is bit / The moon’s in a fit /

And the houses are built without walls.” In his drawings, “Trumped Tower” looms above a landscape of homeless children, who must form a makeshift family in order to survive.

Sendak’s biography and the trajectory of his creative output, which sensitively contrasted internal realities with external social forces, are intertwined with broader social histories of acculturating Jewish, queer, and other marginal Americans, as well as the history of children’s literature; broadly speaking, the conformity and culturally-biased optimism of midcentury gave way to the integration and universalization of certain marginal voices and liberal social critiques by the 1960s and ‘70s, retracting anxiously toward conservative ideals by the ‘80s and ‘90s. As the twentieth century drew to a close, Sendak watched with disgust as even the industry in which he sought to empower the disenfranchised with serious, empathetic understanding, “sold out,” he felt, abandoning craft for profit and self-promotion. He recalled the “spontaneous combustion” of the children’s book industry in the 1980s, the profits of Harper and Row’s children’s division jumping from $14 million in 1978 to $40 million in 1988. His Dear Mili ran an unprecedented

266 number of copies for a children’s book at its first printing in 1988 – 250,000, compared to a previous record of 140,000 copies for a children’s book first printing.1054 Bemoaning how commercially oriented publishing had become, he reminisced about “the great days in the 1950s and after the war, when publishing children’s books was youthful and fun.”1055

“It’s hard to be happy,” Sendak concluded in 2012, his last year of life. “Some people have the gift of pulling themselves up and out and saying there is more to life than just tragedy.

And then there are those who can’t. I’m one of them.”1056 If Sendak nourished his own unhappiness, he used it to fuel an ongoing artistic response that conveyed the endangered individual’s grappling with “the void.” As a shame-filled gay person practiced at self- concealment, as well as a trans-memorial subject overwhelmed by the losses of his parents and the murders of his relatives, Sendak was both a porous and guarded personality who fluctuated between feeling almost possessed by others’ spiritual and emotional worlds and protecting his own. The worlds Sendak straddled – between New York’s stigmatized and wildly creative gay subculture; the rapidly expanding but conservatively critiqued field of children’s literature; and the tight-knit atmosphere of his suffering immigrant family – were, in some respects, impossibly far apart. Thus his emotional experience of overextension and social incoherence demanded unrestrained bouts of fantasy, release, and invention. It encouraged him to “play,” making work that appealed to young children, who learn to function socially by trusting their urgent, if unclear emotions, and, like Rosie, by using strategies of camp and queer forms of sentimentality to test different performances, roles, and disguises while orienting to an outer world of social powers and possibilities.

In some respects, Sendak’s emotional conundrum – his need to remain “apart” despite his success and cultural renown, as well as his internalized pressure to turn inward and preserve a

267 threatened Yiddish-inflected identity that was at odds with being a secular American – reflects wider tensions in Jewish American and gay identities of recent decades, as American Jews and gay people reach record levels of integration in powerful sectors of American society. Belonging too well may breed complacency, dull one’s access to internal rhythms, and obstruct one from potential dangers. As I have argued, the spaces of literature and art, as connected to but also distinct from public life and society at large, offer a means for contemplating and shaping meaning, especially regarding facets of experience obscured or neutralized in socialization. They are also spaces of play and problem-solving that, through fantasy, interweaving, and improvisation, help endangered subjects to determine how they might survive subtle and systematic forms of oppression while simultaneously cultivating social worth and connectedness.

It is perhaps in this vein that we might understand the prevalence of queer and ethnically marginalized people in the realms of art and literature. In the 1967-68 Jewish Book Annual,

Sophie Cederbaum glorified a long Jewish heritage of literacy and books, imagining that, for the first Jewish immigrants to America, “books and learning were practically a simultaneous need along with food and shelter.”1057

One might even see Sendak’s position and creative mentalities as paradigmatic of Jewish diaspora and queer American experiences. The Sendak universe is concerned with matters of distinctiveness, belonging, self-preservation, memory, and survival; it is also ambivalently wedded to a majority culture that does not always accept or understand outsiders. Sendak was a queer Jewish Brooklyn boy in an era in which America pathologized and criminalized homosexuality, socially discriminated against Jews, and debated how to respond to the genocide enacted against Europe’s Jews, including Sendak’s cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

Moreover, he was a sickly child who almost died several times in his first years of life, the

268 youngest son of harried Jewish immigrants who struggled to care for him during the Depression, and a child haunted by the horrors of WWII, which clouded his youth. He gained early perspective into what it meant to survive on the fringes of twentieth-century society and its emotional norms. Despite the predominating midcentury approaches, which treated children like frivolous, cherished pets to be properly socialized into an existing society, he sought to honor and dignify children’s emotions, even those that contemporary society deemed queer or problematic. In doing so, his work articulated the culture’s wider shift from the patriarchal, conformist, and institutional ethos of earlier in the century toward a more individualistic, socially progressive, and emotionally attuned approach that sought to empower those at the bottom and on the margins. This shift is clearly reflected in the history of American Judaism, as the large, austere synagogues and federations of the suburbs gave way to spiritual renewal, Havura, and do-it-yourself movements by the 1960s. Titles like Very Far Away (1957), The Sign on Rosie’s

Door (1960), Where the Wild Things Are (1963), In the Night Kitchen (1970), and Outside Over

There (1981) all evoke the emotional journeying of alienated, devalued, or misunderstood children who, left in the figurative dark, depart into unknown territory on their own in order to solve the problem of emotionally existing and preserving self-worth in a fast-changing culture when adults do not see, understand, or care. They helped fill a need in postwar culture, which hungered for a literature that would harness the materials of contemporary life into meaningful, positive values after generations of American acculturation and a magnitude of wartime destruction and loss.1058 Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century, Sendak also responded sensitively to waves of social anxiety, using creative fusions to address the emotional distress and existential resignation related to occupying a controversial, insider-outsider position on uncertain ground.

269 Within Sendak’s claim that children are more honest and in touch with raw human reality than are adults is the insight of a life experienced out of sync with the norms maintained by adult society. Guided by strong internal currents, he applied his perspective to the space of childhood, seeing children as kindred spirits: children, he felt, were human beings on the edges of the social world. Sendak changed modern conceptions of childhood with his compelling artistic depictions of misunderstood, isolated children forced into dangerous situations for which they were not yet prepared. Sendak’s protagonists were punished for unleashing their difficult emotions, yet also victorious by harnessing inner resources, fantasy, and play. As much as Sendak suffered, he also enjoyed an enormous sense of humor, sometimes dark and ironic, which entertained his close friends and relieved frustration, as explored in the earlier discussion of his correspondences with

Coleman Dowell. An important component of Sendak’s truth-seeking and his grappling with topics deemed controversial was his ability to answer hypocrisy and prejudice with farce and snark, even if only with his closest of confidantes.

Art Spiegelman interpreted Sendak’s message as “understanding that the distinction between children and adults is probably one of hypocrisy more than anything else,” implying that adults project onto children aspects of character and personality that they seek to banish from their own identities, whether angelic or wild.1059 Sendak championed the embodied feelings of childhood against conservatively socialized adult perspectives, striving for emotional sincerity against threats embedded in acculturation and socialization. The artist’s persistently cantankerous disposition drew from his lifelong identification with emotional states of early childhood and from his guiding principle that early childhood was not sweet or innocent, but rather sensual, terrifying, and lonely. In some respects, I argue, his work reconceived concrete, specific dangers of Jewish and queer assimilation into Christian heterosexual normativity as

270 more universally shared reservations about assimilating children’s emotional honesty, truth- seeking, passion, and play into the superficial, predictable, and insensitive aspects of adulthood.

America and the wider western world could easily share these concerns especially after WWII warned of the dangers of social conformity and fascism, prompting an inward search for renewed human values. As American culture looked to children and childhood as champions of a symbolic collective rebirth, Sendak fought to dignify the queerness, emotional seriousness, and sensitivity of childhood. He believed that children were more sophisticated and daring in the way they read than adults suspected, that they “dive right into symbols and metaphor. They just go, and they get it. They know how to get right to the heart of the matter [, because] fantasy is all- pervasive in a child’s life. Children live in both fantasy and reality in a way we adults no longer remember.” 1060

This project has analyzed Sendak’s life and work in relation to a perceived synergy across the roots of his parents’ Old World Jewish culture and feelings of his own queer youth, both of which were targets of American socialization processes aimed at creating a specific social future. Sendak’s emotional understanding of childhood drew in part from his sensitivity to the particular pressures placed on especially vulnerable subjects in twentieth-century America, including Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants, children, and those with feelings and desires deemed unacceptable. Immigrant families had struggled to acculturate amidst nativist politicians, often perceiving mainstream America as hostile; wartime and postwar Jewish Americans endured the second-hand effects of genocide in Europe, where many of their relatives and communities were destroyed. Across these decades, American Jewish immigrants’ experiences led them to place additional value on their children as compensatory symbols of redemption, as links in a threatened lineage, and, sometimes, as the only relatives left alive. Children of

271 immigrant families navigated both the plight of childhood in a modernizing culture foreign to their parents, as well as the plight of surviving overwhelming emotional pressures at home.

Queer children additionally navigated the personal travails of accepting and surviving physiologies that marked them as socially deviant, often without the help or understanding of even their own caretakers. Sendak expressed a vision in which vulnerable, solitary, and demonized subjects became profound creative artists, deserving of representation and redemption, even without acculturating to specific ideals of wholesomeness or sweetness.

I have explored several central motifs in Sendak’s life and work: Eastern European

Jewish immigrant family relationships in twentieth-century New York; stigmatized queer identities and an attendant social fluctuation between liberation and anxiety; theatricality, camp, and queer sentimentality as strategies for marginal subjects’ actualization; and shared memory of

Old World Jewish life and Holocaust losses, both within Sendak’s family and in wider communities and public consciousness. Sendak’s creative vision and identity cannot be essentialized to any single facet of his subjectivity, even as each lends rich territory for analysis.

Jewishness, queerness, and positionality vis-à-vis war, memory, and trauma are mutually influential theoretical tools that contribute to the larger pursuit of positioning and appreciating

Sendak’s life and work as it evolved across the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Working through secondhand terrors and untangling social fictions, his artistic obsession with childhood built honest existential foundations for endangered minds and hearts, offering outrageous fantasy, emotional release, and play as paths more effective for “becoming one’s self” than were blind obedience and assimilation to those in power. In Sendak’s own words, “nothing but the truth will suffice for children.”1061

272

Introduction

1 Sophie N. Cederbaum, “American Jewish Juvenile Literature During the Last Twenty-Five Years,” Jewish Book Annual (1967-1968): 196. 2 Sendak “came out” to the public as “gay” in 2008 but was aware of his sexuality by his teenage years. I use “queer” as an umbrella term to describe non-normative experiences and expressions of gender and sexuality (i.e. male femininity, female masculinity, pansexuality, etc.), but with awareness of the term’s wider implication of stigmatized difference, which applied also to other aspects of identity in midcentury society, including Yiddish culture and post-traumatic mentalities. Patricia Cohen, “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/arts/design/10sendak.html?mcubz=3 3 Stephanie Nettell, “Maurice Sendak obituary,” May 8, 2012, , https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/08/maurice-sendak 4 Rochman, “The Booklist Interview: Maurice Sendak,” Booklist (June 15, 1992), 1849, box 1, folder 21, Blaine Pennington Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives. 5 Braun, “Sendak Raises the Shade on Childhood,” Francelia Butler Papers. 6 Muriel Harris, “Impressions of Sendak,” Elementary English 48, no. 7 (Nov. 1971): 825-32, rpt. in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, ed. Peter C. Kunze (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 39. 7 Gary Groth, Interview with Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 53. 8 Tony Kushner, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present (NY: Abrams, 2003), 190. 9 R. Danielle Egan and Gail Hawkes, Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 32. 10 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work: Fearful Symmetries: Maurice Sendak’s Picture Book Trilogy and the Making of an Arist,” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 21. 11 For a closer look at the evolution of modern Jewish education, see: Jonathan B. Krasner, The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011); Eliyana R. Adler, In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011); Naomi Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917-1950 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017); Avraham Greenbaum, “The Girls’ Heder and the Girls in the Boys’ Heder in Eastern Europe before World War I,” East/West Education 18, no. 1 (1997): 55-62; Shaul Stampfer, Families, Rabbis, and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010); Steven J. Zipperstein, “Transforming the Heder: Maskilic Politics in Imperial Russia,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky, edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London: Halban, 1988), 87-109. 12 See Chapter Two of Naomi Seidman, The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (Stanford: Press, 2016). Also see David Biale, “Eros and Enlightenment,” in Eros and the Jews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 149-175. 13 For more on the intergenerational tensions of early twentieth-century urban immigrant families as youth participated in popular culture, see Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Press, 2009). 14 Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930- 1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 19; Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents (NY and London: NYU Press, 2003). 15 Studies of early modern Ashkenazi Jewish childhood, however, include Ivan Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medie val Europe (New Haven and London: Press, 1996) and Tali Berner, “Children and Rituals in Early Modern Ashkenaz,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7, no. 1 (2014): 65-86. 273

16 Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University, 1998); Shaul Stampfer, Families, Rabbis, and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth- Century Eastern Europe (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010). 17 Joyce Antler, You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Lawrence Fuchs, Beyond Patriarchy: Jewish Fathers and Families (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2000); Riv-Ellen Prell, “Family Economy/Family Relations: the Development of American Jewish ethnicity in the Early Twentieth Century,” National Variations in Jewish Identity, eds. Steven M. Cohen and Gabriel Horenczyk (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 177-198. 18 , A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (New York: Baronet Books, 1978); Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); Deborah D. Moore, At Home in America (New York: Press, 1983); Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: Cooper Square, 1934); Sanford Sternlicht, The Tenement Saga The Lower East Side and Early Jewish American Writers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 19 Eli Lederhendler “Orphans and Prodigies: Rediscovering Young Jewish Immigrant ‘Marginals’,” American Jewish History 95, no.2 (June 2009): 135-155. 20 Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888-1988 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 77. Sabbath Visitor was among the first Jewish-American periodicals for children. Designed for ages seven to fourteen, its mission was to simultaneously combat assimilation by providing a proud knowledge of one’s Jewish heritage and religious ritual, while also enforcing the proper manners of American “ladies” and “gentlemen.” Naomi W. Cohen, “Meant for Children,” What the Rabbis Said: The Public Discourse of Nineteenth-century American Rabbis (New York: , 2008), 74-93. Sarna’s study of the Jewish Publication Society offers an even broader example of how Jewish American institutions self-consciously strove to synthesize Jewish and American values; JPS, he writes, fused values from nineteenth-century liberal Jewish thought with Victorian didacticism to ward off “ignorance from within and prejudice from without” as Jews acculturated in America, perpetuating a “post-Emancipation Jewish concern with manners and mores.” Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888-1988 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 88-90. 21 Ibid, 78. 22 Report of the Twenty-Eighth Year of The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1915-1916, American Jewish Committee Archives, Accessed January 4, 2018, www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1916_1917_9_JPSAReport.pdf 23 Sarna, JPS, 85. 24 Ibid, 86. 25 Ibid, 77. 26 Stephen S. Wise, Child Versus Parent: Some Chapters On the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), 36-37. 27 Fanny Goldstein, “The Jewish Child in Bookland,” The Jewish Book Annual 5 (1946-1947): 86; Cederbaum, “American Jewish Juvenile Literature During the Last Twenty-Five Years,” 194-195. 28 Sarna, JPS, 88-90, 170. 29 Sadie’s father was a rabbi who died at age forty. Sadie blamed her young father’s death on her own mother, who, according to Sendak, sent her to America to silence her, growing tired of her accusations. Eventually she was joined by her mother and remaining siblings, except for her brother Aaron, who likely perished in the Holocaust. Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection; Emma Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence,” The Believer, November/December 2012, Accessed 22 April, 2016, http://www.believermag.com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak. 30 Jennifer Young, “‘A Language is Like a Garden’: Shloyme Davidman and the Yiddish Communist School Movement in the United States,” in Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 156. 31 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 190. Sendak’s later book We are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993) would emphasize urban children’s exposure to kidnappings and broadcasted hardships, as naked, homeless children literally clothe themselves in scraps of newspaper, which report on the AIDS crisis and other dangers and tragedies. 32 Riv-Ellen Prell, “Family Economy/Family Relations” in Cohen and Horenczyk, eds. National Variations in Jewish Identity, 178. 274

33 Introduction to Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 1-2. 34 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. Sholem Aleichem was the pen name of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, a Yiddish writer and playwright who lived 1859-1916 and is best known by contemporary readers for his stories about Tevye the Dairyman. 35 Especially after the 1917 Revolution, political texts for children took on mature political themes. Lyudmila Sholokhova reads symbols of Soviet propaganda used in children’s books, shifting from romantic optimism in the years following the Revolution to “symbolic clichés” in the 1930s, depicting sickles and hammers, portraits of Lenin, banners, and marching pioneers. Young, “‘A Language is Like a Garden’: Shloyme Davidman and the Yiddish Communist School Movement in the United States,” in Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 161. 36 Typescript, Maurice Sendak, no date, “In Grandpa’s House,” Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, PA. 37 Introduction to Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 1; Miriam Udel, “The Sabbath Tale and Jewish Cultural Renewal,” in Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 23-24. 38 Naomi Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917-1950 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 177. 39 Lyudmila Sholokhova, “Soviet Propaganda in Illustrated Yiddish Children’s Books: From the Collections of the YIVO Library, New York,” in Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 168. 40 Introduction to Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 2. 41 Kadar, Raising Secular Jews, 178. 42 Introduction to Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 2. 43 Mikhail Krutikov, “An End to Fairy Tales: The 1930s in the mayselekh of Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko,” in Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 111. According to Niger, WWI spurred major growth in Yiddish children’s literature, due to the 1917 collapse of the Russian monarchy with its restrictions of Jewish cultural production, as well as the need it created to care for those children displaced, homeless, or orphaned by the war; Vilna and Kiev became the main centers of production of Yiddish children’s books, with specialized press and publishing houses. Introduction to Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 2. 44 Thank you, Ellen Kellman, for introducing me to the Yiddish text and reading and discussing it with me at Brandeis this November. 45 Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), xxii. 46 The ABC of It, New York Public Library exhibit, curated by Leonard Marcus, June 21, 2013 - March 23, 2014, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, New York, NY. 47 Dagmar Langlois, “The Influence of Maurice Sendak, , and Chris Van Allsburgh on Contemporary American Children’s Book Illustration,” (MA Thesis, Syracuse University, 1991), 200. 48 Marcus, “The Artist and His Work,” 15. The American Library Association began awarding Caldecott Medals in 1938, Newbery Medals in 1922. By 1945, libraries competed with classrooms as spaces of socialization, teaching politeness, responsibility, and discipline through literacy, membership, required hand-washing, and overdue fines (seen as especially important for civilizing the children of urban immigrants). Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 276. 49 Barbara Bader, American Picture Books from Noah’s Ark to the Beast Within (Macmillan Publishing Company, 1976), 32, cited in Langlois, “The Influence of Maurice Sendak, Leo and Diane Dillon, and Chris Van Allsburgh on Contemporary American Children’s Book Illustration,” 199. 50 John Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 49. 51 Sarna JPS, 171-172. For more on the history and context of this seminal work of Jewish children’s literature, see Jonathan B. Krasner, “A Recipe for American Jewish Integration: The Adventures of K’tonton and Hillel’s Happy Holidays,” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 3 (September 2003): 344-361; and Jonathan Sarna, “From K’tonton to the Torah,” Moment Magazine (October 1990): 44-47. 52 Goldstein, “The Jewish Child in Bookland,” 89. 53 Cederbaum, “American Jewish Juvenile Literature During the Last Twenty-Five Years,” 193. 54 Sarna, JPS, 86. 275

55 Morgenstern identified three problems for contemporary Jews: reestablishing Jewish life in Europe, the building of Israel, and “the great problem of creating a true Jewish atmosphere, culture, and environment in America.” As an optimistic solution to the third problem, Morgenstern offered children and youth participation in Talmud Torah, Jewish high school, holiday services, and philanthropic drives as a symbolic solution for the Jewish future in America. Congregation Sons of Israel Yearbook, 1947, “The days of our years,” 3, BM225.N5 B46, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY. 56 Ibid, 4. 57 Goldstein, “The Jewish Child in Bookland,” 87. Yiddish literature for children, on the other hand, continued to flourish on the margins, even in the Bolshevist 1930s, despite the conservative ideologies that often constricted it. Introduction to Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 2. 58 A minority of the students at American shules came from Yiddish-speaking homes by the end of that decade. Jennifer Young, “‘A Language is Like a Garden’,” in Estraikh, et al., Children and Yiddish Literature, 163. 59 Peter Dobrin, “Rosenbach reels in rare Sendak trove,” Jan 29, 2017, Philly.comhttp://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/arts/Maurice_Sendaks_personal_library_comes_to_Philadelp hia.html 60 Typescript, Maurice Sendak, no date, “In Grandpa’s House,” Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, PA. 61 Ibid. 62 Daniela Mantovan, “Reading Soviet-Yiddish Poetry for Children: Der Nister’s Mayselekh in ferzn 1917- 39,” in Estraikh, et al., Children and Yiddish Literature, 97. 63 Jonathan Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things,” Rolling Stone, December 30, 1976, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/maurice-sendak-king-of-all-wild-things-19761230?page=3 64 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 65 Introduction to Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 1-2. 66 Ibid, 2. 67 The ABC of It, New York Public Library exhibit, curated by Leonard Marcus. 68 See, for example, Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). 69 Proceedings of the White House Conference on Children in a Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Print. Office), 1940, 29-30, digitized by the Boston Public Library, https://archive.org/details/proceedingsofwhi00whit. 70 Joseph E. Illick, American Childhoods (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 122. 71 David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts, cited in Marie Popova, “Peanuts and the Quiet Pain of Childhood: How Charles Schulz Made an Art of Difficult Emotions,” Brain Pickings, Jan. 20, 2015, Accessed Jan. 4, 2018, https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/20/charles-schulz-peanuts-biography-david-michaelis/ 72 Beyond the scope of this project, but deserving of full studies in its own right is the difficult reality that postwar ideals of universalism nevertheless failed to sufficiently include African American and other racialized minorities. For examples, see: Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Press, 1998); Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Press, 2006); Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011). 73 Krasner Benderly Boys, 361. 74 Sarna, JPS, 226. 75 Langlois, “The Influence of Maurice Sendak, Leo and Diane Dillon, and Chris Van Allsburgh on Contemporary American Children’s Book Illustration,” 199-200. 76 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 15; Nathalie Op de Beeck, Suspended : Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xix. 77 Goldstein, “The Jewish Child in Bookland,” 84. 78 Ibid, 85. 79 Devra Ferst, “The Twisty History of Jewish Kid Lit,” The Jewish Daily Forward, November 24, 2010, issue of December 03, 2010, Accessed Dec. 20, 2013, https://forward.com/articles/133388/the-twisty-history-of- jewish-kid-lit/ 80 Cederbaum, “American Jewish Juvenile Literature During the Last Twenty-Five Years,” 198. 81 Jack Sendak, The Happy Rain, pictures by Maurice Sendak (New York: Harper Collins, 1956), 8-9. 276

82 Jean Mercier, “Sendak on Sendak,” Publishers Weekly, April 10, 1981, 45-46. 83 Lee Bennett Hopkins, Books are by People: Interviews with 104 Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young Children (New York: Citation Press, 1969), 188, 257. 84 David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts, cited in Popova, “Peanuts and the Quiet Pain of Childhood: How Charles Schulz Made an Art of Difficult Emotions.” 85 Sara Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak: A Visit with the Most Celebrated Children’s Author of Our Time,” Parents, November 1992, 583, box 6, folder 67, Phillip Applebaum Collection, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History. 86 Inauguration of the Zena Sutherland Lectureship, “Sources of Inspiration,” Maurice Sendak, 20 May 1983, box 7, folder 4, Zena Bailey Sutherland Papers, University of Chicago Graduate School Special Collections. 87 Gregory Maguire, Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 95, 98. 88 Patrick Rodgers, “Where the Wild Things Are: Mad Max: On Three Preliminary Drawings for Where the Wild Things Are,” Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, 195. 89 Cited in Philip Nel, “Wild Things, Children and Art: The Life and Work of Maurice Sendak,” The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 14. 90 “Questions to an Artist Who Is Also an Author: A Conversation between Maurice Sendak and ,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 28, no. 4 (Oct. 1971): 262-80, rpt. in Peter C. Kunze, ed., Conversations with Maurice Sendak (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 24. 91 Rita Berman Frischer, “Children’s Literature in the United States,” Jewish Women’s Archive, Accessed Dec. 13, 2013, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/childrens-literature-in-united-states; June Cummins, “Becoming an ‘All-of-a-Kind’ American: Sydney Taylor and Strategies of Assimilation,” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 3 (2003): 324-343; Ferst, “The Twisty History of Jewish Kid Lit”; Paula E. Hyman, “The Jewish Family: Looking for a Usable Past,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 19-26; Tamar Salmon-Mack, “Childhood,” Yivo Encyclopedia, Accessed March 20, 2015, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Childhood 92 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1961); Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932 – 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 93 Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust (New York: Penguin Books, 1979); Esther Benbassa, Suffering as Identity: The Jewish Paradigm. Translated by G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2010); Alan L. Berger, Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Pascale Bos, “Positionality and Postmemory in Scholarship on the Holocaust,” Women in German Yearbook 19 (2003): 50-74; Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 103-28; Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (London; New York: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992). 94 Patricia Cohen, “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are.” 95 Chapter One deals more explicitly with how the public and the press sought not to see Sendak’s homosexuality, Sendak sometimes playing into those efforts, even when his gayness loomed in plain sight. In conversation, ChaeRan Freeze offered the useful comparison between the impulse of heterosexual people to shield themselves from recognizing a beloved figure’s homosexuality with Robin DiAngelo’s notion of “white fragility,” which describes how white people avoid acknowledging the different conditions of racial minorities, in order to shield themselves from the discomfort of making explicit their own privilege as white people. Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 54-70. 96 Jerry Griswold, “Outside Over There and Gay Pride,” The Horn Book, June 28, 2017, www.hbook.com/2017/06/authors-illustrators/outside-over-there-and-gay-pride/ 97 Kenneth Kidd, Freud in Oz: at the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 125. 98 Ibid, 127. 99 Kenneth Kidd, “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picture-Book Psychologist,” in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, edited by Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 212. 100 Philip Nel, “In or Out?: Crockett Johnson, Ruth Krauss, Sexuality, Biography,” Nine Kinds of Pie (Philip Nel’s blog), February 17, 2011, Accessed April 21, 2016, http://www.philnel.com/2011/02/17/in-or-out/ 277

101 John Mitzel, “An Approach to the Gay Sensibility in Literature,” The Gay Alternative 11 (Spring 1976): 46. Archive.org, accessed Feb. 6, 2018, https://archive.org/details/TheGayAlternative11Spring1976 102 Barbara Bader, “Five Gay Picture-Book Prodigies and the Difference They’ve Made,” The Horn Book, March 5, 2015, www.hbook.com/2015/03/authors-illustrators/five-gay-picture-book-prodigies-and-the-difference- theyve-made/ 103 Kidd, Freud in Oz, 125. 104 Bader, American Picture Books, 252 cited in Langlois, The Influence of Maurice Sendak, 199. 105 Susannah Cahalan, “‘Goodnight Moon’ author was a bisexual rebel who didn’t like kids,” New York Post, Jan. 7, 2017, https://nypost.com/2017/01/07/goodnight-moon-author-was-a-bisexual-rebel-who-hated-kids/ 106 Hurd had a romance with photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955), who photographed Hurd nude in his studio, as well as “sprawled naked over a large rock in the woods.” Aaron Rosen, “Bernard Perlin: Europe’s American,” in In Focus: Orthodox Boys 1948 by Bernard Perlin, Aaron Rosen, ed., Tate Research Publication, 2016, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/orthodox-boys-bernard-perlin/europes-american, Accessed November 4, 2016; David Leddick, Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 93. 107 Colin Stokes, “‘Frog and Toad’: An Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love,” May 31, 2016, New Yorker Magazine, Accessed June 7, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/frog-and-toad-an- amphibious-celebration-of-same-sex-love 108 Jonathan Weinberg, “Ray Johnson fan club,” in Ray Johnson, Ray Johnson: Correspondences, eds. Donna M De Salvo and Catherine Gudis (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1999), 101. 109 David Drake, “Born to be Wild: Interview by David Drake,” Sept. 1999, Poz Magazine, 89, ONE Archives Foundation, Los Angeles, CA. 110 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 111 Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 79. 112 , “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’” PBS NOW interview, March 12, 2004, accessed October 30, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/sendak.html 113 Emma Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence,” The Believer, November/December 2012, Accessed April 22, 2016, http://www.believermag.com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak. 114 Jeffrey Jon Smith, “A Conversation with Maurice Sendak,” Article based on transcript of a phone conversation with Sendak, August 27, 1974, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 115 Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’” 116 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Gene Friese, September 15, 1966, box1, folder 4, Morton E. Wise Collection of Maurice Sendak - Manuscript MS-1038, Dartmouth Rauner Library Dartmouth Rauner Library. 117 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Selma Lanes, March 25, 1968, MS 292, Smith College Library. 118 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Selma Lanes, Feb. 19, 1969, MS 292, Smith College Library. 119 Steven Bruhm, Curiouser: On The Queerness Of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth B. Kidd, Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 120 See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 121 Lederhendler, “Orphans and Prodigies: Rediscovering Young Jewish Immigrant ‘Marginals’.” 122 Hamida Bosmajian reads Sendak’s use of wildernesses and forests, especially in his Dear Mili (1988), as drawing from a western tradition of using such landscapes to signify this notion of vulnerability and awe in the face of unknown dangers beyond one’s reach or understanding. While Bosmajian’s analysis focuses on Sendak’s relationship to Holocaust mourning, I extend a study of the artist’s relationship with unknowable dangers with his intersectionally marginal position as a queer son of Jewish immigrants who experienced his youth as a sensitive, physically frail, and socially isolated boy, his young adulthood overshadowed by homophobic stigma. Hamida Bosmajian, “Memory and Desire in the Landscapes of Sendak’s Dear Mili,” The Lion and the Unicorn 19, no. 2 (1995): 186-210. 123 Further study of these works might consider Michel Foucault’s notion of the queer freedom granted to the socially invisible – a removal from social surveillance and its accompanying expectations of self-policing. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1995). 278

Stockton similarly values the benefits of “growing sideways,” of pouring oneself into hidden places of nourishment beyond the expected social trajectory, when that trajectory threatens one’s pressing emotional needs. The downside of such liberating contexts is their psychological isolation and the consequential emotional suffering of one who does not make sense to other people and who does not have the knowledge or tools to remedy that problem. Miranda Fricker’s concept of “hermeneutical marginalization” helps articulate the structure of that potentially painful – even dangerous – position. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Thank you, ChaeRan Freeze, for introducing me to this work. 124 Quoted in Nat Hentoff, “Among the Wild Things,” New Yorker, January 15, 1966, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/01/22/among-the-wild-things 125 Seth Lerer, “Wild Thing: Maurice Sendak and the Worlds of Children’s Literature” (lecture), Contemporary Jewish Museum, uploaded on Sep 29, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lducj5nUkrI 126 Cited Anne Commire, “Maurice Sendak,” Something About the Author: Facts and Pictures about Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People 27 (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company, Book Tower, 1982): 194. 127 Sarna, JPS, 85. 128 Essay on authors including Sendak (by unknown author, no date), box 2, folder 49, Beulah Campbell Papers, A.B. Colvin Collection and Archives, Montgomery Library, Campbellsville University, Campbellsville, Kentucky. 129 Krutikov, “An End to Fairy Tales: The 1930s in the mayselekh of Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko,” in Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 113. 130 Yiddish Communist writing like that of Shloyme Davidman (1900-1974), offered didactic but non- condescending messages to children, espousing the general belief that “children, like adults, struggled under their current conditions, but, if they worked together, children and adults together could have a brighter future.” Young, “‘A Language is Like a Garden,’” in Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 154. 131 Mantovan, “Reading Soviet-Yiddish Poetry for Children,” in Estraikh, et al., Children and Yiddish Literature, 108. 132 Introduction to Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 3-4. 133 John Klapper describes “inner emigration” as a strategy of nonconformity by which children’s writers in WWII-era Germany and Austria eluded Nazi ideology by retreating inward, going “elsewhere” internally in order to stay sane during a political nightmare. See John Klapper, Nonconformist Writing in Nazi Germany: The Literature of Inner Emigration (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015), especially Chapter Two. Thank you, Eugene Sheppard, for introducing me to the concept of “inner emigration” and to Klapper’s work. Young notes the emergence of “an entire corpus of left-wing children’s literature, in many languages” in Cold War-era North America, which, in Yiddish, included dozens of journals, hundreds of books and stories, and thousands of unprinted plays, pageants, and musicals from summer camps and shules (Yiddish leftist afternoon schools, whose enrollment across NY and other American cities peaked in the late 1930s to mid-1940s at about 6,000 students, with about 50 schools in New York City alone). In 1937, for example, Shloyme Davidman published a book of Marxist-influenced stories for children, one declaring: “we already know that there is no God in heaven. We must overthrow the bad people, the capitalists, who now rule us, like they did in the Soviet Union.” Young, “‘A Language is Like a Garden,’” in Estraikh et al., eds., Children and Yiddish Literature, 154, 157-8. 134 Klapper, Nonconformist Writing, 70-71. 135 Bob Batchelor, American Pop: Popular Culture Decade by Decade 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2009), 33. 136 Ibid, 49. 137 Bill Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’” 138 Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), 223. 139 Eulogy for Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak, 1993, 1, GEN MSS 1199, box 1, Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. 140 Maurice Sendak, “Enamored of the Mystery,” Innocence and Experience: Essays & Conversations on Children’s Literature, eds. Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1987), 369. 141 Justin Wintle interviews Maurice Sendak, The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children’s Literature (New York: Paddington Press, 1975), 28.

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142 Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, however, deemed this study “lazily written — […] less a scholarly or journalistic essay than a kind of assemblage of Cott’s conversations with Sendak, and with various experts […] about Sendak’s work.” Michiko Kakutani, “Digging to the Roots of Maurice Sendak’s Vision,” New York Times, May 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/books/review-theres-mystery-there-maurice- sendak-jonathan- cott.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Farts&action=click&contentCollection=arts®ion=stream&mod ule=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=1 143 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child (Durham: Duke U. Press, 2009); Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1995). 144 Crenshaw’s policy-oriented work studies biased sociopolitical practices specifically related to economic injustices experienced by women of color. I extend the term to a study of subjectivity-in-formation, situated within literary and cultural studies and social history. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence against Women of Color,” in Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Mary Lyndon Shanley and Uma Narayan (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 178-193. Considering the politics of extending the term in this way, I stress that my intention is not to displace or coopt the political potential of the term for gender-related experiences of people of color but rather to credit the original scholarship that inspired my reading of Sendak as a subject whose internalized feelings of displacement were intersectional, queerness and Jewishness interacting with childhood frailty during a largely homophobic era concerned with global antisemitism and changing ideas about childhood. For further reading on the dangers of displacing intersectionality’s original manifestation, see: Sirma Bilge, "Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies," Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10, no. 2 (2013): 405-424; and Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 785-810. I thank Prof. Sara Shostak, Brandeis University, for helping me to see my use of intersectionality in this specific way, as an intervention with new connotations that must remain sensitive to the politicized history of the term’s usage. 145 Gerry Brigada and Warren Taylor, “Sendak’s childrens books come from personal life,” The Connecticut Daily Campus, April 29, 1981, Francelia Butler Papers 1997.0056, series 2, box 9, University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, Storrs, CT. 146 Sara Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak,” 583. 147 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” in Marcus, ed. Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, 19; Maurice Sendak, “Enamored of the Mystery,” in Innocence and Experience, 373. 148 Buzz Poole, “The Wisdom of Sendak: Children are Wild, Honest, Immoral Beings,” Literary Hub, May 22, 2017, http://lithub.com/the-wisdom-of-sendak-children-are-wild-honest-immoral-beings/ 149 Marcus, ed., Dear Genius, 184. 150 Nicole Eustace, “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1490. The participants included Nicole Eustace, Eugenia Lean, Julie Linvingston, Jan Plamper, William M. Reddy, and Barbara H. Rosenwein. 151 Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 813. 152 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129. 153 Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Sterans,” History and Theory 49 (May 2010): 254. 154 David Shneer elucidates Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”: Queers and Jews, for Sontag, he writes, “made modern urban culture. And each did so from a different cultural position – queers from the perspective of playfulness, aesthetics, and camp; Jews from seriousness, morality and liberalism.” Shneer points out the problematic presumption that Jewish and queer are always separate categories: “If homosexual camp is apolitical and ‘dissolves morality’ […], Jewish moral sense leaves little room for aesthetics and play. […] Does Sontag’s thesis collapse when these two forces that she suggests oppose one another are embodied in one person?” I argue that part of Sendak’s struggle, much like that of Harvey Fierstein’s protagonist in the film Torch Song Trilogy (1988, based on the earlier play) was to simultaneously embody both playful aesthetics and moral seriousness, using play to fight for social justice. David Shneer, “Queer is the New Pink: How Queer Jews Moved to the Forefront of Jewish Culture,” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 1, no. 1 (January 2007): 56.

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155 Lynn Spigel, “Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar America,” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 110-135. 156 Kidd, Freud in Oz, 126. 157 For an extensive list of Sendak’s works through 2001, as well as descriptions of first-edition markers, see Joyce Y. Hanrahan, Works of Maurice Sendak: Revised and Expanded to 2001 (Saco, Maine: Custom Communications, 2001). 158 Marissa Hamilton, Brandeis University Senior Research Integrity Administrator, confirmed that these conversations do not fall under federal definitions of human subject research and that this project thus does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Institutional Review Board. 159 Leonard S. Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work: Fearful Symmetries: Maurice Sendak’s Picture Book Trilogy and the Making of an Arist,” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 16.

Chapter One

160 Marianne Hirsch developed the theory of postmemory in her analysis of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus (1980-1991). Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103-128. 161 Agnieszka Bedingfield, “Trans-Memory and Diaspora: Memories of Europe and Asia in American Immigrant Narratives,” in Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas, eds. William Boelhower et al. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004), 334-335. 162 Selma Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 66. Based on interviews with Sendak, Lanes’s book offers the first comprehensive biographical portrait of Sendak as a man and artist, surveying his life and work through 1980. Lanes was a Jewish American critic of children’s literature with whom Sendak was friendly. I also draw later from one of Lanes’s interview transcripts with Sendak from 1989. 163 Scholars of childhood have recently taken interest in the “generic child” as a symbolic category onto which adults project their own social desires, anxieties, and demands under the guise of doing what is best for “the children,” considering their “natural” indeterminacy and need for adult intervention. Nicholas Sammond conceives of the “generic child” as the symbolic figure “against which parents judge their efforts in raising their real children, which marketers of educational products mobilize to inspire the anxiety that leads to sales, or which social critics invoke as in need of protection from the excesses of American public and commercial culture.” Sammond credits the following discourses as joint creators of this conception between 1900 and 1960: popular literature on child rearing, social commentary on a unified American culture, and discourse around the effects of mass media on children. Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930- 1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2-6. Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” further theorizes that the dominant social emphasis on protecting the generic child as “our future” is a delusional and selfish means by which adults protect their own image and legacy by projecting anxieties and insecurities onto an abstract conception of “the children,” often at the expense of real, living children. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (New York: Macmillan Press, 1984) As Lee Edelman argues, gay men have been symbolically associated with death and the Freudian death drive in popular imagination. He shows how, as metaphorically contrasted with heterosexual reproduction, especially the female aspects of pregnancy and childbirth, gay men have been represented as the gravediggers of society, living only for pleasure and the destruction of the future. Edelman sees a desirable, radical potential in such a position, through which he calls for a widespread disavowal of false notions of the saintly child on whom parents project deluded fantasies of their own self-centered immortality. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke U. Press, 2004), 13. 164 John Burningham, “His stories and illustrations captivate children, but Maurice Sendak – the author of Where the Wild Things Are – explains why for him they are a means of exorcising a painful past,” The Telegraph, Jan 12, 2005, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3634807/His-stories-and-illustrations-captivate-children-but- Maurice-Sendak-the-author-of-Where-the-Wild-Things-Are-explains-why-for-him-they-are-a-means-of-exorcising- a-painful-past-My-life-with-the-wild-things.html 165 Emma Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence,” The Believer, November/December 2012, accessed April 22, 2016, http://www.believermag.com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak

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166 “Maurice Sendak On Being a Kid,” animated video, Andrew Romano and Ramin Setoodeh, PBS Digital Studios, produced by David Gerlach, based on Newsweek interview, September 9, 2009. 167Anxieties were especially high given that Sendak’s sister Natalie’s first husband had been killed right away in the invasion of Anzio, leaving her inconsolable for months and shaking the emotional climate of the Sendak family as a whole. Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection; Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 23; Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Public Education Program sound recordings, New York Public Library Archives, The New York Public Library. 168 Robert Everett-Green, “Maurice Sendak draws on his passions and past,” The Globe and Mail, Jan 23, 1998, University of Guelph Archival & Special Collections. 169 As cited from 2009 in Mariana Cook, “Postscript: Wild Things,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2012, 58. 170 Jodi Eichler-Levine agrees that although Sendak is not a child of camp survivors himself, he “exhibits many traits of second-generation Holocaust survivors.” Jodi Eichler-Levine, “Maurice Sendak’s Jewish Mother(s),” in Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, eds. Marjorie Lehman, Jane Kanarek, and Simon J. Bronner (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017), 3. 171 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 172 Zakrocym developed from a small community in the fifteenth century, constructing its first synagogue in the 1820s. By 1897, Jews constituted about half of the town’s population of 4,218. “Zakrocym,” The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust, Vol. 3, ed. Shmuel Spector (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 1484-1485, Center for Jewish History Reading Room Library, New York, NY. 173 “Zambrow,” ibid, 1487. 174 Sefer Zambrov: zikaron li-ḳehilat ha-ḳodesh she-hushmedah h. y. d., ed. Yom-Tow Lewinski 1899 (Tel Aviv: ha-Irgunim shel yotsʾe ha-ʻir be-ʾArtsot ha-Berit Argenṭinah ṿe-Yiśraʾel, 1963), 120, YIVO, Center for Jewish History. Peter Crane notes in a letter to the editor that Zembrova [Zambrow] was just east of the line along which Hitler and Stalin had divided Poland. The Germans took it on June 22, 1941, the first day of their attack on the U.S.S.R. Normal mail service was surely disrupted in the war zone, meaning that what Philip Sendak learned on the day of Sendak’s bar mitzvah was likely not that the relatives had already died, but probably that they were under Nazi control. Mass killings of Jews were a state secret, and not many survivors remained alive to send news of them after the killing waves took place. Crane’s note is further supported by a note in Selma Lanes’s records from an interview with Sendak, which states that Philip’s parents both died natural deaths and all other relatives remaining in Poland were killed in the Holocaust. In any case, news of close relatives’ deaths – whatever their causes – fused with news of increasing Nazi atrocities in the general region to induce Philip’s feelings of anger, helplessness, and despair. Peter Crane, letter to the editor, New York Times, April 10, 2016, accessed April 11, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/books/review/letters-every-college-girls-dream.html?_r=0; Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 175 “Zambrow,” Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust (2001), 1487. 176 Cited in Cook, “Postscript: Wild Things,” 58. 177 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 178 Jewish communal organization grew significantly in the 1930s due to the homogenization of Jewish society as the activity of separatist Landsmanshaften decreased. The rise of Nazism and its accompanying problem of addressing Jewish relations with non-Jews also induced a need for unity across Jewish groups. Taft noted that “The civil and social status of the Jew is gravely threatened […] In our country the rapid rise of anti-Semitic agitation” has led many uninvolved Jews to take part in civic-protective work and other Jewish organizations. Among the committees of New York’s 18 Jewish district boards, which included philanthropy, education, and recreation, were discrimination committees. The Brooklyn Jewish Community Council was conceived in June 1939 at a Board of Trustees meeting at the Brooklyn Jewish Center as a result of the rising problem of “the increased menace of racial and religious discrimination in the Borough and the lack of a centralized authority to deal with this problem.” It became official in January 1940. Sigmund C. Taft, “A Study and Evaluation of the Jewish Community of Bensonhurst, Borough Park, Flatbush and Williamsburg, Neighborhoods in the Borough of Brooklyn in New York City” (M.A. Thesis, New York School of Social Work, Columbia University, 1943), YIVO, Center for Jewish History, New York. 179 Taft, “A Study and Evaluation of the Jewish Community,” 30. 180 Ibid, 40-41, 49.

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As Hasia Diner illuminates, Jewish communities mourned and memorialized their WWII losses in their own formal and informal gatherings and writings in the immediate postwar years, before the advent of national, institutionalized Holocaust memory in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (New York: NYU Press, 2009). 181 The U.S. accepted over 300,000 European refugees, displaced persons, and survivors between 1933- 1950. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 293. 182 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 189. 183 According to a figure cited by Arthur Goren, American Jews raised $57.3 million in 1945 to $131.7 million in 1946 for campaigns to move refugees to Israel, increasing this figure to $205 million in 1948. Arthur Goren, “A ‘Golden Decade’ for American Jews: 1945-1955,” in American Jewish Experience, ed. Jonathan Sarna (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 296. Henry Greenspan describes the stigmatization and suppression of survivor identity that existed until 1970: “Before survivors became ‘the survivors’ they were known by other names. For many years in this country they were ‘the refugees,’ ‘the greeners’ (greenhorns), or simply ‘the ones who were there.’ [...] they evoked a shifting combination of pity, fear, revulsion, and guilt. In general, they were isolated and avoided.” He refers to Elie Wiesel’s characterization of survivor immigration, in which “People welcomed them with tears and sobs, then turned away,” treating them as “sick and needy relatives. Or else as specimens to be observed and to be kept apart from the rest of society by invisible barbed wire. They were disturbing misfits who deserved charity, but nothing else.” Henry Greenspan, “Imagining Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness,” in Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 50. 184 Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 148, 158, 312. 185 Beth B. Cohen, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007). William B. Helmreich argues that many survivors poured themselves into their work in order to move forward and to avoid their emotional suffering. The fact that eighty percent of survivors in the U.S. married other survivors reflects, in addition to shared languages and encounters in DP camps, the survivors’ sense of emotional alienation within the American Jewish community. William B. Helmreich, Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 121; Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust (New York: Penguin Books, 1979). 186 Historians have debated the sociocultural climate of postwar America and its attitudes toward the Holocaust in Jewish and wider American circles. Social histories and personal accounts have characterized the postwar era as a time in which the nation eagerly sought to forget the recent hardships and to focus on optimistic social and institutional revival. Those escapees or survivors of the Holocaust who made it to America did so largely through the hard efforts of American relatives and friends. According to Mark Anderson, “Camp survivors and European Jews who had found refuge in the United States were largely unwelcome reminders of the past in a society focused on Cold War issues of nuclear proliferation and the spread of communism.” Each refugee or survivor also required a great deal of paperwork and sometimes government intercession, as well as a guarantee of private sponsorship to ensure that they would not become dependent on the government. Beth Cohen’s study of Jewish American social workers’ interactions with survivors reveals elements of discomfort and impatience in handling the plight of those whose lives were so drastically altered by the Holocaust. Jonathan Sarna writes that in the immediate postwar years “refugees stood almost alone in this determination to memorialize what they had lost,” and the Jewish Publication Society published only one book on the Holocaust between 1950-1965. On the other hand, Hasia Diner has highlighted the understated efforts of Jewish American institutions to commemorate and respond to the Holocaust in what historians have traditionally considered a period of Jewish American apathy toward the Holocaust losses in the decades preceding the Eichmann Trial of 1960. Deborah Lipstadt lists several, often forgotten American handlings of the Holocaust in the 1950s and early 1960s but still asserts that the Holocaust did not gain its major significance in America until after those first two decades. Deborah E. Lipstadt, “America and Memory of the Holocaust, 1950-1965,” Modern Judaism 16, no. 3 (Oct. 1996), 195-214. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (New York: NYU Press, 2009); Cohen, Case Closed; Sarna, American Judaism, 260, 295- 283

296; Mark M. Anderson, “The Child Victim as Witness to the Holocaust: An American Story?,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 1 (2007): 2. In the latter half of the twentieth century, as the nation shifted toward a socially liberal, multiculturalist confessional culture, historians and cultural thinkers began to focus intently on the victims’ experiences of the Holocaust, as well as their embodied, post-traumatic afterlives in the present. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1961); Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932 – 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Epstein, Children of the Holocaust; Esther Benbassa, Suffering as Identity: The Jewish Paradigm, translated by G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2010); Alan L. Berger, Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992). 187 Bedingfield, “Trans-Memory and Diaspora,” 333-346, 345. 188 Isaac Bashevis Singer, Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, pictures by Maurice Sendak, translated from the Yiddish by I.B. Singer and Elizabeth Shub (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966), xi. 189 David Riesman’s sociological study, The Lonely Crowd (1950) is perhaps the best known of these commentaries for its depiction of the alienated American subject in a mass-produced, herd-like society. Sendak’s emotional frustration in the public school context reflects similar feelings of suffering at the hands of mechanical and impersonal social controls. Sendak’s partner, Eugene Glynn, a child psychiatrist and art critic, was one of the many voices contemplating the effects of television and other forms of mass media on the American personality. Eugene Glynn, “Television and the American Character” (1956), in Eugene Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (New York: Periscope Pub., 2008). 190 Minutes from the National Social Welfare Assembly’s Comics Committee reflect these tensions. In a February 1950 meeting, Dr. Dallas Pratt of the National Mental Health Foundation expresses ambivalence about using Superman in the organization’s educational comics. Dr. Pratt, wary of promoting authoritarianism but conscious of Superman’s charismatic influence, states at the meeting, “it is somewhat ironic to use Superman to preach against discrimination […] when the superman psychology is the basis of discrimination itself. On the other hand, it could be effective to use Superman as an advocate.” Pratt goes on to warn against “preachy materials,” pointing out that children would respond most to materials that understand their expectations and, rather than condescend to them from above, meet them at eye level to facilitate a meaningful connection and impact. Minutes, National Social Welfare Assembly Comics Committee, Feb. 1950, box 48, folder 20, Comics Project, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections. Dr. Pratt’s suggestions reflect wider shifts in child psychology and intellectual discourse on the nature of humanity after WWII. Dr. Benjamin Spock popularized “permissive,” child-centered approaches for parents learning to respond to their children’s emotions and individual differences through intuition. 191 Dumbo’s ability to fly, Sammond argues, is understood as worthwhile only when ultimately harnessed by the circus, the very institution that has imprisoned and exploited him. Cited in Nicholas Sammond, “Dumbo, Disney, and Difference: Walt Disney Productions and Film as Children’s Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature, eds. Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 151. 192 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, box 2, folders 8-9, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators, Loyola Marymount University Archives & Special Collections. 193 Francelia Butler, Sharing Literature with Children: A Thematic Anthology (New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1977), 457. 194 Sylvia Barack Fishman’s concept of “coalescence” argues that central to Jewish Americanization in general was the adoption of American values specifically by situating them as new or renegotiated Jewish values, as well as vice versa. Promoting the symbol of the child Holocaust survivor in a future-oriented American culture of child icons may exemplify this phenomenon. Sylvia Barack Fishman, Negotiating Both Sides of the Hyphen: Coalescence, Compartmentalization, and American Jewish Values (Cincinnati: Judaic Studies Program, University of Cincinnati, 1996). 195 Preceding acculturation to the American middle class and its particular conceptions of childhood, New York’s Yiddish immigrant culture of the early twentieth century, like most urban cultures with experiences of hardship, endangerment, and persecution, encouraged its youth to understand their social and political surroundings, as well as to be astutely aware of potential social dangers. Though most American public schools took until the 1960s to teach about the Holocaust, Jewish children in Israel and America of the ‘40s and ‘50s read about the atrocities committed against their people in Europe. At the Jewish Publication Society in the early twentieth century, 284 the “boundaries between adult and youth fiction were never formally set forth, and they sometimes blurred completely.” Some children read adult fiction, especially stories of European Jewish ghettos. Sarna, JPS, 78. Like the original Brothers Grimm stories, traditional Yiddish tales were generally darker and more explicit than were most of modern American children’s stories. Yiddish literary scholar Chone Shmeruk writes of one 1888 collection by Mordkhe Spektor, a friend of Sholem Aleichem’s, “it is doubtful that there is even one story in that book which we would find appropriate for children today.” Gennady Estraikh et al., introduction to Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity, eds. Gennady Estraikh et al. (Cambridge, England, and NY: Legenda, 2016), 1. 196 As Jewish newspapers began to announce the existence of death camps and mass killings by the fall of 1942, Jewish schools participated in events organized on local and national levels, such as the Children’s Solemn Assembly of Sorrow and Protest on Washington’s Birthday, 1943, which drew 3,500 representatives from 518 schools to Mecca Temple in Manhattan. Jonathan Krasner notes the “earnest expressions” on the faces of the participating children in the press photographs, which included six refugee children who spoke about their families’ victimization by the Nazis. Jonathan B. Krasner, The Benderly Boys & American Jewish Education (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 361, 365, 348. 197 Yiddish children’s magazines also detailed the events of the Holocaust in frightening detail and appealed to readers’ emotions. An April 1942 issue of Kinder Zhurnal, for example, reported the Nazis murder of over 84,000 civilians in Poland, including women, children, and the elderly – Jews more than any other people. It describes the Nazis’ treatment of the city of Barysaw, where they killed 15,000 Jews, imprisoned the rest in a barbed-wire ghetto, and, fearful that the Jews were helping the Red Army, plundered the ghetto, leading the remaining Jews, including small children, to hide in the open graves they had dug for their dead. Kinder Zhurnal, a children’s magazine established in 1920 by New York’s secular Yiddishist Sholem Aleichem Institute, was edited by Shmuel Niger from 1922-1947. “Nayes fun der velt” (world news), Kinder Zhurnal (April 1942), 17 (microfilm), Kinder Zhurnal/Farlag Matones Records, 1924-1963, YIVO, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY. A 1943 June-July issue describes Jewish men, women, and children of Warsaw fighting with arms in hand against the much-stronger “Nazi-murderer.” Ibid (June-July 1943), 15 (microfilm). Another issue reports “last month, shocking news arrived to us about what the Nazis are doing to Jews in Poland.” Details follow about the massive concentration camps and the gassing of men, women, and children in iron chambers. Ibid (December 1942), 16 (microfilm). A year later, articles feature Jewish men, women, and children of Warsaw fighting with arms in hand against the much stronger “Nazi-murderer” (Ibid, June-July 1943 (microfilm) 15) and reports of how the Nazis sent half a million Jewish men, women, and children from Warsaw ghetto the previous year to their deaths in Treblinka’s gas chambers. Ibid (June-July 1943), 15, and (August-September 1943), 14 (microfilm). 198 Ibid (August-September 1942), 3-6 (microfilm). 199 Naomi Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917-1950 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 158. 200 Diane K. Roskies, Teaching the holocaust to children (Brooklyn, NY: Ktav Pub. House, 1975), 18. 201 However, as America rallied around the image of the innocent, hopeful child and the suburban family as symbols of national regeneration, Yiddish writers published children’s stories about heroic acts that fostered the survival and regeneration of Eastern European Jewish culture and the nascent Zionist state in Palestine. Kadar, Raising Secular Jews, 167-176. 202 Kinder Zhurnal (April 1946), Kinder Zhurnal/Farlag Matones Records. 203 Mark Anderson argues that the figure of the innocent child victim surpassed other representations of Holocaust victims in order to suit a child-centered, somewhat nativist American context. Anderson, “The Child Victim as Witness.” In 1967, Otto Frank would confess in an interview that when he first read the diary, he was surprised by Anne’s depth of thought and feeling, by her seriousness – sides of her he never gleaned, despite being close with her. He concluded that most parents do not fully know their children. Video shown at Anne Frank House main exhibit, Amsterdam, Netherlands, visited April 2015. 204 Devra Ferst, “The Twisty History of Jewish Kid Lit,” The Jewish Daily Forward, November 24, 2010, http://forward.com/articles/133388/the-twisty-history-of-jewish-kid-lit/. However, Frank’s diary also deeply disturbed sensitive readers like Sendak. The year of the diary’s publication, Sendak was twenty-four years old and had only just established his name in children’s literature. He once wrote,

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I remember reading that Anne Frank had a friend in America, in Idaho or somewhere, and they exchanged letters. The girl wanted to know why Anne couldn’t come and visit her. The idea that it would have taken only a simple plane trip to save Anne’s life… and the little girl from Idaho didn’t understand that. Why should she? It was very touching to me that it was the plane trip that was the answer to everything. Anne’s death was very hard. All the little-girl playmates that I had in Brooklyn became little Anne Frank girls. And one of them actually became sick and died. I was very confused. I saw that you could die, even in America. That was hard.

Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” Sendak would eventually depict Anne Frank as a figure among endangered children in a forest within his book Dear Mili (1988). Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Public Education Program Sound Recordings. 205 Anderson, “The Child Victim as Witness,” 3. 206 Ibid, 4. 207 Proceedings of the White House Conference on Children in a Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Print. Office), 1940, 68, digitized by the Boston Public Library, https://archive.org/details/proceedingsofwhi00whit. 208 See, for example: Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011); Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 209 June Cummins, “Becoming an ‘All-of-a-Kind’ American: Sydney Taylor and Strategies of Assimilation,” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 3 (2003): 324-343. 210 Inaugural Zena Sutherland Lecture, Maurice Sendak, “Sources of Inspiration,” May 20, 1983, 9, box 7, folder 4, Zena Bailey Sutherland Papers, University of Chicago Graduate School Special Collections. 211 Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust (1979), for example, recounts growing up in a survivor family that was socially ostracized for its cultural difference within the postwar suburbs, an environment that had little patience for the weighty seriousness and emotional rigidity of her traumatized parents. This book, a kind of collective biography, was among the first to raise consciousness about the difficulties of those raised in families whose emotional culture set them apart from other Jewish American families. 212 Popular cultural representations like Disney’s film Dumbo (1941) sought to encourage the expression of individual difference (partially to avoid the creation of an automaton generation of future American adults), but only when it could be contained for the benefit of the larger system (i.e. the circus), no matter how cruel or oppressive that system seemed. Clear routes for harnessing queerness or emotional investment in Holocaust losses into the light-hearted and exclusively heterosexual American society were surely lacking. Sammond in Mickenberg and Vallone, 147-166. 213 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 191. 214 Gladys Baker Bond, Seven Little Stories on Big Subjects (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1955). 215 Until the mid-1950s, comic books featuring lurid horror, crime, and sex filled newsstands. The creation in 1954 of the Comics Magazine Association of America and its Code of criteria – such as forbidding profanity and obscenity, ridicule of police, parents, racial and religious groups, and the excessive exaggeration of the female anatomy – mitigated youth exposure to these elements. Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German American psychiatrist and author of Seduction of the Innocent (1954), argued that comic books blunted conscience, made children less susceptible to art and education, and obscured children’s understanding of relations between the sexes, and caused juvenile delinquency. Written speech for the White House Conference on Children and Youth in Washington, D.C. on March 28, 1960, Ann G. Wolfe, “Comic Books and Comic Strips: Their Effects on Children and Youth,” box 48, folder 29, Comics Project, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections. 216 This figure is according to a 1957 study. A December 1951 report showed that readership of the comic inserts was slightly higher among adults over twenty-one than among children. Sendak would have been about twenty-three at the time. Report, December 1951, box 48, folder 32, Comics Project, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections.

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The inserts featured comic strips in which figures like Superman helped lay the groundwork for making ethnic and religious minorities “cool” by demystifying misconceptions and chastising intolerance. Topics proposed and used for comics demonstrate the mainstream values of the time, which combined conservative impulses of social conformity and “family values” with gentle attempts to expand acceptance of those who did not quite fit the mold. At one meeting in 1949, proposed topics for these inserts included: “brotherhood,” “give your parents a break,” “getting along with the family,” “neighborliness,” “understanding people,” and “citizenship.” Additional topics proposed in the following year included “use of cultural agencies,” “helping plan the family budget,” “old people can be interesting,” “the advantages of belonging to a group,” “the contribution of other cultures to our civilization,” “the status of women,” and “preparation for marriage.” Participants of the National Advisory Committee for the project included representatives from such groups as the American Jewish Committee, the New York Public Library, the Girl Scouts, and National Comics Publications. The committee also consulted agencies such as the American Social Hygiene Association, the Child Welfare League of America, Community Chests and Councils, Family Service Association of America, the National Child Labor Committee, and the National Mental Health Foundation. The February 1952 comic “Who Says So?” shows the effects of gossiping and spreading rumors, while the March 1952 comic, as minutes from a committee meeting describe it, teaches “what creativity does for the person.” The social stereotype that emerges, at least in the eyes of adult contemporaries, is that of an appearance- oriented, socially minded, not-particularly-creative generation of youth. This sort of cultural climate would have been especially challenging for minorities and other outsiders disadvantaged from the perspective of the mainstream social establishment. Comics Project Assembly minutes, box 48, folder 20, Comics Project, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections. 217 Comic book insert, “Superman’s Code for Buddies,” National Comics Publications Inc., 1949, box 48, folder 30, Comics Project, Social Welfare History Archives. The following year, a strip called “Superman in ‘School Children ‘Round the World’,” Superman takes a couple of reluctant students on a flight to see how difficult schooling is in other countries, such as in Poland where children must take “several hours each day” to “leave their lessons and lay bricks” in order to help “rebuild their own schools, bombed during the war.” The rebellious boys return home appreciating the privilege of an American education. Comic book insert, “Superman in ‘School Children ‘Round the World’,” National Comics Publications Inc., 1950, box 48, folder 30, Comics Project, Social Welfare History Archives. 218 Minutes from the 15th of that month include a reported conversation in which representatives of National Urban League and American Jewish Committee advocated to Judge Murphy of the Comics Code Authority (Comics Magazine Association) for closer attention to problematic racial and religious stereotypes in comics. On March 28, 1960, Wolfe, then-chairman of the comic project committee, presented on comics at the White House Conference on Children and Youth on March 28, 1960, declaring that:

comics, as all other media of education, should seek to widen the image of the good American. In most comics, heroes are still portrayed as fair-haired, light-skinned, “clean-cut” Americans, with Anglo-Saxon names. Characters of lesser status – or, frequently, villains – may be dark-haired or dark-skinned, and may have somewhat foreign-sounding names. Characters of all backgrounds and complexions should people the comics more prominently, and in more natural roles. […] comics should also avoid stereotyping in the portrayal of family life. Comic-book family relationships perpetuate the image of the inept, blundering father, and the smart, efficient mother – “the power behind the throne,” who usually straightens out the mess. I would urge publishers and editors to take a searching look at the picture they project of the American family.

A 1960 strip called “Lend a Friendly Hand!” features a boy telling his friend, “Aw, Jim, we don’t want Sandor along. Those refugee kids can’t talk English or play ball or anything!” Superman interrupts with, “Maybe there’s a reason for that!” He takes the boys to see a refugee camp, impressing them with the hardships faced by “people who have fled to another country because of political events, war or disaster.” The last frame shows the newly empathetic boys welcoming Sandor into their group with warm facial expressions. Comic book insert, “Lend a Friendly Hand!” National Comics Publications Inc., 1960, box 48, folder 31, Comics Project, Social Welfare History Archives. 219 It would take until the 1960s, facilitated by the underground comics movement, Civil Rights, and greater positive mainstream representations of ethnic minority cultures, for comics to more readily spotlight non-WASP protagonists, including Jews and Holocaust survivors. In 1963, for example, Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber)

287 and (born Jacob Kurtzberg) would create the X-Men comics series, featuring a cast of persecuted mutant superheroes who suffered social alienation and bigotry. 220 Though not every child consciously suffers forbidden romantic or physical attractions or the distress of traumatized parents, cultural theorists like Kathryn Bond Stockton assert that all children are made “queer” by the bizarre, indeterminate roles into which adult projections place them, and that childhood is thus itself a universally queer realm in its liminal difference from the structures of the symbolic social realm and the rules of adult society into which children are eventually initiated or forced. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Steven Bruhm, Curiouser: On The Queerness Of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth B. Kidd, Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 221 There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak, Rosenbach Museum and Library, retrospective of Sendak Interviews, 2008, DVD. 222 Bill Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’” PBS NOW interview, March 12, 2004, accessed October 30, 2016, http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/sendak.html Dressing a child in white or calling them “alter” (meaning “elder” in Yiddish) was a “segula,” a Yiddish folk remedy to confuse an Angel of Death seeking children. Conversation with Prof. Ellen Kellman, Brandeis University, Monday March 13, 2017. 223 Cited in Cook, “Postscript: Wild Things,” 58. 224 Tony Kushner, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present (NY: Abrams, 2003), 24. 225 Sendak once said he based his character Ida on Pamina of Mozart’s Magic Flute. Pamina is forcibly separated from her beloved mother; is unaware that her mother is not sane; and is in love with a prince who loves her back but can never reveal it, due to a vow of silence. Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Public Education Program sound recordings. 226 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Thank you, ChaeRan Freeze, for introducing me to this work. Part of what would draw Sendak to the writing of Henry James and to his own articulation of childhood defiance was his sense of outrage against those who held children back from learning about the world and “becoming who they are.” Henry James delighted Sendak by writing children who “stay up and see what the grown-ups are really doing,” who enter even “the most deranged adult society, and they’re permitted to view and morally judge their elders.” For Sendak this was “a fantasy come true” and one from which he would draw in books like In the Night Kitchen, in which Mickey defies his bedtime in order “to see what goes on in the Night Kitchen.” Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature (New York: Random House, 1981), 64. David Schearl of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) suffers a similar dilemma growing up a sensitive and precocious boy in an overextended Jewish immigrant family in the Lower East Side’s tenement slums; he finds himself questioning who his real father is, infatuated with a gentile boy, and obsessed with the dangerous energy of a train rail, which electrocutes him. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1934). An analysis of Roth’s difficulty with social belonging is also informed by his later confession of incest with his sister in his teen years. Sendak’s close bonds with his siblings and the ambiguous boundaries of those bonds in childhood are handled in Chapter Four of the present study. Adam Kirsch, “Henry Roth Slept With His Sister and Cousin,” review of Mercy of a Rude Stream by Henry Roth, Tablet Magazine, July 2014, accessed October 30, 2016, www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/180662/henry-roth-quartet 227 Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 254-255. 228 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 229 Congregation Sons of Israel Yearbook, 1947 Yearbook, Semi-Centennial Celebration, 5, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History, New York. 230 David G. Roskies and Naomi Diamant, Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 49. 231 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” The opening story, “Fool’s Paradise,” follows Atzel, a boy who, lured by his old nurse’s stories about the delights of paradise, tries to will himself dead by the powers of his imagination in order to convince his parents to bury him. Singer and Sendak, Zlateh, 5-16; Researcher’s notes, Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records (DM009), Georgia Institute of Technology Archives, http://finding- aids.library.gatech.edu/repositories/2/resources/436

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232 To guilt Sendak into behaving, Sadie also talked about Leo Schindler, Sendak’s maternal cousin who was about Sendak’s age, dying in a camp. Aaron Schindler, Sadie’s brother, was among other relatives who had also stayed in Poland and died in the war. Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are’”; Cynthia Zarin, “Not Nice: Maurice Sendak and the perils of childhood,” The New Yorker, April 17, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/17/not-nice. 233 “‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak,” NPR.org, May 8, 2012, accessed May 11, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152248901/fresh-air-remembers-author-maurice-sendak 234 Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 63. 235 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 236 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 23. 237 Emma Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence,” The Believer, November/December 2012, Accessed April 22, 2016, http://www.believermag.com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak. 238 According to neo-Freudian approaches, children benefited most from a calm, reason-oriented approach; for a parent to place guilt on a child was to unduly privilege parents’ emotional reactions above children’s development. Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents (NY and London: NYU Press, 2003), 63. 239 Glenn Edward Sadler, “A Conversation with Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss,” 1982, rpt. in Peter C. Kunze, ed., Conversations with Maurice Sendak (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 67. 240 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CA Press, 1990), 81. 241 David Leddick, Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 4. 242 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 356. 243 Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, Sept. 1, 1980, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-boys-on-the-beach/ 244 Taft, “A Study and Evaluation of the Jewish Community,” 35. 245 George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 246 Sara Miller’s Under the Eagle’s Wing (1899), for example, published by the Jewish Publication Society, offers the message that Jews would be less despised if they were “less submissive” and more like the courageous fighters of the Torah. Sarna, JPS, 86. 247 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 190. 248 “‘Don’t assume anything’: A Conversation with Maurice Sendak Philip Nel,” 2001, rpt. in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 119. 249 Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Public Education Program sound recordings. 250 Ibid. 251 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 252 “‘Fresh Air’ Remembers,” 2012. 253 The 1950s conception of the term “gay” – vivacious, carefree, and joyous – connotes a raw and cheerful freedom of emotion at odds with the mainstream ideals of measured reason and restraint valued especially within Protestant American masculinity. In the mid-century social order, gayness belonged to feminine, child-like, or “ethnic” people. White men were expected to enjoy gayness only vicariously. An poem illustrated by Sendak in 1953 has a man beseech his love, “Please be gay, Amanda, / Amanda, please be gay, / For when you’re gay, Amanda, / The stars come out by day, / The police throw parking tags away, / And I want to kick up my heels and bray. / Amanda, / Dear Amanda, / Please be gay.” Ogden Nash, You Can’t Get There from Here, illustrated by Maurice Sendak (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953), 24. 254 Emma Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence,” The Believer, November/December 2012, Accessed April 22, 2016, http://www.believermag.com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak. 255 Tim Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die,” The Times, September 24, 2011, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maurice-sendak-im-ready-to-die-f6zrhvmh6pk. 256 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 257 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Leroy Richmond, June 14, 1966, The Maurice Sendak Archive, 1965-2007, Columbia Rare Books & Special Collections Manuscripts Collection, University of South Carolina. 289

258 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, Feb 24, 1969, box 1.3, folder 3, Coleman Dowell Papers, Fales Library, NYU. 259 Jacob Kohn, Modern Problems of Jewish Parents: A Study in Parental Attitudes (New York: The Women’s League of the United Synagogue of America, 1932), 75. 260 In the early 1920s, Stephen S. Wise refers to the “evil of solitariness,” a message taught to and internalized by children. Stephen S. Wise, Child Versus Parent (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), 36. 261 Chauncey, Gay New York, 72. 262 Michael J. Sweet, “Talking about Feygelekh: A Queer Male Representation in Jewish American Speech,” in Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, eds. Anna Livia and Kira Hall (Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116-117. 263 Typescript, Maurice Sendak, no date, “In Grandpa’s House,” Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, PA. Tony Kushner interprets this message as coming “right from the pamphlets of the Workers’ Bund,” advocating for strength in numbers against capitalist giants. Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 43. 264 Jemma Tosh, Perverse Psychology: The Pathologization of Sexual Violence and Transgenderism (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 71. It would take until 1973 for the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, after an address at the 1972 Dallas APA convention by a gay psychiatrist who, advocating for this change, wore a full rubber mask and an oversized suit so as not to risk his own career. Homosexuality was that contested and controversial in those years. Ira Glass, “204: 81 Words” (radio show transcript), This American Life, January 18, 2002, accessed Nov. 3, 2016, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/204/transcript 265 Lee Edelman understands the metaphorical childlessness of homosexuals as earning them a lasting popular association with “the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic, enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning” and contrary to all collective, future-oriented human values. Edelman, No Future, 13. 266 Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, dir. Spike Jonze and , perf. Maurice Sendak, Lynn Caponera, Catherine Keener, Laboratories, 2010, DVD. 267 Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’” 268 Patricia Cohen, “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are,” The New York Times, Sept. 9, 2008; Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 269 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 270 Later, over the fireplace of the Greenwich Village apartment he inhabited from 1961-1971 on West 9th Street, Sendak would display a painting he made of a young “Talmudic student,” whom he described as “an old childhood friend…a very dear friend.” Whether or not the subject was Mr. Berd himself, it is likely the painting stimulated memories of this person, Sendak’s primary connection to traditional Jewish learning. Muriel Harris, “Impressions of Sendak” 1970, reprinted in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 38. 271 David Herszenson, “Of Fags, Flags, Faggots and Feygeles,” The Jewish Daily Forward, April 21, 2010. In Joseph Green’s film A Brivele der mamen (1938), for example, Edmund Zayenda’s plays Aron ‘Arele’ Berdyczewski (coincidentally sharing the surname of Sendak’s gentle teacher), who, once immigrated to America becomes a fanciful singer called “Irving Bird” who rides in limousines and forgets his Yiddish-speaking mother. Sendak would have been about ten years old and already studying with “Mr. Berd” at the time of this popular film’s release. It is likely Sendak would have been aware of the connection, growing up in neighborhoods filled with his parents’ native Yiddish. David M. Lugowski, “Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics of Hollywood's Production Code,” Cinema Journal 38, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 3–35. Birds have also been used as a symbol for Jews – based on the antisemitic stereotypes of beaked noses, flat feet, and flighty rootlessness. Using this motif, Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Jewbird” (1963) centers on a crow named Schwartz fleeing antisemitic persecution. Bernard Malamud, A Malamud Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967); Chauncey, Gay New York, 353. A New York Times reporter would later even describe Sendak himself as “a bird in a nest,” observing him surrounded on all sides by objects, toys, books, pins, and gadgets. Braun, “Sendak Raises the Shade on Childhood,” Francelia Butler Papers. 272 Sendak’s Fantasy Sketches (1970), which he composed in a free-association manner while listening to music, include children devouring and being devoured by birds, fish, and their parents. Maurice Sendak, Fantasy Sketches (Philadelphia: Philip H. & A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1970). 290

The motif also reappears in an ink study for ’s Seven Tales, in which a bird finds a wandering boy in the woods and takes him on a joy ride past the moon and over a village. Ink study, Maurice Sendak, “Seven Tales,” Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection, Elmer Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries. In his later work Brundibar (2003), children fly on the backs of blackbirds in a quest to save their mother’s life. 273 Jonathan Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things,” Rolling Stone, December 30, 1976, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/maurice-sendak-king-of-all-wild-things-19761230?page=3 274 Cited in Jill P. May, “Envisioning the Jewish Community in Children’s Literature: Maurice Sendak and Isaac Singer,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 33, no. 3 / 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2000-Winter 2001), 147. 275 Maurice Sendak in John Burningham, ed., When We Were Young (Bloomsbury: London, 2004). 276 Peter Pan becomes birdlike and flies away in direct protest to the prospect of growing up; Sendak’s children merge with animals when they feel lost or disconnected from their caretakers or the wider adult world, whether that disconnection from the mainstream comes from ethnic-cultural, individual-sensual, or post-traumatic- family currents. Stockton, The Queer Child. Sendak’s children feel disconnected from the social order for the very same reason they come to join animals – Sendak once said, almost admiringly, “I think there is something barbaric in children.” Romano and Setoodeh, “Maurice Sendak On Being a Kid.” 277 Greif, Age of the Crisis of Man, 134-135. Rather than an act of passive escapism, Sendak’s investment in children’s fantasies was an active resistance and critical distancing from the regulating social mechanisms that shape and control normative subjects through a matrix of surveillance. See the introduction for a discussion of midcentury children’s literature as a particularly suitable realm for dodging social surveillance and channeling subversive ideas beyond the radar of mainstream powers. To be “off the map” is, in a theoretical sense, to be on one’s own terms, exempt from some of the potentially intrusive aspects of wider social government. George Chauncey nostalgically describes gay New York before the 1930s as, for a time, thriving through its social obscurity: “much of gay life had been governed by an informal ‘understanding’ fashioned through constant skirmishes over the uses of public sites, which allowed queer men to socialize in public only so long as they did nothing to draw attention to themselves as homosexuals. Restaurants, speakeasies, and even bathhouses patronized by gay men were able to flourish so long as they kept out of public view.” Chauncey, Gay New York, 356. 278 While affection and romantic play between little boys and girls is “endearing” and expected in an exclusively heterosexual social order, the same expression between two children of the same biological sex is often corrected and disdained. For more discussion around this idea, see: Steven Angelides, “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 141-177; Lee Edelman, No Future; R. Danielle Egan and Gail Hawkes. Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids up Gay,” Social Text 29 (1991): 18- 27; Stockton, The Queer Child; Abate and Kidd, Over the Rainbow. 279 Maurice Sendak, “Enamored of the Mystery,” Innocence and Experience: Essays & Conversations on Children’s Literature, eds. Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1987), 371. 280 Patrick Rodgers, “Selected Sendak: Interviews by the Rosenbach,” Rosenbach Museum Archives, 2007- 2008, rpt. in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 165. 281 Braun, “Sendak Raises the Shade on Childhood,” Francelia Butler Papers. 282 Quoted in Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” These pictures were copyrighted but not published. Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Public Education Program sound recordings. 283 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 12; Zarin, “Not Nice.” 284 Dagmar Langlois, “The Influence of Maurice Sendak, Leo and Diane Dillon, and Chris Van Allsburgh on Contemporary American Children’s Book Illustration” (M.A. thesis, Syracuse University, 1991), 165. 285 Gary Groth, Interview with Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 53. 286 Stearns, Anxious Parents, 108. 287 By the 1950s, youth culture was firmly oriented away from parents and toward the social sphere. A prosperous middle class of consumers trained its children to engage in a growing service economy by becoming aware of “fad and fashion,” and by developing “sensitivity to the opinions of others” and “an ability to alter themselves accordingly.” Even as early as 1936, self-help books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and 291

Influence People became bestsellers. Adults were “fascinated and appalled by teenage behavior in the years immediately following World War II—the way they dressed, talked, and associated with one another seemed bizarre and ever-changing. But by the mid-1950s there was real consternation, allied with the belief that the mass media, the vehicle of a new peer culture, had erected a barrier between parent and child. […] By the late 1950s, social commentators were arguing that teens had taken over popular culture and were dictating their vision to elders.” Sendak came of age as a queer outlier to this value system, focused on the serious emotions of young children and elderly immigrants, rather than on the popular styles and norms of young adults. Joseph E. Illick, American Childhoods (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 106, 117, 121. 288 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, April 19, 1971 and March 1971, Coleman Dowell Papers. 289 WWII enabled some art students to find otherwise-unavailable jobs. Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 24- 25. 290 Groth, Maurice Sendak Interview, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 57. 291 Ink drawing, Maurice Sendak, Atomics for the Millions, Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, PA. 292 Chauncey, Gay New York, 159. 293 Jonathan Weinberg (family friend of Sendak and Consulting Curator and Director of Research The Maurice Sendak Foundation) mentioned that Sendak went by “Mark,” even signing his name “Mark” when writing to Eugene Glynn in the 1950s. Conversation with Jonathan Weinberg, October 28, 2017. I speculate that this might have been in order to ease his social integration in a culture that would have seen “Maurice” as foreign and fanciful. It’s possible that the fame he began to acquire publishing under the name “Maurice” is what led him to eventually shed “Mark” in his social life, probably by the late 1950s. 294 Chauncey, Gay New York, 86-90. 295 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 29. 296 “‘Fresh Air’ Remembers,” 2012. 297 Tell Them Anything You Want (DVD). 298 Illick, 115. 299 Ibid, 121. 300 Heather K. Love, “Emotional Rescue,” in Gay Shame, eds. David M. Halperin & Valerie Traub (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 258. 301 Associations between “artistic” men and homosexuality may stem from popular stereotypes associating theater, music, and visual art with gay men, as well as early twentieth-century psychological studies of “inverts,” such as those by Havelock Ellis, who wrote, “the congenitally inverted may, I believe, be looked upon as a class of individuals exhibiting nervous characters which to some extent approximate them to persons of artistic genius. The dramatic and artistic aptitudes of inverts are, therefore, partly due to the circumstances of the invert’s life, which render him necessarily an actor…” Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1, Sexual Inversion (Watford, London, and Leipzig: The University Press, 1900), 122-124. 302 Bertram Slaff, “Creativity: Blessing or Burden?,” Adolescent Psychiatry (1981): 86. 303 Cited in Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies,” in In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005), rpt. in Reading Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity, eds. Susan Archer Mann and Ashly Suzanne Patterson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 346. Halberstam writes that “queer time” as a concept emerged in the late twentieth century among gay men facing impending mortality during the AIDS crisis. 304 Cited in Philip Nel, “Wild Things, Children and Art: The Life and Work of Maurice Sendak,” The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 12-29, 14. 305 For further analysis of Sendak’s artistic style and influences on his artwork for Dear Mili, see: Marcus, Leonard S. Marcus, The Art of Maurice Sendak: A Conversation with Maurice Sendak conducted by Leonard S. Marcus, The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Nov. 22, 2002 – Jan. 12, 2003, Amherst, MA; Gregory Maguire, Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009); Paul G. Arakelian, “Text and Illustration: A Stylistic Analysis of Books by Sendak and Mayer,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1985): 122-127; Sendak at the Rosenbach, exhibition catalog, curated by Vincent Giroud and Maurice Sendak, April 28 – October 30, 1995, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, PA; Brian Anderson, Catalogue for an Exhibition of Pictures by Maurice Sendak, December 16 – February 29, 1975-76, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (London: Bodley Head, 1975); and Hamida Bosmajian, “Memory and Desire in the Landscapes of Sendak’s Dear Mili,” The Lion and the Unicorn 19, no. 2 (1995): 194. 306 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 292

307 The advent of the modern teenager – the social actor whose standards and styles are generated by peers instead of by parents – became concrete shortly after Sendak aged out of his teens. Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 33. Sarah Chinn persuasively argues for understanding the fluid, self-constructed culture of urban, early twentieth-century immigrant youth as the root of the cultural category of the modern teenager, which became widely visible and concrete by the 1940s and’50s, just as Sendak entered his twenties. Like the children of urban immigrants, who learned new cultural scripts, language, mannerisms, and skills in order to survive in the fluid, diverse, and competitive spheres beyond the specific frameworks of their own family’s Old World households, the modern teenager evolves according to social expectations, self-policing, and the messages of persuasive media, beyond the domain of home or family tradition. Teenagers, along with the advertisers and cultural figures who influence them, constantly redefine their conceptions of social acceptability and distribute power accordingly. Originated by the first generations of intermixed, American-born Italians, Irishmen, Eastern Europeans, Asians, and other ethnicities, this new power structure posed the democratic possibility of overcoming the limitations of ethnicity, religion, class, or social status via the achievement of “cool.” Sarah Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ & London: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 308 Roger Sutton, “An Interview with Maurice Sendak,” The Horn Book Magazine 79 (2003): 694. 309 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 16. 310 Tim Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 311 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 16-17. 312 Quoted in Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 35. 313 Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” Slaff was co-founder of the New York Society for Adolescent Psychiatry in 1958 and was at one point a president of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry. He would also take on a leadership role in the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists. A 2004 newsletter of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists welcomes members to a spring conference in New York City, which includes Sunday board meetings at Slaff’s home, followed by drinks at Therapy, a gay nightclub that remains popular in New York’s gay-friendly Hell’s Kitchen. Slaff had experience as a captain in the Army Medical Corps (1946-48) before beginning private practice in 1949, during which time he also became Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Child- Adolescent Division of the Mt. Sinai Department of Psychiatry. Slaff’s literary sensitivities led him to join the Board of Directors of the nonprofit Dalkey Archive Press, as well as to serve as first reader for his partner, the novelist Coleman Dowell whom Sendak also befriended. Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists Newsletter 30, no. 2 (April 2004): 5; American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry Newsletter (Winter 2013): 13; Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 192. 314 Richard Canning describes Dowell’s subject matter as “the vicissitudes, thrills, and agonies of the human mind as it struggles to make sense of the body’s impulses, vexations, and pleasures.” Living with Dowell’s reportedly antisemitic attitudes, the Jewish Slaff must have personally empathized with some of Sendak’s ambivalence toward the non-Jewish mainstream and its wavering between multicultural and nativist impulses. Richard Canning, “Something Unforgettable, Forgotten,” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 14, no. 6 (Nov/Dec 2007): 19-21; Edmund White, preface to Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell, ed. Eugene Hayworth, (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), xiii. 315 Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 316 Moby Dick describes, for example, two men intertwined in bed, in their “hearts’ honeymoon.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Bantam Classics, 1981), 69. Analyses of Melville as a potentially repressed homosexual are based on his investment in symbols of eroticism between men, the concept in Moby Dick of a threatening sperm whale lurking like a secret beneath the ocean’s surface, and the author’s own intense, romantic friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, about whom Melville would suggestively write, “I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.” Erik Hage, The Melville-Hawthorne Connection: A Study of the Literary Friendship (Jefferson, NC & London: McFarland & Co., 2014), 22; Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 88; John Bryant, “Pierre and Pierre: Editing and Illustrating Melville,” review of Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities. The Kraken Edition by Herman Melville, ed. Hershel Parker, pictures by Maurice Sendak, College English 60, no. 3 (Mar., 1998): 336-341.

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317 Gregory Maguire, Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 8-9. 318 Jonathan Weinberg, introduction to Desperate Necessity, ed. Jonathan Weinberg, 11; Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, xvi. A strange sort of symmetry emerged between the Sendak-Glynn and Dowell-Slaff couples: both were comprised of an artist and a psychologist, the artist fleeing repeatedly to nearby, gay-friendly island retreats (Fire Island for Sendak, Shelter Island for Dowell); both were a Jewish-gentile pair that loved and owned dogs. 319 A psychiatrist in public medicine with a specialty in treating adolescents and supervising social workers, Gene would also pursue graduate studies in intellectual history and art history at Columbia in the 1960s. Jonathan Weinberg, introduction to Desperate Necessity, ed. Jonathan Weinberg, 11, 13; Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 10. 320 David Rosen, Sin, Sex & Subversion: How What Was Taboo in 1950s New York Became America’s New Normal (New York: Carrel Books, 2016); Eugene Hayworth, Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (Champaign & London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), 36. 321 Hayworth (2007), 36. For further writing on Bernstein’s sexuality and artistic career, see: Billy J. Harbin et al., eds., The Gay & Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures in American Stage History in the Pre-Stonewall Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 59-62; and Leonard Bernstein, The Leonard Bernstein Letters, ed. Nigel Simeone (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Leddick, Intimate Companions. 322 Lisa Hammel, “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet,” New York Times, January 5, 1973, Maurice Sendak, Art & Artist Files, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Library, Washington D.C., consulted November 7, 2015. 323 Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 324 In 1950, for example, the New York State Liquor Authority revoked the liquor license of the Salle de Champagne, a popular Greenwich Village cabaret restaurant, because the venue had allowed the performance at “amateur night” of a singer who investigators claimed to be singing about “fairies and lesbians” and who had been denied a required cabaret card because of two prior convictions for “homosexual solicitation.” Chauncey, Gay New York, 352. But in the 1930s-‘50s there were also privileged, exclusive milieus of gay and bisexual men that met discreetly in New York and other urban centers. These included among them a number of Jews working in the visual art and theater worlds – some involved in children’s books. Jewish men like the discreetly gay Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), a giant of the cultural scene who co-founded the New York City ballet, and self-identified bisexual Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), the American composer and musician, benefited from the understanding and generosity of their devoted wives, who lived with these men through the late twentieth century in arrangements that honored emotional commitments but allowed for homosexual transgressions of the marriage. Leonard Bernstein, The Leonard Bernstein Letters, ed. Nigel Simeone (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Leddick, Intimate Companions. Sendak’s therapist, Bertram Slaff, who was also gay and Jewish, was an acquaintance of Leonard Bernstein’s since the 1940s. Hayworth, Fever Vision, 36. Kirstein’s social circle also included members of the artistic circle including Bernard Perlin, the painter and gay son of Russian Jewish immigrants (who, like Sendak, made figurative art with undertones of queer boyhood and Holocaust-infused Jewish endangerment during an era of American abstraction, also retiring from Manhattan to Ridgefield, Connecticut), as well as photographer George Platt Lynes (1907-1955), who had a romance with Clement Hurd. Hurd would later illustrate Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny (1942) and Goodnight Moon (1947), a favorite of Sendak’s. Lynes photographed Hurd nude in his studio, as well as “sprawled naked over a large rock in the woods.” Aaron Rosen, “Bernard Perlin: Europe’s American,” in In Focus: Orthodox Boys 1948 by Bernard Perlin, Aaron Rosen, ed., Tate Research Publication, 2016, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/orthodox-boys-bernard-perlin/europes-american, accessed November 4, 2016; Leddick, Intimate Companions, 93. It is unclear to what extent the younger, reclusive Sendak might have participated in such circles. He was more interested in books than in parties; moreover, even among artists, children’s book illustrators were still socially belittled as “kiddie book illustrators” in those years. He later confessed that staying late at parties made him anxious, because he was usually eager to work the next morning, and that he was never one for drinking, though he enjoyed smoking cigarettes. Meryle Secrest, “Sendak Hasn’t Lost That Direct Link With Childhood,” Francelia Butler Papers, Series 2, box 9, folder: “Sendak, Maurice (Author).” As a twenty-four-year-old, an Eighth-Street 294 bookshop in Greenwich Village was the center of his universe, Sendak wrote. Maurice Sendak, forward to R.O. Blechman: Between the Lines, ed. Bea Feitler (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1980) 7. 325 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. 326 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 16. 327 Groth, Interview with Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 47. 328 Cohen, “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are.” 329 Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters, eds. Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006), xii. 330 Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 299; Seth Lerer, “Wild Thing: Maurice Sendak and the Worlds of Children’s Literature,” a talk for the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s exhibition: “There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak,” September 8, 2009 - January 19, 2010, uploaded to Youtube Sept. 29, 2009, accessed Nov 3, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lducj5nUkrI 331 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 11 332 Maurice Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things,” Vassar Quarterly 92, no. 4, September 1, 1996, 10. 333 Nordstrom lived with her partner Mary Griffith for decades. Maria Popova, “How Ursula Nordstrom, the Greatest Patron Saint of Modern Childhood Stood, Up for Creativity Against Commercial Cowardice,” Brain Pickings, Feb. 2, 2015, https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/02/ursula-nordstrom-letters-integrity/; Kelly Blewett, “Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer History of the Children’s Book,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 28, 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ursula-nordstrom-and-the-queer-history-of-the-childrens-book/ 334 Marcus writes that Nordstrom “reserved her highest level of devotion for the artists and writers she plucked from obscurity, and whose careers she felt privileged to guide from the beginning onward.” Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 17. 335 Ibid. 336 Groth, Interview with Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 58. 337 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 17. 338 Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), 41. 339 Ibid, 81, 165. 340 Ibid, 147-148. 341 Ibid, 156. 342 Ibid, 165. 343 Ibid, 99-100. 344 Philip Nel suggests that Gorey may have also been gay. Gorey painted emotionally confusing and disturbing situations in traditional Victorian and Edwardian settings. Philip Nel, “In or Out?: Crockett Johnson, Ruth Krauss, Sexuality, Biography,” Nine Kinds of Pie (Philip Nel’s blog), February 17, 2011, accessed April 21, 2016, http://www.philnel.com/2011/02/17/in-or-out/; In a 1972 letter to Nordstrom, Sendak deemed Gorey a “mensche.” Marcus, Dear Genius, 338. 345 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 27. 346 In December 1954, ostensibly suffering feelings of guilt or entrapment, Sendak would send Krauss a wishful drawing of a man taking off in a sailboat toward a lighthouse, his hair blowing freely in the wind. In the years of Sendaks’ parents’ youth, Kafka’s writing likened the modern condition to that of an endangered child or animal, lamenting his entrapment in a bureaucratic surveillance state in which one might be accused of crimes unknown even to oneself, and persecuted by mysterious authorities to which one had no concrete access or understanding. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Ruth Krauss and David Johnson Leisk, December 21, 1954, box 2, folder 44, Ruth Krauss Papers, series 2, box 8, folder 261, University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections, Storrs, CT. A great admirer of Kafka’s writing, Sendak would later create a “World Mother Goose Theater” in Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967) based on Kafka’s “Nature Theater of Oklahoma” in his story Amerika. Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn, 59. 347 “‘Don’t assume anything’: A Conversation with Maurice Sendak Philip Nel,” from interviewer's private collection, June 28, 2001, rpt. in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 133. 348 Ibid, 131.

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349 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. 350 Sendak contrasted this aspect of midcentury American children’s publishing with that of Europe. Jennifer M. Brown, “The Rumpus Goes On: Max, Maurice Sendak and a clan of bears pay tribute to a lifelong mentorship,” Publishers Weekly April 18, 2005, 252, 16, 19. 351 “Don’t assume anything”: A Conversation with Maurice Sendak Philip Nel 2001 From interviewer's private collection, 28 June 2001 reprinted in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 133. 352 Eulogy for Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak, 1993, pages 2-3, Lillian Hoban Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. 353 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 18; Philip Nel, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2012), 166. 354 Eulogy for Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak, 1993, page 2, Lillian Hoban Papers. 355 Vincent Giroud and Maurice Sendak (curators), Sendak at the Rosenbach, catalog of an exhibition held at the Rosenbach Museum & Library, April 28-October 30, 1995, 8. 356 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 18. 357 List collected from the class of Dorothy Walker, Group G., Ruth Krauss, January 12, 1951, Ruth Krauss Papers, series 2, box 8, folder 261, University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections, Storrs, CT. 358 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 40. 359 Ibid, 42. 360 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 18. 361 Quoted in Nat Hentoff, “Among the Wild Things,” New Yorker, January 15, 1966, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/01/22/among-the-wild-things 362 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 26. 363 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 364 Leonard S. Marcus, “The Resilience of Children in Maurice Sendak’s Books,” interview by NYU Child Study Center Grand Rounds, published on Youtube by NYU Langone Medical Center October 28, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q9UgR3Zyxs 365 Hayworth, Fever Vision, 43. 366 Philip Nel, “In or Out?,” 2011. 367 Eulogy for Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak, 1993, pages 2-3, Lillian Hoban Papers; Nel, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss, 123. 368 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work,” 18. 369 “Questions to an Artist Who Is Also an Author: A Conversation between Maurice Sendak and Virginia Haviland,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 28, no. 4 (Oct. 1971): 262-80, rpt. in Peter C. Kunze, ed., Conversations with Maurice Sendak (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 34. 370 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 260. 371 Ungerer’s work arose out of the personal void in his subjectivity resulting from a traumatic childhood of witnessing warfare and experiencing fascist indoctrination and cultural repression as an Alsatian child under Nazi rule. Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, dir. Brad Bernstein, 2013, http://www.faroutthemovie.com/tomi-ungerer/ 372 Described by himself and others as a man more of the nineteenth century than of his contemporary era, Sendak immersed himself in novels, chapbooks, and children’s stories of the 1800s. He admired the compact size of the chapbook as most appropriate for a child’s hands and emulated its smallness in his 1962 Nutshell Library, a collection of miniature books. Sendak conceived these books as subversions of the moralistic traditions of children’s literature – books so discreet and intimate that they could be surreptitiously read by children “behind their stupid Sunday School books,” as Nordstrom put it. Marcus, Dear Genius, 154. 373 Hillel Italie, “Maurice Sendak with the Wild Things, now (+video) The beloved children’s book author passed away at 83 after suffering a stroke,” The , 8 May 2012, Christian Science Monitor, accessed Dec. 20, 2013, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/LatestNewsWires/2012/0508/MauriceSendakwiththeWildThingsnowvideo 374 Pencil sketch, Maurice Sendak, Ruth Krauss Papers, series 2, box 8, folder 270, Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut.

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375 Pencil study, Maurice Sendak, “I’ll Be You and You Be Me,” Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. 376 Pencil study, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. 377 Phrases like “love birds” and “empty nest,” as well as the symbol of the stork connote associations with the bourgeois family, romance, and sexuality. Antisemitic depictions have drawn Jews as beaked, chicken-legged, and flighty, rootless menaces. Homophobic depictions have also used bird features, depicting gay men as fluttery, erratic, and delicate – hence the pejorative Yiddish epithet for a gay man: “feygele” or “little bird.” In The Little White Bird, J.M. Barrie’s adult story on which Peter Pan is based, all children are birds before they are born, and house swallows, Peter’s favorite birds, are dead children punished for disobeying the rules and staying in Kensington Gardens overnight. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), 25. 378 Book cover drafts, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. 379 Kadar, Raising Secular Jews, 235. 380 Sound cassette (2 sound files), Maurice Sendak, September 14, 1993, Unit DA00228, September 14, 1993, Public Education Program sound recordings. 381 Eulogy for Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak, 1993, page 3, Lillian Hoban Papers. 382 Eulogy for Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak, 1993, page 5, Lillian Hoban Papers. 383 Typescript draft, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. 384 Maurice Sendak, Kenny’s Window (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), 42. 385 Ink study, Maurice Sendak, “Wheel on the School,” Maurice Sendak Archive, Rosenbach Library. 386 A sketch not used in the published book also depicts friends of all sorts enjoying closeness, including two boys walking cheek-to-cheek. Ibid, unused ink sketch. A draft illustration for the line “WE’D BE LIKE TWINS” shows two female friends clasping arms, their heads resting against each other in a moment of ambiguously queer affection, made even more queer by the presence of two suns in the sky behind them. A second draft – closer to the published version – takes a more cautious approach to the girls’ mutual affection, however, replacing this image with one in which the girls both face forward, heads apart, each girl smiling to herself. The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960) also features two boys walking in synchronized step with their arms around each other, one boy resting his hand on the other’s torso. Maurice Sendak, The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960), 34. 387 Pencil study, Maurice Sendak, “Let’s Be Enemies,” Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. 388 Blewett, “Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer History of the Children’s Book.” 389 Nordstrom also worked on a sequel titled The Secret Choice, presumably about gay experience beyond childhood, but she could not find a way to finish it, so she burned the manuscript. Ibid. 390 Marcus, Dear Genius, 224. 391 Hillel Italie, “Maurice Sendak with the Wild Things.” 392 Zarin, “Not Nice.” 393 Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 68. 394 Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’” 395 Zarin, “Not Nice”; Kenneth Kidd, “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picture-Book Psychologist,” in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, edited by Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213. 396 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 63-65; Patrick L. Cooney, “History of Cornwall, Connecticut: Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut,” NY-NJ-CT Botany Online, n.d., accessed Nov. 3, 2016, http://www.nynjctbotany.org/lgtofc/cornwallhistory.html 397 Corrected typescripts, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. 398 Cited in Anne Commire, “Maurice Sendak,” Something About the Author: Facts and Pictures about Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People 27 (Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company, Book Tower, 1982): 187. 399 Sendak would later have his hero Mickey, naked with genitals exposed, crowing, “COCK a DOODLE DOO!” when asserting his newfound confidence. Maurice Sendak, In the Night Kitchen (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 31. 400 Sendak, Kenny’s Window, 1. 401 Ibid, 17. 402 Ibid, 19. Sendak similarly associates the Old Country with traditional gender roles in his illustrations for Ruth Krauss’s I’ll Be You and You Be Me (1954), in which, in a wedding scene, he draws hex signs in the sky and

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“an ox – not the customary American horse – pulling the wedding carriage.” Sonheim, Maurice Sendak, 32. He also has the bride and groom eat chicken soup at their wedding, a nod to traditional Eastern European Jewish cuisine. 403 Sendak, Kenny’s Window, 23. 404 Ibid, 51. 405 Philip was always uneasy about the fact that his two sons were working as artists, while his daughter wanted to be an artist but could not succeed in the field. Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan, video, 1985, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art. 406 Jeffrey Jon Smith, “A Conversation with Maurice Sendak,” based on transcript of a phone conversation with Sendak, August 27, 1974. 407 Sendak, Kenny’s Window, 19. 408 Typescript, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” folder 1, Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. 409 Ibid, folder 3. 410 Ibid, folder 4. 411 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, May 25, 1962, Kane family letters, Rosenbach Library. 412 Typescript, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” folder 3, Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. 413 Sendak, Kenny’s Window, 7. 414 Ibid, 34. 415 Typescript, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” folder 1, Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. 416 John Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 127. 417 Sendak in Burningham, When We Were Young, 123-124. 418 Typescript, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” folder 1, Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection.

Chapter Two

419 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881-1981 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982). Racial categorization factored into American Jews’ anxiety in the 1930s: “At the height of the Depression, Jews in America could scarcely have been more torn about their place in the American racial system. A growing sense of insecurity heightened their identification with blacks even as it pushed them toward whiteness. Increasing attacks from hostile forces intensified their feelings of ‘racial’ pride and solidarity while also underscoring the danger of being seen as distinct in race.” After 1939, radio priest Charles Coughlin promoted the view that Jews were pushing America into WWII for their own self-interest, against American interest, riling up antisemitic sentiment among urban Catholics and profascist groups. Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 189, 191. As significant numbers of Jews moved to the suburbs and became wealthier in these decades, anti-Jewish feelings increased: new policies excluded Jews from residential areas, country clubs, and resorts; Henry Ford’s “The International Jew” unleashed a campaign of unprecedented public antisemitism in America; Jews were widely suspected of communist conspiring; and immigration quotas that solidified in 1924 severely restricted the immigration of certain peoples, including Eastern European Jews. Jacob Kohn noted in 1932 that “The Jewish child at public school is likely to find himself isolated religiously and socially, especially in Christian neighborhoods.” Jacob Kohn, Modern Problems of Jewish Parents: A Study in Parental Attitudes (New York: The Women’s League of the United Synagogue of America, 1932), 26. Popular opinion polls of the late 1930s revealed that a startling percentage of Americans viewed Jews as too powerful, greedy, and at least partially to blame for their own persecution under Hitler. Matthew Baigell, Jewish Art in America: An Introduction (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 71. According to Matthew Frye Jacobson, 1920s American social institutions began to evaluate whether to include Jews as a “white ethnicity,” rather than as a distinct race. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 420 Sendak “came out” to the public as “gay” in 2008 at age eighty but was aware of his same-sex attractions by his teenage years, having his first sexual encounter at age nineteen. As discussed in the previous chapter, his pre-adolescent boyhood was “queer” in terms of his physical frailness in relation to masculinity standards, his flamboyant behavioral style, as well as in the same-sex “crushes” he harbored. I use “queer” as an umbrella term to describe non-normative experiences and expressions of gender and sexuality (i.e. male femininity, 298 female masculinity, pansexuality, etc.), but with awareness of the term’s wider implication of stigmatized difference, which applied also to other aspects of identity in mainstream midcentury American society, including Yiddish culture and post-traumatic mentalities. Patricia Cohen, “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/arts/design/10sendak.html?mcubz=3; Tim Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die,” The Times, September 24, 2011, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maurice- sendak-im-ready-to-die-f6zrhvmh6pk. 421 Richard M. Gottlieb, “Maurice Sendak’s Trilogy,” in Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 63, eds. Robert A. King and Samuel Abrams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 199. 422 In the first two decades of the twentieth century, certain parts of Manhattan offered new freedoms for marginalized individuals, including immigrant youth and others stigmatized by their race, culture, gender expression, or sexual orientation. Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 130-136. As George Chauncey illuminates, before the socially conservative backlash of the 1930s, colored by Prohibition, the Depression and heightened persecution of homosexuality, the Lower East Side had been something of a liberated, if covert, “pleasure district” that glamorized socially abject performers as flashy entertainers: African American jazz, homosexual “fairy” performers, prostitutes, and performance artists of various types delighted the locals and wealthier “slummers” alike. Popular tabloids of the ‘20s and ‘30s depicted the prevalence of sailors, “fairies,” and prostitutes that populated certain areas of the city and participated in Manhattan’s erotic cultural underbelly. Cartoons and paintings that caricatured the competition between gay men and female prostitutes to win sailors’ interest combined themes of seafaring, sexuality, and social degradation, and they may have been some of the first artifacts of popular culture to which the young Sendak was exposed. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 179- 180. Works of fine art by artists like Paul Cadmus, such as The Fleet’s In! (1934), also depict sexually provocative flirtations and uninhibited solicitations between sailors, gay men, and female prostitutes on New York’s boardwalks. David Leddick, Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 48. 423 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection; Emma Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence,” The Believer, November/December 2012, Accessed 22 April, 2016, http://www.believermag.com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak. 424 Cynthia Zarin, “Not Nice: Maurice Sendak and the perils of childhood,” The New Yorker, April 17, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/17/not-nice 425 Deborah Dash Moore writes that about 160,000 Jews left the Lower East Side for Brooklyn, the Bronx, and other new neighborhoods in the 1920s, leaving behind about 100,000 Jews. Deborah Dash Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (NY: Columbia University Press, 1981), 19. 426 Muriel Harris, “Impressions of Sendak,” Elementary English 48, no. 7 (Nov. 1971): 825-32, rpt. in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, ed. Peter C. Kunze (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 38. 427 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, box 76, no. 3, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, New York Public Library. 428 Selma Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 18-19. 429 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 430 Bill Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’” PBS NOW interview, 12 March 2004, Accessed 30 October 2016, http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/sendak.html 431 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 16. 432 Philip Sendak and Maurice Sendak (illustrator), In Grandpa’s House (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 4. 433 John Burningham, “His stories and illustrations captivate children, but Maurice Sendak – the author of Where the Wild Things Are – explains why for him they are a means of exorcising a painful past,” The Telegraph, Jan 12, 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3634807/His-stories-and-illustrations-captivate-children-but- Maurice-Sendak-the-author-of-Where-the-Wild-Things-Are-explains-why-for-him-they-are-a-means-of-exorcising- a-painful-past-My-life-with-the-wild-things.html 434 John Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 31; Andrew Wheeler, “R.I.P. ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ Creator Maurice Sendak (1928-2012),” Comics Alliance, May 8, 2012, Accessed 3 April 2015, comicsalliance.com/maurice- sendak-death-where-wild-things-are-obituary/ 299

435 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 436 Sendak in John Burningham, ed., When We Were Young (Bloomsbury: London, 2004), 122. 437 (“Myselles” Yiddish for “little stories”) Harris, “Impressions of Sendak,” in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 41. 438 Typescript for In Grandpa’s House, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 439 Sendak most recalled one story about a game Philip played as a small boy with his friends – they would dig sticks into the ground of a graveyard at night. One night, while doing this, they heard a scream. The next morning one of the boys was found dead by a coronary, because, having pierced the stick through his own garment on its way down, lodging himself to the earth, he thought the dead were seizing him. Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. In another story, which Sendak later almost illustrated, a child is separated from his parents and gets lost in the snow, sobbing in terror under a tree. He dies, taken up by the biblical Abraham and Sarah. Nat Hentoff, “Among the Wild Things,” New Yorker, January 15, 1966, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/01/22/among-the- wild-things 440 Sound cassette (2 sound files), Maurice Sendak, September 14, 1993, Unit DA00228, September 14, 1993, Public Education Program sound recordings, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. 441 Since the turn of the century, modern urban youth tended to work for pay and enjoyed the freedom to frequent dance halls and movie theaters. In the early twentieth century, writes historian Sarah Chinn, dance halls were “crucibles for the formation of a specifically urban, specifically adolescent, specifically American sense of self.” So powerful and alluring was the new youth culture of urban immigrants’ children with their proclivity for fashion and spending and their liberated sexual mores, argues Chinn, that it set the trend for the culture of teenagers in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, spreading even to white Anglo-Saxon youth in the suburbs in those later decades. Sarah E. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 102-104. While the powerful youth culture of the 1920s had comprised white, upper-middle-class college students, by the 1950s, it extended to the growing, more diverse suburban demographic, including those newly risen from the working class, and constituted a much larger social sphere that challenged the family’s influence. Joseph E. Illick, American Childhoods (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 121. 442 Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 6. Cognizant of these emerging cultural trends, advertising companies banked on targeting the young and pressured parents not to deprive their children of the individual emotional fulfillment that social scientists painted as crucial to healthy child development. Child psychology offered new emotional pressure points for advertising to the new child market. Henry Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader (NY: New York University Press, 1998), 458. If parents were to get the outcomes they desired in their children’s development, the article argued, they needed to keep up with the rhythms and techniques of advertising, which so mesmerized their children. Child experts in the social sciences and widely circulated parenting manuals warned against the harms of sentimental, Victorian, and otherwise “backward” or “un-American” styles of parenting, advocating instead a cooler, capitalist approach that spotlighted consumerism and openness to future change, against the emotional burdens of nostalgia. Advice manuals and magazines encouraged parents to mimic the coercive powers of consumerism in order to keep up with their children’s desires and needs. One article in 1928, the year of Sendak’s birth, entreated parents to use advertising and sales techniques to enforce desired behaviors: “Do you really know your child?” the article asked, “the corner store […] is just about putting the average parent out of business.” “Selling Food to Children: The Mother’s Own Book (1928),” in Henry Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader (NY: New York University Press, 1998), 463-4. Parents used material goods in behaviorist-influenced stimulus-reward training, using presents to help children overcome fears, quiet their difficult emotions, and offer reinforcing extensions of self. Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 396-401. 443 As children, Sendak and his beloved brother, Jack, built a model of the World’s Fair. Antonia Saxon, “A Loving Tribute: Maurice Sendak on ‘My Brother’s Book’,” Publishers Weekly, Feb 22, 2013, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/56059-a-loving-tribute.html 444 Analyzing the emergent youth culture of immigrants’ children, Chinn makes a distinction between “play,” which nourished an individual’s creative imagination and spirit, often under adult protection or supervision, 300 and “fun,” which was based in commercialized, crowded, erotically charged contexts of leisure, hastening puberty and adolescence. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 20. Children of immigrants, she argues, valued “fun” as an undeniable right of adolescents, assuming greater social authority than their parents had at their age, overturning traditional practices, such as arranged marriages and subscribing to modern conceptions of courtship and romantic love. Ibid, 22. See Chapter Two of Naomi Seidman, The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). Growing up in an era of energetic consumerism and a youth culture that began to distinguish itself from parents’ tastes and values, as well as to revise the established adult roles, children of the early twentieth century sought out styles and examples purposefully unlike those offered by their parents. Differentiating childhood from adulthood in this way created the category of “adolescent,” writes Chinn. This helped produce “the discourse of the separation between parents and children,” which served as “a vehicle by which the adolescent children of immigrants could construct a new identity for themselves that drew on both their own communities and a larger sense of ‘America’ for its raw material.” The category of modern adolescence in the mainstream solidified in the 1920s but was an issue of concern since the peak immigration years, beginning in the 1880s. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 78, 80. 445 Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 118. Donna Haraway wrote in the early decades of the century, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” Behaviorist approaches to childrearing similarly neglected emotional development in favor of training children’s habits. Cited in Nathalie Op de Beeck, Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 14. 446 Applying the scientific method in a context of rapid industrialization and foreign immigration, American turn-of-the-century researchers had begun a rigorous, empirical study of the child through an organized network of direct clinical research that would help authorities keep tabs on the nation’s future through cultivating “desirable” American children. Delineations of such specialized fields as pediatrics and child psychology led to the creation of “child experts” to which journalists and social critics increasingly turned for support. Behavioral psychologist John B. Watson advocated for a rigid, mechanical “habit training” and warned against coddling and sentimentality. New mainstream attention to childhood development was reflected in the growth of children’s literature designed to address such developmental needs directly. Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland, 6, 14. 447 “Maurice Sendak: Childhood Books I remember,” 1995, The Hearst Corporation, Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records (DM009), Georgia Institute of Technology Archives, http://finding- aids.library.gatech.edu/repositories/2/resources/436 448 Cynthia Zarin, “Not Nice.” 449 Harris, “Impressions of Sendak,” in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 38. 450 Hentoff, “Among the Wild Things,” 54. 451 See Stearns, Anxious Parents. 452 In 1932, Conservative rabbi Jacob Kohn called the automobile the most characteristic symbol of “our machine-made civilization with its incessant hunger for speed.” Kohn, Modern Problems of Jewish Parents, 87-88. An Ogden Nash poem illustrated by Sendak in 1953 – “Posies from a Second Childhood or Hark How Gaffer do Chaffer” – would comment humorously on the tendency of liberated youth to spend outside of the home: “The healthy human child will keep / Away from home, except to sleep. / Were it not for the common cold, / Our young we never would behold.” Ogden Nash and Maurice Sendak (illustrator), You Can’t Get There from Here (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953), 170. The Broadway Musical Bye Bye Birdie (1960) would later dramatize the 1950s generational clash between suburban parents and their increasingly mobile, emotionally casual, and independent children. It features a flamboyantly suffering Jewish mother who threatens to put her head in the oven as a means of controlling her adult son, as well as songs with lyrics like “Kids! I don’t know what's wrong with these kids today! […] Laughing, singing, dancing, grinning, morons! […] Kids! They are just impossible to control!” Lyrics by Lee Adams. 453 Stephen S. Wise, Child Versus Parent: Some Chapters On the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922), 143. Illick describes the “democratization” of the middle-class American family in the interwar decades, as parents increasingly reconsidered children’s emotional health and development, seeing the need to appeal to their reason and to their feelings, and to treat them more as separate individuals, rather than as extensions of themselves. Advocating for this democratization of the family’s emotional climate, Wise writes in 1922 that a child “cannot be fettered to an autocratic regime within the home and at the same time be a free and effective partner in the working 301 out of the processes of democracy.” Wise considered that “it may be that the revolt of the Jewish child seems more serious than it is because of the filial habit of obedience in the life of the Jewish home.” Wise, Child Versus Parent, 89-90, 101, 143. 454 Advertisers tapped into resulting peer pressures to sell their products and perpetuate a public, visible display of popular youth-led fashions. See Evalyn Grumbine McNally, Reaching Juvenile Markets: How to Advertise, Sell, and Merchandise Through Boys and Girls (NY & London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1938), rpt. in Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader, 460. Contrast this capitalist approach with the romantic culture of Poland, from which the Sendaks immigrated. Agnieszka Bedingfield writes that Poland, under partition for all of the nineteenth century and through WWI, longed for the past glory of the Polish State. The Polish concept of “Tęsknota” (described as “nostalgia for home [...] as the site of family life and as the country of origin”) did not easily translate to American culture. Agnieszka Bedingfield, “Trans-Memory and Diaspora: Memories of Europe and Asia in American Immigrant Narratives,” in Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas, eds. William Boelhower et al. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004), 336. Polish-American Jewish Holocaust survivor Eva Hoffman recalled the “Polish nostalgic temperament” as embodied in a Cracow concert of Chopin by Arthur Rubinstein, describing it as “an outbreak of high excitement, patriotism, nostalgia, and pure sentiment.” Bedingfield contrasts “pragmatic Americans” with “romantic Poles” in Hoffman’s descriptions, noting that “North America of the second part of the twentieth century has little patience for [...] old-world attachments.” Ibid, 337. 455 Though a social misfit, the young Sendak participated somewhat in this culture of early mass child consumerism; he excelled at yo-yo tricks in the early ‘40s, even getting to perform on stage at a movie matinee and winning a tommy-gun, a badge, and a Mickey Mouse wrist watch. But Sendak, a child who spent much of his boyhood in the kitchen with his mother and grandmother, and who clung to his father’s bedtime shtetl tales, also remained highly connected to the feelings and stories of his parents’ pasts. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Laurie Deval, June 13, 1969, box 2, Muir mss. II, 1892-1981, LMC 2286, Manuscripts Dept., Indiana University Lilly Library. 456 Cech, 49. 457 Bob Batchelor writes that Hollywood throughout the 1930s “released a string of movies about newspapers and reporters. These films created the stereotype of the fast-talking, wisecracking reporter who always gets the story […] the image of the busy newsroom, the harried editor, the race to make a deadline, and the constant chatter of all involved became the standard.” Bob Batchelor, American Pop: Popular Culture Decade by Decade [4 volumes], vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2009), 44. 458 Illick, American Childhoods, 110-111. Thus, as Sendak claimed in several interviews, the ‘30s became a “decade of babies,” including such notable portrayals as Fanny Brice’s “Baby Snooks,” Eddie Cantor’s performance as a baby, as well as the prevalent cultural symbols of high chairs and rattles. The birth of the identical Dionne quintuplets in 1934 created a commercialized media sensation, the young Sendak and his siblings cherishing and fighting over their set of “quint” spoons. Sound cassette, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Unit 00360, Book of the Month Club: Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children, 1989, Public Education Program sound recordings, New York Public Library. The five baby goblins in OOT drew also from the spectacle of the Dionne quintuplets, “whose early years were well-documented in fairy-tale fashion in the newspapers of the 1930’s.” Sorin, “The Fears of Early Childhood,” 66; Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak, 235. Winsor McCay’s comic strips Sammy Sneeze and Hungry Henrietta humorously drew upon this unprecedented attention to children and adults’ anxieties about handling children properly. A reasoned, playful, flexible, and casual emotional style, behaviorists argued, was more adaptive to the growing consumerist culture than was Old World “smothering” or the Victorian style of carefully defined, but profoundly passionate emotions reserved for friends and family in the privacy of confined spaces. Stearns and Lewis, An Emotional History of the United States, 174, 405. With anxieties heightened around properly parenting the psychologically fragile child, children were also encouraged to comfort themselves with goods that helped them imagine achieving a glamorous young adulthood, epitomized by their beloved superheroes and movie stars. Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents (NY and London: NYU Press, 2003). Interwar American families spent increasing amounts of emotional energy on desiring and enjoying material objects, which behaviorists and advertisers of the ‘20s linked to children’s emotional training. Dolls, argued child experts of the 1920s and ‘30s, helped children prepare for grief and cultivate empathy, and toys generally

302 became consolations for older siblings jealous of newborn babies or young children learning to comfort themselves in their parents’ absence. Illick, American Childhoods, 108. 459 Selma Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 247. 460 Disney’s success was specifically in its channeling the entertainment value of popular media, which social reformers feared carried only corrupt and foreign mentalities, into films that taught children “proper” American values. Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland, 9-10, 18. Popular media was a subject of controversy and debate in the interwar decades, as many of its first producers were working-class immigrants. Disney gradually came to speak to interests of the white American Protestant middle class, which imagined itself as the “backbone” of American culture and a distinct group, and which had found its influence undercut by a wildly popular alternative media culture in early twentieth century work produced by urban immigrants. Ibid, 6. As film became increasingly popular in the 1920s and ‘30s, the argument was extended to refer to the impressionable minds of all children, across lines of class and ethnicity. Ibid, 9. The early-twentieth-century, primarily Protestant, progressive middle class – a vocal and highly organized minority, distinct from “ethnic” minorities – drew on the emerging science of childhood to attack the film industry as supposedly obstructing immigrants’ American acculturation and infecting the impressionable minds of immigrant children who might more easily Americanize without such influences. Ibid, 8. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, ethnic immigrant children were expected to conform to the mores and manners of WASP America, and not to those of their immigrant parents, which were perceived as the sources of the crude violence and sexuality in popular films. Acculturating American Jews sided with middle-class authorities. Reform rabbi Stephen S. Wise writes in 1922, “Recreation is become a really serious problem in our time,” with children exposed to “all the vulgarities and indecencies of the virtually uncensored motion picture theatre.” Wise, Child Versus Parent, 33. Beginning in 1930, the Motion Picture Production Code (“Hays Code”), a censorship campaign instated to protect the impressionable minds of children, limited even some of the “barnyard humor” of Mickey Mouse, who was fashioned to look increasingly soft, wholesome, middle-class, and child-like. Sendak would call this revised Mickey Mouse a “schmuck,” preferring the older, wilier version, who better mirrored the mannerisms and look of an urban, working-class child. Sammond in Mickenberg and Vallone, 149-150; Cook, 58. Comics artist Art Spiegelman would similarly contrast the earlier “jazzy Mickey Mouse,” whom he called a “jazz age wiseguy – Al Jolson with large round circles on top of his head,” with “the suburban and staid Mickey Mouse of later decades.” Art Spiegelman, Metamaus (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), 12. See previous chapter for a discussion of how these social stances continued in the 1950s, as psychiatrist Fredric Wertham championed an attack on the social effects of comic books. 461 In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), Lee Edelman describes the self-serving, exploitative rhetoric used by adults who treat childhood as a symbolic device for manipulating social values, dictating a specific future in the name of protecting “the children.” 462 American attitudes toward parenting shifted away from behaviorism partly in reaction to the rise of European fascism, as social scientists and educators of the interwar years sought to prevent cultivating “authoritarian” personalities in a new generation of children. Popular parenting periodicals and advice columns warned against the more rigid, behaviorist approaches that treated children like trained pets and dehumanized them, as observed in Nazi Germany’s households. Such outmoded approaches of domination might either encourage the unquestioning, passive obedience of an automaton, or inspire the child’s own tyrannical impulses by way of reaction to the imposed power. Julia Mickenberg, “The Pedagogy of the Popular Front: ‘Progressive Parenting’ for a New Generation, 1918-1945,” in The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Caroline Field Levander (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 226-245. Accordingly American magazines of the 1930s proudly highlighted the democratic nature of the American family. Illick, American Childhoods, 111. Hitler’s speech of May 1, 1937, as quoted in The New York Times, illustrated the nightmare of an overly authoritarian approach: “We will take away their children. These we will train and educate to become new Germans. We will not permit them to lapse into the old way of thinking but will give them thorough training. We will take them when they are 10 years old and bring them up in the spirit of the community until they are 18. They shall not escape us. [...] Who shall dare say that such training will not produce a Nation?” Children were taught in Nazi Germany that loyalty to the Fuehrer must come before loyalty to the family. Sociologist E. Y. Hartshorne writes that the Nazi government “flattered” German youth by incorporating them in its official organization, “treating them as adults. This encouraged the adolescent’s natural tendency to resist parental authority, and the net result was that the Revolution was bidding for the allegiance of the children over the heads of their parents.” E. Y. Hartshorne, German 303

Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory by America in a World at War 12 (New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1941), 18-20. 463 Nicholas Sammond, “Dumbo, Disney, and Difference: Walt Disney Productions and Film as Children’s Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature, eds. Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 151. 464 For example, tapping into American racial issues, a Kinder Zhurnal story from May 1933 depicts the injustice of a public lynching of an African American person in Georgia. Naomi Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917-1950 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 222. Leon Elbe’s “Dos yingele mitn ringele” (The little boy with the little ring), a story that appeared in monthly installments in the Kinder Zhurnal, a Yiddish children’s magazine, beginning in April 1920, follows a small child who survives kidnappings, ominous forests, and other external threats with the help of a magic ring that represents his psychological internalization of his parents’ strength and support, as well as what Naomi Prawer Kadar calls “a link in di goldene keyt, the golden chain that symbolically connects generations of Jews and Yiddish culture.” Naomi Prawer Kadar compares this series to Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, in which Max returns home to his mother’s warm meal after venturing out into a dangerous, wild world. She writes that Elbe’s appeal to the universal insecurities of childhood and parenting reflect the Sholem Aleichem schools’ “broad progressive goals of educating the whole child,” while striving to keep children connected to their Yiddish cultural roots against the overwhelming influence of American culture. Kadar, Raising Secular Jews, 183-186. 465 Der Nister’s 1934 Dray mayselekh (Three little tales) and his 1939 Zeks mayselekh (Six little tales), published in Kharkov and Kiev, respectively, handle cannibalism and death, human beings being killed without hearing or trial. Daniela Mantovan, “Reading Soviet-Yiddish Poetry for Children: Der Nister’s Mayselekh in ferzn 1917-39,” in Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity, ed. Gennady Estraikh et al. (Cambridge, England, & NY: Legenda, 2016), 104. Mikhail Krutikov writes that the harsh themes of this literature might have served the function of warning children against brutality or of readying them for it as a natural component of human life. The message is left ambiguous in stories like Leyb Kvitko’s 1937 Yiddish tale about a beloved family’s dog that goes mad, forcing the family to join a crowd in killing him. Mikhail Krutikov, “An End to Fairy Tales: The 1930s in the mayselekh of Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko,” in Estraikh et al., 114-115. 466 Krutikov, “An End to Fairy Tales,” in Estraikh et al., 120. Krutikov poses the idea that “Der Nister could have been reflecting on his own position as a ‘wild animal’ in the new, strictly disciplined Soviet society,” but also on his own inescapable capacity to perpetuate and enforce that oppressive order. 467 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 468 Cott, 1976. 469 Maurice Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things” (Commencement address), Vassar Quarterly vol. 92, Number 4, September 1, 1996, 11. 470 Driven by desires to secure their social inclusion in the nation and to afford Jewish education for their children, large portions of Jewish American immigrants invested in rising beyond working-class lifestyles; great numbers of them achieved this dream in the 1920s, relocating from cities to suburbs. Middle-class acculturation could be achieved through the proper cultivation of self-sufficient, emotionally restrained, gender-normative, light- hearted American offspring who knew how to “have fun” by the standards of popular youth culture, which demanded technology, speed, style, and excitement. Among the more liberal Jews especially, these goals became Jewish values. However, historians like Beth Wenger emphasize the importance of remembering the minority of American Jews who had not becoming comfortably middle-class before the onset of the Depression. Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 18. 471 Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan, video, 1985, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art. As the growing middle class and those seeking entry into it gradually came to regard parenting as more a matter of emotions and intuition than of discipline and law, shifts occurred in popular conceptions of middle-class American fatherhood and motherhood. The new focus on emotions and intuition offered new comforts and challenges to immigrants from tight-knit family styles. Immigrant parents were asked to trust their natural instincts, but in a foreign context that might ridicule their emotional styles as odd, sentimental, or excessive. Gender dynamics became a special point of focus in the social evolution of American parenting as manifested in different immigrant 304 communities. Lawrence Fuchs, seeing traditional Eastern European Jewish fatherhood as emotionally or at least spiritually engaged in children’s inner lives, points to the influence of Torah study, rabbinic roles, and the internalization of family-oriented halakhah, notes that Jewish masculinity contributed to promoting fatherly involvement in American childrearing, or at least responded favorably to shifting expectations of American fathers. Lawrence Fuchs, Beyond Patriarchy (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2000). In 1932, Jacob Kohn wrote, “We have left the patriarchal family so far behind […] that the influence of the father in the direction of his family has shrunk to comparative insignificance and is in danger of disappearing altogether. In America, and in Jewish circles in America particularly, there are signs of a new matriarchy”. Kohn, Modern Problems of Jewish Parents, 119. Irving Howe wrote that Jewish fathers’ loss of authority as immigrants in America increased mothers’ power in the household. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 253. Critiques of middle-class mothers in the 1930s-50s, such as that of Philip Wylie’s best-selling Generation of Vipers (1942), which inspired the term “Momism,” accused them of being controlling, materialistic, and manipulative parents who objectified their children, treating them as extensions of their own selves, rather than giving them the skills to become emotionally independent, functional individuals. Jewish mothers were particularly targeted in postwar years for being too possessive and for clinging too tightly to their children, especially sons, as later dramatized in ’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) – which Sendak read the year he created Night Kitchen – and Woody Allen’s short film Oedipus Wrecks (1989). Joyce Antler, You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2007), 73-74. Leslie Tannenbaum reads some of these ethnic gender stereotypes into Sendak’s work, conveying the challenges of growing up with parental role models who struggled to meet the gendered expectations of American society. Tannenbaum notes the prevalence of exhausted, sleeping fathers and aggressive, dissatsifed mothers in his animated CBS special Really Rosie (1975), which he reads as a more explicitly Jewish rendition of his The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960), on which the piece was based. Leslie Tannenbaum, “Betrayed by Chicken Soup: Judaism, Gender and Performance in Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie,” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 3 (2003): 364-365. 472 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. Charles Lindbergh was an American aviator, inventor, and military officer, among other things. He achieved the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. Anne Spencer Lindbergh was also an aviator and an author. 473 Sara Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak: A Visit with the Most Celebrated Children’s Author of Our Time,” Parents, November 1992, box 6, folder 67, Phillip Applebaum Collection, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History. As a child Sendak had even glimpsed the morning issue of the Daily News’s front-page story, “Lindbergh Baby Found Dead,” with a huge black arrow pointing to the baby’s corpse in the woods – a spectacle that caused Colonel Lindbergh to sue the newspaper and have those newspapers pulled off the stands, replaced with a more discreet version without the photograph. Sendak was not believed by his parents or by his therapist in later years about his having seen the uncensored image. Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Public Education Program sound recordings. 474 Inauguration of the Zena Sutherland Lectureship, “Sources of Inspiration,” Maurice Sendak, 20 May 1983, box 7, folder 4, Zena Bailey Sutherland Papers, University of Chicago Graduate School Special Collections, 10. 475 Tim Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die,” The Times, September 24, 2011, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maurice-sendak-im-ready-to-die-f6zrhvmh6pk; John Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 231. 476 There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak, Rosenbach Museum and Library, retrospective of Sendak Interviews, 2008, DVD 477 Maurice Sendak, “Enamored of the Mystery,” in Innocence and Experience: Essays & Conversations on Children’s Literature, ed. Gregory Maguire (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1987), 363, 362-374. The traumatic situation of forced separation between parents and children in a dangerous world, which resounds in Sendak’s work, may derive both from urban dangers and from anxieties inherited from Eastern European Jewish fears around kidnappings and forced conscription of Jewish boys into the tsarist army, a matter that pervaded works of modern Yiddish literature and folklore. Olga Litvak, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 305

Sendak cites Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), and Fantasia (1940) as three of the early inspirations of his creative vision. Nicholas Sammond claims that early Disney films “played upon separation anxiety in both parent and child. The standard narrative schema for a Disney film had its youthful protagonist separated from her/his parent or parents, made to face perils and challenges with the help of friends (though largely on her/his own), and then, having grown older and wiser, reunited with his/her family and community as a more independent and self-sufficient individual.” Cited in Nicholas Sammond, “Dumbo, Disney, and Difference: Walt Disney Productions and Film as Children’s Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature, eds. Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 150. 478 Bill Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’” PBS NOW interview, March 12, 2004, Accessed 30 October 2016, http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/sendak.html 479 Tony Kushner, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present (NY: Abrams, 2003), 24. 480 Under chronic financial anxiety, the working-class family might remain a site of education and labor, deprived of the middle-class family’s freedom to cultivate children’s emotional development, overworked parents depleted of emotional energy. Illick, American Childhoods, 108. Wise implied in 1922 that families in which “the whole problem of life revolves around bread-winning” fail to instill Jewish values, direction, and discipline in their children. Wise, Child Versus Parent, 17-18. Newly wealthy parents, on the other hand, might focus excessively on material goods and not enough on the family’s emotional wellbeing. Wise placed some of the blame for children’s disrespect of their parents on “fathers who care solely for the things of this world, success however achieved, money however gained and used, power whatever its roots and purposes,” as well as on materialistic mothers who enabled such behavior by caring most about “the lesser and the least things of life.” Wise, Child Versus Parent, 47. Works of midcentury Jewish American literature and popular culture, such as Herman Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar (1955), would later exemplify the figure of the financially successful and emotionally removed middle-class Jewish American father. 481 Psychotherapist Alice Miller’s 1981 study illuminates connections between parental stress and children’s chameleon-like, shape-shifting talents in immigrant families. She described how some children of immigrants felt a threatened sense of autonomy if the parent, as cultural outsider, placed excessive expectations on the child, as cultural insider, to redeem the family’s social disenfranchisement via special abilities, good looks, or accomplishments. Objectified for these reasons, the immigrant’s child might develop feelings of grandiosity, of having personal worth only to the extent that he or she meets these family needs and performs extraordinary feats. Miller paints these emotionally exploited offspring as jealous of others’ ability to live “normal” lives that do not revolve around constant attempts to earn exaggerated levels of admiration and unique recognition. Chameleon-like shape-shifting, the ability to embody the role most needed for survival at a given moment, Sendak knew, is a universal talent of children, who live between fantasy and reality and whose cognitive plasticity is designed to respond quickly to surrounding contexts and the emotions of caretakers. Alice Miller, Drama of the Gifted Child (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 35. Sendak would spend his life trying to answer the question of how children survive from within the cracks of a society that excludes or neglects them – how creative fantasy might save a lost human being from obliteration by synthesizing the emotional with the social. 482 Eli Lederhendler highlights the centrality of lost parental authority in the formation of subjectivity for those Americans raised by Jewish immigrants. Lederhendler, “Orphans and Prodigies.” As Chinn suggests, Americanized children had reasons to use their cultural authority over their immigrant parents to their own advantages. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 81; Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. Irving Howe writes that immigrant parents staking all future success on their sons – via education and Americanization – twisted the Jewish family into new shapes. Comparing Jews of the Lower East Side to those of Russia, Hutchins Hapgood wrote in 1902, “The father is in this country less able to make an economic place for himself than is the son.” Howe, 253. But such shifts came at emotional costs, creating great tensions between parents and children, as well as shame and embarrassment around parents’ loss of authority in some cases. 483 Irving Howe and others have described the sometimes guilt-ridden, tentative ways the children of traditional Jewish immigrants embraced America’s urban styles of playful, physically liberated youth. Howe writes,

Suspicion of the physical, fear of hurt, anxiety over the sheer ‘pointlessness’ of play: all this went deep into the recesses of the Jewish psyche. It was a price, hardly the largest, that Jews had paid for 306

the conviction of specialness. They could no more suppress their true feelings about the frivolities of street or gymnasium than they could deny the shudder that passed through them on walking past a church. A sensitive writer remembering his childhood in Brownsville would conclude that “intellectual and spiritual independence came easily to the Brownsville child…but the right to breathe freely, to use one's arms and legs and voice forcibly…these privileges had to be conquered inch by inch.” Decades would have to go by before the sons and daughters of the immigrants could shake off – if they ever could! – this heritage of discomfort before the uses and pleasures of the body. What they were struggling for was nothing less than the persuasion that they had as much right as anyone else to feel at home on this earth, and what their parents were saying was no, Jews could not feel at home on this earth.

Howe, 182. 484 Cited in Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 84. Indeed, rapid advances in industrialization brought a high demand for cheap labor, which ushered unprecedented numbers of foreign migrants into the nation through the ‘20s. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, Chapter Two. 485 Modern childhood, enabled largely by the outlawing of child labor and the rise of public education and popular children’s markets – may have begun as part of a project to acculturate the urban working class and immigrants, the majority of American child laborers having been from southern, eastern, and central Europe. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 39. Sammond stresses how from its earliest manifestations, the “dominant presence of members of the white, Protestant, progressive middle class in the study of childhood ensured that certain fundamental assumptions about the inherent nature of the child and its environment (based on observations of their own children) would find their way into baseline descriptions of normal childhood.” Sammond connects this process with a larger program of assimilating the working class and immigrants through their “exposure to and involvement in naturalized middle- class habits.” The standard by which all American children were to be measured, thus, was conceived in middle- class, white, Protestant culture. Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland, 7. Accordingly, the mainstream cultural establishment began to more aggressively censor “deviant” identities. Following the Payne Fund’s 1930s studies on the deleterious effects of film on children’s wellbeing, it became “common knowledge” among child experts and the public by the 1940s that films were psychologically damaging to sensitive children. Stearns, Anxious Parents, 179. In his history of gay New York, George Chauncey recounts that “As the onset of the Depression dashed the confidence of the 1920s, gay men and lesbians began to seem less amusing than dangerous. A powerful campaign to render gay men and lesbians invisible—to exclude them from the public sphere—quickly gained momentum.” George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 331. 486 The rise of modern dating, dance halls, movie theaters, and other sites of urban amusement by the turn- of-the-century facilitated an ongoing sexualized public youth culture of leisure, instant gratification, informality, and pleasure outside of the family. See Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence. 487 Child-centered psychology sought to empower new, American-born personalities against immigrant parents’ influence. “In a clientist liberal state such as the United States of America,” writes Sammond, “the child is the ultimate client: its requirements are generally defined according to its condition of becoming, and unlike the adult it will become, its status as citizen-in-the-making means that it can be invoked without immediate recompense.” In other words, the figure of the abstract child is employed widely, with flexibility, and without protest, to suit any given adult agenda. Sammond claims that making an argument for “the children” as collective future “is to invoke a constituency not yet arrived, the common good of which cannot be questioned,” because “children straddle the line between the particular and the universal, occupying a unique position in which they are simultaneously the creatures of their parents and of the state, but not yet individuals unto themselves.” Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland, 4. According to American media scholar Henry Jenkins, behaviorists like John B. Watson had even celebrated the growing divorce rates and decreasing childbirth rates as a blessing in disguise: the weakening of the traditional family might liberate the child from the smothering influence of sentimental parents. Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader, 469. Though American Jews largely welcomed the opportunity to educate and acculturate their children as a means of ensuring their future prosperity, they suffered emotional costs in watching their children become so 307 different from themselves. Some may have also feared the potentially dangerous undertones of a conformist society that lures its children away from the influence of their parents, as was happening in fascist European nations. Hartshorne, German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory, 18-20. 488 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1. 489 Struggling to dissociate their public image from unflattering modern urban stereotypes and to secure middle-class standing, many American Jews pursued the suburban family dream, which emerged around the popularization of the automobile, federal changes in the home financing industry, and newly affordable methods of home construction. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism. 490 Wise saw acculturated Jewish parents as harmfully disengaged from their children’s emotional worlds, commenting on the summer “camp-craze” as reflecting parents’ desire for an easy way out of the “harassing difficulty” of living “in normal, intimate contact with their children” during the summer. He believed that “parents are so little accustomed to living with their children that when the summer months force the child into constant contact with parents, the latter grow embarrassed by the necessity for such contact,” and “some of these parents are the very ones who will later wonder that ‘our children have grown away from us.’” Wise, Child Versus Parent, 31- 33. 491 Kohn calls the Bar Mitzvah a site of “tragic spiritual ineptitude,” in which lavish treyf meals are served to a crowd of the father’s business associates, and the child is made to feel indulged rather than reverent of his Jewish maturation. “I have witnessed dinners at which the young boy or girl is made to partake not only of the kiddush wine but of strong drink far beyond his childish capacity, and where he is made to witness his older brothers and sisters, as well as his friends, in various states of intoxication. To make the party a real event vaudeville artists are sometimes engaged and one is privileged to enjoy the puerile vulgarisms of the variety theater capping the climax of a Bar Mitzvah ceremony.” Kohn, Modern Problems of Jewish Parents, 31. 492 Wise, Child Versus Parent, 35. 493 Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 102. So striking was the tension between generations around sexuality during Sendak’s upbringing – as perplexed parents fretted over young adults’ increasingly liberated and sexualized individualism – that in 1929 E.B. White (who would later write for children) satirized the phenomenon with his co-author James Thurber:

I have talked with hundreds of children about the problem of educating their parents along sex lines. So many of them have told me that they honestly tried to give their elders the benefit of their rich experience in life, but that parents usually grew flushed and red and would reply, “Nice people don’t talk about such things.” […] Sometimes it may be advisable to quote to your parents from standard works on the subject of sex.

James Thurber and E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary (Garden City, NY: Blue Ribbon Books, 1944, originally printed by Harper & Brothers, 1929), 113, 131-132. See also Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986). 494 A section of The Forverts called “A Gallery of Missing Husbands” published photographs of Jewish husbands who abandoned their wives for financial independence, other women, or the pleasures of bachelorhood in the New World, shaming those men who took advantage of the American social freedoms that enabled anonymity and the ability to reinvent oneself. The ability to enter a diverse, fast-evolving world beyond the watchful eye of a tight-knit, coercive kehillah and nuclear family enabled rebellious men to enjoy an extended bachelorhood if they so chose – an option especially essential to the beginnings of modern gay culture, as George Chauncey explores in Gay New York (1994). 495 In an article from September 8, 1908, titled “Yunge yidishe ferbrekher” (Young Jewish Criminals), Abraham Cahan explicitly urged fathers to take greater pains to bolster their own self-esteem and paternal authority in order to better discipline their sons and thus prevent New York’s Jewish boys’ involvement in petty crime. As Ellen Kellman notes, Cahan also reinforced the traditional patriarchal gender order by maintaining that children were influenced less by mothers, of whom they were not afraid. Ellen Kellman, “Aiding Immigrant Readers of Entertaining Them?: The Jewish Daily Forward and Its ‘Gallery of Missing Husbands’ (ca. 1909),” in New York and the American Jewish Communal Experience, eds. Fruma Mohrer and Ettie Goldwasser, based on the Milstein Conference on New York and the American Jewish Experience (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2013), 6. Thank you, Ellen Kellman, for sharing these sources with me. 308

496 As Matthew Frye Jacobson writes, some journalists and social agitators of the early twentieth century characterized the Jewish “race” as having contempt for law and a lust for the forbidden fruit of sex with gentiles. Journalists sometimes characterized Jews as having bulging satyr eyes, sensual full lips, and an animalistic jaw. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, Chapter Two. See also Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), especially Chapter Five. Deborah Dash Moore claims that the American-born New York Jews of the interwar era assembled a self- perpetuating identity by creating a “moral community” that made use of existing American institutions, recasting them to align with their values. Moore understands this community as transitional, not marginal, as it did somewhat belong in both mainstream and traditional Jewish cultures. Moore, At Home in America, 9-11. 497 Illick, American Childhoods, 108-110. 498 Moore, At Home in America, 14, 89. 499 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things,” 1976. Remarks Sendak would make in later years about parenting offer insights into how he viewed his male peers as a child: “If I’d had a kid, I would have had a daughter. They’re kinder than boys. Smarter. More intuitive and sensitive. If you have to have a kid, you might as well have a daughter.” Interestingly, Sendak would later depict himself as a female baby in Outside Over There (1981), his personal favorite of all his picture books. Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 500 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 22. 501 Sendak attended P.S. 205, 177, Boody Jr. High, and Lafayette High. Harris, “Impressions of Sendak,” in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 38. 502 Maurice Sendak, “Enamored of the Mystery,” in Innocence and Experience: Essays & Conversations on Children’s Literature, ed. Gregory Maguire (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1987), 362-374. Perhaps reflecting this discomfort around schools, an earlier draft of his first authored story, Kenny’s Window (1956), has Kenny’s dream interrupted by the noise of children outside on their way to school. Typescript, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” folder 1, Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection, Elmer Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries. 503 Eli Lederhendler “Orphans and Prodigies: Rediscovering Young Jewish Immigrant ‘Marginals’,” American Jewish History 95, no.2 (June 2009): 135-155. 504 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 182. The radio, by which Sendak’s mother sat at her kitchen table, would have also been the main source of news about European fascism and the nascent world war. Later she would sit by the radio to hear news pertaining to Sendak’s older brother, Jack, who had been drafted to serve in the 1945 Pacific invasion of Okinawa. Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 505 As suggested by the enormous size of the milk bottle in Night Kitchen, milk was a “wonder food” in the thrifty Depression years, perceived as necessary for children in high doses, due to its comprising so many nutritional components – protein, calcium, fat, and others – in a single food product. Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression (New York: Harper, 2016), 45. 506As Viviana Zelizer writes, in the early twentieth century, middle-class America imagined “properly loved” children similar to how they imagined properly cared-for women: as belonging in domesticated, unproductive worlds of lessons, games, and allowances, sheltered from public dangers. Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1985), cited in Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 34. Felix Adler had combined political Progressivism with Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories to argue that humans, as highly evolved organisms, needed extensive time to prepare “to take up the struggle for existence” and thus that resources were needed for children to develop into fully realized adults via play, education, and parental nurture. Challenging the legality of child labor until 1938, in which the Fair Labor Standards Act federally outlawed it (Sendak was about ten years old at the time), early twentieth-century child labor reformers argued that meaningful play was important for healthy childhood development but impossible when children were paid workers made sullen and serious by their lives’ demands, or prematurely burdened with sexuality, financial exchange, and responsibility for others. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 23, 39. 507 Kohn, Modern Problems of Jewish Parents, 86. Raising families in small apartments and in an urban landscape with delights like “the theatre and later the moving picture palace,” early twentieth-century commentators “feared that the home would cease altogether to be the center of social life and that the coming generation would find its pleasures and recreation completely outside its walls.” On the other hand, Kohn consoled worried parents, reminding them that the automobile, which had been perceived as “one of the dire threats to family life, and one of the most potent forces making for the disintegration of 309 the home” by offering “an easy means for young people to escape parental influence,” had not yet ended family life, even though cars could indeed “whisk one in a trice to entrancing regions distant from the family fireside.” Ibid, 87- 88. 508 Cited in Moore, At Home in America, 86. 509 Illick, American Childhoods, 106. The very words “urban” and “urbanization,” argues Chinn, were used as code words for “immigrant.” Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 17. 510 Sendak later told an interviewer that it was he who had thrown the ball, admitting, “I didn’t see the body and his mother didn’t blame me, which was such a relief.” Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 511 Sound cassette (2 sound files), Maurice Sendak, September 14, 1993, Unit DA00228, September 14, 1993, Public Education Program sound recordings, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. 512 Zarin, “Not Nice.” 513 Sound cassette (2 sound files), Maurice Sendak, September 14, 1993, Unit DA00228, September 14, 1993 and February 8, 1989, Public Education Program Sound Recordings. Public Education Program sound recordings, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. 514 Maurice Sendak in John Burningham, ed., When We Were Young (Bloomsbury: London, 2004), 124. 515 The latter mentality held true especially for communist and leftist thinkers like Yiddishist and children’s writer Itche Goldberg, who served as education director of the pro-communist Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO); Godlberg empathized with parents alienated from their Americanized children when he argued that the “melting pot” idea was a tactic of the ruling class to maintain social control by suppressing the values of certain ethnic minorities. Lyudmila Sholokhova, “Soviet Propaganda in Illustrated Yiddish Children’s Books: From the Collections of the YIVO Library, New York,” in Estraikh et al., 168. With 50,000 members in 1947, the JPFO was the largest division of the International Workers Order (est. 1930). In its hope to build a revolutionary “Soviet America,” the JPFO disapproved of the ethnic segregation and religiousness of yeshivas, decried the militaristic chauvinism of the Boy Scouts, and condemned the “American dream” as a capitalist fantasy. Jennifer Young, “‘A Language is Like a Garden’: Shloyme Davidman and the Yiddish Communist School Movement in the United States,” in Estraikh et al., 158-159. 516 During the years of Sendak’s childhood, Yiddish was not only a particularity of Jewish difference and of the Old World past; in Yiddish proletarian cultural production it functioned as an international “weapon to fight the bourgeois influence within the Jewish masses, to awaken their class consciousness.” By July of 1935, however, the international Communist movement officially shifted its priority to combatting fascism, which required working together with bourgeois segments of society. A. Bergman “Yiddish oder Yiddishkayt,” quoted in Young, in Estraikh et al., 160n21. Consequentially, The JPFO’s Yiddish pedagogical journal (est. January 1935) began to address the Jewish people as a whole, rather than specifically the working class, focusing more on wider-held distinctions between childhood and adulthood, rather than between proletariat and bourgeois. It featured Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz, as well as articles that upheld mainstream ideas about childhood as a playful, insular realm of nurture separated from adult concerns. In JPFO shule textbooks after 1935, “children were portrayed as a distinct, special group, rather than as small adults.” Young, in Estraikh et al., 161. As discussed in the previous chapter, however, some Yiddish schools and publications in America, such as the Kinder Zhurnal, would continue through WWII to treat children as mature enough to learn about the gruesome and traumatic realities of the adult world and of the fatal results of global antisemitism. Sendak was exposed to such harsh truths as a child, directly from his parents as they learned of their own relatives’ endangerment and deaths in Europe. 517 Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 82. 518 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 519 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 520 Philip Sendak recalled an affectionate relationship with his grandfather (Sendak’s great-grandfather). At night Philip would go to his grandfather’s bedside to hear stories about wild animals. This grandfather also recalled caring for a dog during his own boyhood and imagining that the dog was human and communicating with him as humans do. In a typescript draft of In Grandpa’s House, Philip would have David, the boy protagonist, ponder the blurry line between animal and human. After playing with a lion cub and his friends in the forest, hunters strike and

310 kill some of the animals. The hunters are then killed by other animals. Typescript for In Grandpa’s House, page 49, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 521 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 161. 522 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 523 Isaac Bashevis Singer, Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, pictures by Maurice Sendak (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966), 21-23. 524 Even at this point in his life, Sendak felt a degree of alienation in a society rooted in Anglo-Saxon culture; the same year as Zlateh’s publication, Harper editor Ursula Nordstrom found the need to ease Sendak’s anxiety with humor, writing in December before one of the artist’s trips to England, “I have always thought the Royal family is Jewish too so I am sure some suitable gala can be arranged while you are in London. But of course even the gentiles do you honor. So how can you miss?” Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998),, 231. 525 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 526 Youth like Sendak were attracted to their elders’ shtetl tales of demons, infanticide, and other matters that dramatized real-life fears. “To me the Grimm tales were an extension of the stories my father told me,” Sendak remembered, “they are very like his stories, in which people got hacked and eaten and brutalized. And the bad people were really tortured to death, and that was such a great satisfaction.” Marion Long, “Maurice Sendak: A Western Canon, Jr.,” HomeArts, Archive.org Internet Archive, Accessed October 10, 2016; Jeffrey Jon Smith, “A Conversation with Maurice Sendak,” article based on transcript of a phone conversation with Sendak, August 27, 1974. In an unpublished typescript for In Grandpa’s House, based on Philip’s stories, the boy protagonist’s impoverished parents are killed in an accident and sent to hell for having temporarily deserted their son to beg in neighboring towns – an action taken in their desperation to find money to care for him. The boy goes on to shoot arrows at hunters, wounding them, and commanding them to follow his orders. Typescript for In Grandpa’s House, page 3, chapter 4, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 527 Hillel Levine, “To Share A Vision,” in Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology, eds. J.N.Porter & P. Dreier (1973), 183-185. 528 Hana Wirth Nesher describes Bernard Malamud’s “Jewbird” (1963) as a judaizing of Edgar Allen Poe’s raven, revamping the blackbird as “sharp-tongued” and critical of Jewish assimilation. Cynthia Ozick, in the style of earlier Yiddish writers, layered her writing with Jewish idioms and traditional knowledge that nodded to cultural insiders. Her writing also allowed Jewish and western gentile values to wrestle with and complement each other. Michael P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher, Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 117; 529 Brigid Alverson and Era Volin, “Comics Censorship, from ‘Gay Batman to Sendak’s Mickey,” School Library Journal, Sept. 23, 2014, http://www.slj.com/2014/09/censorship/comics-censorship-from-allegedly-gay- batman-to-sendaks-mickey/. 530 Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 111. 531 Harriet Stix, “Sendak Draws on Childhood Truths,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1984, box 1, folder 103, Arne Nixon Papers, Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. Bruno Bettelheim, for example, criticized Wild Things in his column in the Ladies’ Home Journal for its image of a mother withholding food as potentially frightening to children. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius, 265. 532 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 183. Sendak later wrote, “To deny children’s sexuality is a crime which we in this country are very guilty of.” Patrick Rodgers, “Selected Sendak: Interviews by the Rosenbach,” Rosenbach Museum Archives, 2007-2008, rpt. in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 165. Night Kitchen was partially inspired by memories of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, where Sendak’s older sister lost track of him in front of the Sunshine Bakers building. Ibid, 175. Though delighted by the aroma and by the tiny bakers waving from the balcony, Sendak remembered cringing at the company’s tagline: “We Bake While You Sleep!,” which frustrated the young Sendak excluded from the action and fun of urban nightlife and its promises of adult knowledge. Sendak called his Night Kitchen “a sort of vendetta book” to get back at those who obstructed him from the important and exciting knowledge of the night. Speaking about the process of creating the book, the artist declared, “I was now old enough to stay up at night and know what was happening in the Night Kitchen.” There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak, Rosenbach Museum and Library, retrospective of Sendak Interviews, 2008, DVD; Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 174. 311

533 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, box 2, folders 8-9, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators, Loyola Marymount University Archives & Special Collections. 534 Typescript, Francelia Butler interviews Maurice Sendak, April 1976, 19, box 9, folder: “Sendak, Maurice – Children’s Literature,” series 2, Francelia Butler Papers, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. 535 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 536 Cited in Commire, “Maurice Sendak,” 187. 537 Drawing from the liberal ideas of role models like Ruth Krauss, discussed in the previous chapter, Sendak’s work in these decades mirrors some of the critical perspectives of his contemporary intellectuals and popular artists. John Cech notes that early 1960’s social and personal liberation movements saw books like W. Hugh Missildine’s Your Inner Child of the Past (1963) that encouraged adults to come to terms with their wounded “inner child,” and that cultural icons like the Beatles celebrated the creative energy of the dynamic inner child – “irreverent, playful, mischievously challenging the boundaries of the acceptable.” Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 25. Jean Perrot notes that Sendak’s Wild Things (1963) was published one year before Lévi-Straus’s The Raw and the Cooked, and Night Kitchen appeared a year before Lévi-Strauss’s The Naked Man (1971), which interrogates the role of clothing in artificially developing human personality. Jean Perrot, “Maurice Sendak’s Ritual Cooking of the Child in Three Tableaux: The Moon, Mother, and Music,” Children’s Literature 18 (1990), 70-72. Perrot reads Sendak’s naked protagonist Mickey, moving between “lower” urban kitchen and “higher” cosmic sky, as a Lévi-Straussian mediator between “heaven and earth, life and death, nature and culture.” Ibid, 72-73. 538 Kathryn Bond Stockton uses the term “growing sideways” to describe the process of creatively resisting the social order’s threatening advances on the child’s early self. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 539 Seth Lerer argues that Sendak’s contribution to modern children’s literature was turning away from the Puritan, pastoral simplicity of the rural country and toward the dangerous city landscape – the site of modernist art – embracing it as a means to explore the wilderness of the interior self. Lecture, Seth Lerer, “Wild Thing: Maurice Sendak and the Worlds of Children’s Literature,” Contemporary Jewish Museum, uploaded Sep 29, 2009 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lducj5nUkrI; Jean Perrot writes that in Sendak’s Night Kitchen, we see deflections of his drawings for such earlier works as Krauss’s Charlotte and the White Horse (1955) and his own Kenny’s Window (1956) in “a caricature of Chagall’s universe seen through a child’s eyes.” Perrot, “Maurice Sendak’s Ritual Cooking of the Child,” 68-86, 70; Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 53. 540 Sendak’s concern with the child’s need to survive the boredom of the empty Brooklyn street also reflects a growing social concern in the decades of his youth around child’s play. With a plethora of mass media and commercialized toys available, parents were expected to keep their children entertained. The child who did not have fun was thought to be at risk for delinquency or for taking on the undue sullenness of adulthood. Peter Stearns traces to the 1920s the social expectation that parents entertain their children. Stearns, Anxious Parents, 188. Sendak’s early childhood took place during this shift, in which parents became more anxious about their children’s entertainment and their own limited ability to curate it. A misfit within a system that acculturated children into American democracy through a public system that encouraged conformity to rigid behavioral rules and foreign cultural norms of the Anglo-Saxon middle class, the young Sendak yearned for creative outlets for his serious and “different” inner world. 541 Marcus, Dear Genius, 163. 542 Jean Mercier, “Sendak on Sendak,” Publishers Weekly, April 10, 1981, 45-46. 543 Researcher notes, Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records (DM009), Georgia Institute of Technology Archives, http://finding-aids.library.gatech.edu/repositories/2/resources/436 544 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Minnie Kane, April 18, 1969, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 545 Nevertheless, Sendak would come to personally deplore the gratuitous distraction and stresses of the city. At the age of thirty-four he thanked his friend Mrs. Kane for helping him see that the excessive, frantic action of the city was a hindrance to his goals. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, May 25, 1962, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia (Mrs. Kane was in the habit of sending Sendak stones, which he believed had calming, grounding powers). 546 Jonathan Crary defines the notion of the “spectacle,” epitomized by advertising, comic books, and amusement parks, as “a technology of separation [through] the management of attention [that helped shape Americans into] docile subjects, even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous.” Op de Beeck, Suspended Animation, 121. 312

Fine art of the interwar years celebrated mechanical innovations and industry, contrasting the sentimental and morally didactic trends of earlier decades. Generated in part by the disillusionment of WWI and the Great Depression, the popular culture of Sendak’s adolescence favored capitalist dreams, superhero fantasies, and social realism over the earlier emphases on classical idealism and heavy-handed moralizing. 547 Sendak saw the 1920s as “a happy time, before commercial art became a term of opprobrium, and the myth flourished that achievement of any popular success in the arts exiled one from the realm of the serious.” Maurice Sendak, Introduction to The Poster Book (New York: Harmony Books, 1974), 5. 548 Allison Flood, “Maurice Sendak tells parents worried by Wild Things to ‘go to hell’,” The Guardian, Oct. 20, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/20/maurice-sendak-wild-things-hell Sendak once stated, “I remember a Mickey Mouse mask that came on a big box of cornflakes,” he recalled, “What a fantastic mask! Such a big, bright, vivid, gorgeous hunk of face! And that’s what a kid in Brooklyn knew at the time.” Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” Though Sendak had loved the earlier, scrappy version of Mickey Mouse, Mickey’s widespread popularity, Sendak felt, led Disney to flatten Mickey’s character into “a fat nothing [---] placid and nice and adorable” in order to appeal to the dollars of the mainstream masses. Flood, “Maurice Sendak tells parents worried by Wild Things to ‘go to hell’.” 549 Channeling Humpty Dumpty, Sendak once stated, “Mickey Mouse brought something out in me that even analysis couldn’t put back together again.” Mariana Cook, “Postscript: Wild Things,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2012, rpt. from 2009 interview, 58. 550 Lisa Hammel, “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet,” New York Times, January 5, 1973, Maurice Sendak Art & Artist Files, Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian Libraries, Washington D.C., consulted November 7, 2015; Harris, “Impressions of Sendak,” in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak. 551 Sonheim, Maurice Sendak, 78, 110. 552 According to Arthur Goren, the most discussed trend in American Jewish life of the 1940s and early 1950s is the move from working-class urban life to the middle-class suburbs. Arthur Goren, “A ‘Golden Decade’ for American Jews: 1945-1955,” in American Jewish Experience, ed. Jonathan Sarna (New York & London: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 295. American Jews of this era, he writes, benefited from careers in the professions and entrepreneurship, as well as from a decrease in antisemitism, and they felt more confidently American due to the nation’s role in defeating Germany in the war and taking leadership in the free world. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 2004), 306-308. 553 Chauncey notes that films of the 1930s “destabilized gender categories and implied that any man might sexually desire another man” by regularly depicting “one of the duo goosing the other, pulling down his pants, or engaging in obscene poses,” such as in the film Their First Mistake (1932), in which Laurel sucks a baby’s bottle from Hardy’s hands before Hardy strokes the bottle “so hard that milk spurts out of it.” Chauncey, 325. It is not surprising, then, that Sendak, who was four years old at the time of the film’s release, would later choose to feature Oliver Hardy lookalikes as bakers in his book about childhood sexuality – in which the triumphant, sensually awakened boy protagonist floats naked through the air and pours milk down to those bakers. Considering his ambivalent feelings about his queer sexuality as a source of danger and isolation, it is also not surprising that those flamboyant bakers bury Mickey in cake batter and literally almost destroy him. Sendak told Steven Heller in 1986 that Night Kitchen contained “everything I loved: New York, immigrants, Jews, Laurel and Hardy, Mickey Mouse, King Kong, movies.” Steven Heller, ed. Innovations of American Illustration (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986), 70-81, rpt. in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 104. 554 Jess H. Wilson, “Does Your ‘Research’ Embrace the Boy of Today?,” Printers Ink 118 (March 16, 1922), rpt. in Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader, 462. 555 Girls’ fashion in the ‘30s, however, remained diminutive and child-like, dominated by simple dresses, pinafores, sunsuits, playsuits, and bloomers. Bob Batchelor, American Pop: Popular Culture Decade by Decade [4 volumes], vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2009), 78-79. 556 The motion and activity of a comic strip evolve through the empty “gutter” spaces between panels, which invite the viewer to engage in the process of visually connecting the dots and imaginatively filling in the blanks, as Sendak did through the window: “We sat in front of a window, and my grandmother pulled the shade up and down to amuse me. […] I was thrilled by the sudden reappearance of the backyard, the falling snow, and my brother and sister busy constructing a sooty snowman. Down came the shade – I waited. Up went the shade – the 313 children had moved, the snowman had grown eyes.” Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: Harper Collins, 1993); Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things,” 1976. 557 Quoted in Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things,” 1976; Sound recording (2 sound files), Maurice Sendak, September 14, 1993, Public Education Program sound recordings. 558 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 175. For an analysis of Sendak’s integration of text and image panels in Where The Wild Things Are, see Paul G. Arakelian, “Text and Illustration: A Stylistic Analysis of Books by Sendak and Mayer,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1985): 122-127. 559 Sendak was not unprecedented in emulating comics superheroes in children’s picture books to speak to their liberation fantasies. His colleague Ruth Krauss’s 1946 picture book The Great Duffy likewise used a superhero motif to validate children’s desire for unbridled freedom while remaining materially dependent on adults. Illustrated by Mischa Richter, also a child of Eastern European immigrants, it follows a boy who, frustrated by the limitations of his young age (he is not allowed by his mother to walk to school by himself), imagines wearing a tight blue shirt and pants, a bright red cape, a black belt, boots, and a golden badge – “The good muscles of his shoulders and the good muscles of his legs showed plain beneath the shirt and pants. The red cape hung from his shoulders like a flag.” Duffy’s desk turns into a superhero’s headquarters, and suddenly the boy, dressed in Superman’s colors, speeds off in a car, commands a submarine, and parachutes out of a plane to save an endangered puppy. This imaginary adventure gives him solace to return to the reality of his small, dependent position. As discussed below, Sendak’s Night Kitchen expanded on and sensualized this sort of fantasy about unreachable agency and freedoms, which could appeal to children and other culturally regulated human beings alike. Ruth Krauss, The Great Duffy, Pictures by Mischa Richter (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1946). 560 As Sendak saw it, Melville’s work “is full of men like […] superman, heroes. He loved male imagery like that. It’s very peculiar.” Cited in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 88. Thus, Sendak indirectly linked his own use of comics conventions with respectable nineteenth-century literature. 561 By the late 1920s, artists like William Nicholson moved away from illustrating wordy or didactic stories to focus instead on what became the children’s book as we know it today: a horizontal layout with individual frames that paid more attention to the fusion of text and image; including more entertaining, meaningful pictures and a running text that was more fluid, spare, and suspenseful. Op de Beeck, Suspended Animation, 1-2. 562 A representative of the Houghton Mifflin Company in the 1920s decried the sensational, unreflective, overstimulating, and unwholesome children’s books that, like comics, resembled movie plots. Ibid, x, 14. 563 Moreover, Sendak’s figurative drawing style also lacked favor by the interwar decades, as new standards of technology, design, and abstraction displaced earlier, more sentimental styles. Even by the 1940s and ‘50s, during the height of abstract expressionism when, as Leonard Marcus writes, “America’s post-war art establishment deified Jackson Pollock,” figurative artists like Sendak remained unfashionable in high society, confined to “the cultural shallows of advertising, cartooning, graphic design, and illustration, or the so-called ‘applied’ arts […] with children’s book illustration consigned to a position at or near the bottom of the pecking order.” Leonard S. Marcus, “The Artist and His Work,” in Marcus, Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, 15. 564 Part of what made the wider culture take comics and picture books seriously as art were the innovations of figures like Sendak and Art Spiegelman, who pushed aesthetic limits and infused those overlooked forms with serious, human questions. With his controversial use of nudity, terror, and visual tropes from the “low” art of comic books, movies, Mickey Mouse cartoons, and advertisements, Leonard Marcus writes, “Sendak’s Mickey, in a certain sense, pointed the way to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, to the rise of the mongrel art form of the graphic novel in which the once-fixed categories of ‘high,’ ‘low,’ ‘adult,’ and ‘child-appropriate’ art would all turn richly and provocatively fluid.” Ibid, 24. 565 At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, an eleven-year-old Sendak was left alone by his older sister in front of the Sunshine Bakers building, out of which came a mesmerizing aroma and several short-statured bakers who waved at Sendak from the balcony. Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 174. 566 Memorandum, Anne G. Wolfe of the American Jewish Committee to the members of the Committee on Comics, April 11, 1960, box 48, folder 29, Comics Project, Social Welfare History Archives, Elmer Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries. 567 Art Spiegelman once said that Sendak approached his books with “a comics inflection […] with the bounce, movement, and even sometimes the language—including balloons and panels—that evolves from a deep affection for comics.” Sasha Weiss, “Art Spiegelman Discusses Maurice Sendak” New Yorker, May 9, 2012. Sendak’s pictures for A Very Special House (1953), Hector Protector (1965), and Lullabies and Night Songs (1965)

314 also draw from comics conventions, using word bubbles, sound effects written out in capitalized letters, wild pacing, separated panels, and flat color planes. 568 Little Nemo in Slumberland, with its fantastical architectural dreamscapes, mermaids, and clowns, drew from his background as a sign painter for a traveling circus. The first comic strip to receive a full exhibit at the Met, Little Nemo brought Sendak back to the popular art of his own childhood. Sendak visited the Met exhibit in 1966. Woody Gelman, “Dreamer of Beauty,” in Little Nemo (NY: Nostalgia Press, 1976). 569 For example, the cream container lists two addresses from Sendak’s Brooklyn childhood, a carton labeled “Eugene’s” refers to his partner, Eugene Glynn, and his parents receive mention in the labels “Philip’s best tomatoes” and “Sadie’s best.” Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 182-3. 570 See Danny Fingeroth, Disguised As Clark Kent (NY & London: Continuum, 2007); Arie Kaplan, From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 2008); Samantha Baskind and Ranan Omer-Sherman, eds., The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008). 571 Halberstam writes that mainstream society values “long periods of stability” and demonizes those who live “in rapid bursts (drug addicts, for example)” as “immature and even dangerous.” Judith Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies,” in In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005), rpt. in Reading Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity, eds. Susan Archer Mann and Ashly Suzanne Patterson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 346. 572 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 25-26. 573 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Harry Ford, August 5, 1975, Non-Book-Related Correspondence, Manuscript Series, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 574 Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’” 575 Rochman, “The Booklist Interview,” 1848, Blaine Pennington Papers. 576 However, it is important to note that comparing immigrants or other minority groups to children has been a way to exclude them from civil rights. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xxiv, cited in Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 34. Sendak called childhood a “grand and terrifying and most uncivilized country,” doing so from a place of great reverence and respect for the child’s wild energies in the face of an unnaturally restrained and culturally suppressive adult society. Inauguration of the Zena Sutherland Lectureship, “Sources of Inspiration,” Maurice Sendak, May 20, 1983, box 7, folder 4, Zena Bailey Sutherland Papers, University of Chicago Graduate School Special Collections, 3. 577 “Maurice Sendak On Being a Kid,” animated video, Andrew Romano and Ramin Setoodeh, PBS Digital Studios, produced by David Gerlach, based on Newsweek interview, September 9, 2009. Philip’s version of Adam and Eve was “soft porn,” and he “didn’t censor anything.” Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan, video, 1985, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art. Sendak, repeating details of these stories in school, would get sent home by teachers to have his mouth washed out. Sound cassette (2 sound files), Maurice Sendak, September 14, 1993, Public Education Program sound recordings. 578 Riv-Ellen Prell, “Family Economy/Family Relations,” in National Variations in Jewish Identity, eds. Steven M. Cohen and Gabriel Horenczyk (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 185. 579 Reform rabbi Stephen S. Wise believed that the intergenerational conflict so prevalent in the late 1910s and early 1920s was due to the “unfitness of the elders” to parent by heightened standards of modern childrearing. Wise, Child Versus Parent, 22. By the early 1920s, American Reform Jews stressed the importance of children’s psychological independence above their observance of parents’ traditions. Wise, for example, encouraged Jewish parents to minimize their influence on their own children. He wrote, “As children near adulthood, they desire to be autonomous persons rather than things or possessions. […] The ‘owned’ child is not unlikely with the years to become and to remain a poor, miserable dependent intellectually and spiritually, once its parents are gone.” Ibid, 111-112, 116. 580 Ibid, 142. Nevertheless, even while advocating for understanding and acculturation to middle-class parenting styles, Wise cautioned American Jews that the Jewish home was under serious threat in a culture of American individualism. Ibid, 138. Wise believed that the “grace and glory” of the traditional Jewish home, exaggerated by the effects of anti-Jewish hostility in the external world, was rooted in parents’ selflessness and the

315 resultant “understanding of togetherness,” as well as the love and “reverence of the Jewish child for parents” even after their passing. Ibid, 131. 581 Ibid, 103-104. In 1932, Conservative rabbi Jacob Kohn also beseeched parents not to guilt their children with tears or by questioning the child’s love. “A young person soon realizes, if such tactics are repeated, that the very love felt for parents—something quite taken for granted—is being used against him to throttle his personality and to suppress his individuality. I know of nothing that can poison the relation between parents and child more effectively than this discovery.” Kohn, Modern Problems of Jewish Parents, 42. 582 American Reform Jews in the interwar years were largely established, middle-class families who had immigrated from the cities of Western and Central Europe, many having acculturated in the previous century. Eager to suit mainstream American cultural and gender norms, they integrated popular child-centered approaches more readily than did traditional congregations established by Eastern European shtetl immigrants like the Sendaks, but they also struggled to keep children engaged in Jewish and family values amidst the competing invitations offered by American individualism and popular culture. Some Reform leaders thus advocated for increasing emotional closeness between children and parents. In 1928, the year of Sendak’s birth, Max Reichler, a Reform Rabbi of the Sendaks’ Bensonhurst neighborhood declared, the “American environment works its influence in the direction of liberalism, which youth does not want to combat and old age cannot.” Beth Sholem Peoples Temple Yearbook, 1928, “The Rabbi’s Message,” American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History. Six years earlier, Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise wrote Child Versus Parent (1922), which recognizes children as emotionally vulnerable personalities deserving respectful communication and reasoning. Wise argued that children would learn “outward courtesy and inward chivalry” only when parents descended their “thrones” to prioritize collaborative truth-seeking by appealing to children’s reason, rather than exercising irrational power and control. Wise, Child Versus Parent, 92. 583 Conservative rabbi Jacob Kohn, for example, took an empathetic approach to Jewish children who rebelled against parents’ traditions, warning Jewish parents to understand the disillusionment and rebelliousness of adolescent youth who came of age in the aftermath of WWI, betrayed by “many of the cherished illusions of civilization in the horrible tragedy of a world conflict.” Kohn, Modern Problems of Jewish Parents, 36-37. Kohn warned against creating an excessively insular, austere home in which children were not free to ask the wider human and social questions that mattered to them. He wrote that adolescents’ “discoveries of the possibilities of life and sex, so glamorously new to them” were too often met with parental replies of, “I’m tired; talk to me about that some other time,” or “Get to bed; you mustn’t keep us up all night.” Kohn encouraged late-night, boundary-pushing, open conversations between parents and children as a means for the generations to grow closer. He also advised parents not to censor “dangerous” or corrupting information from their adolescent offspring, as it only intensified their interest in that information: “To live dangerously is one of the ideals and one of the prerogatives of youth. It is we who long for the safety and the security of the accustomed armchair. They, for the most part, are willing to test the dangers of a plane navigating the air or of an idea soaring above the level of conventional prejudice.” Ibid, 49-50, 44. 584 Sadie and Philip were both children of rabbis, Sadie being the eldest daughter of a poor talmudic scholar who had run a grocery and dry-goods store in Zakrocym, Poland. Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 10. The Sendaks associated with Jewish immigrants originating from the Polish shtetlakh of their own origins: Zakroczym for Sadie and Zambrow for Philip. When Maurice was a young child, his father created a tailoring company, Lucky Stitching, with two landsmen friends. Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. Sadie would bring the young Sendak from Brooklyn on trips back to the dense, traditional streets of the Jewish Lower East Side; he would later reminisce about the pickles there and their delightful smell of brine. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, Oct. 29, 1962, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Mrs. Sendak dutifully maintained a kosher home, Shabbat restrictions, and family purity laws, even though the family only attended synagogue on rare occasions. The children were taken to the library on Fridays to choose books to occupy them for Shabbat, as they were not allowed to write or engage in other activities. The Hearst Corporation, “Maurice Sendak: Childhood Books I remember,” 1995, Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records (DM009), Georgia Institute of Technology Archives, http://finding- aids.library.gatech.edu/repositories/2/resources/436 Sendak would relay in adulthood, “I am not an Orthodox Jew, but I was brought up as one and that lingers, the business of making your life purposeful.” Roger Sutton, “An Interview with Maurice Sendak,” The Horn Book (Nov/Dec 2003): 687-99, rpt. in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 150. 316

He would later add that the Jewish laws of his upbringing “made no sense to me. It made no sense to me what was happening. So nothing of it means anything to me. Nothing. Except these few little trivial things that are related to being Jewish.” “‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak,” NPR.org, May 8, 2012. Accessed May 11, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152248901/fresh-air-remembers-author-maurice-sendak 585 See Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) and Moore, At Home in America, 124. 586 During his Hebrew School days, Sendak lived about a mile away from the Orthodox Talmud Torah and Congregation Sons of Israel. Established in 1896 at Benson Avenue and 21st Street in Brooklyn, Sons of Israel’s records describe a history of overcoming an insurgent Reform faction, deemed a “belligerent element” and “contrary to the tenets of our tradition.” The congregation offered a traditional Judaism that might have appealed to the Sendaks. Congregation Sons of Israel Yearbook, 1947, “The days of our years,” American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History. The synagogue attracted traditional Jews to the area, including non-acculturated Jewish European immigrants, some of them survivors of the world wars and of antisemitic persecution, more broadly. In 1924, the congregation was the first in America to welcome the European rabbinical delegation led by Chief Rabbi Abraham Kook, Rabbi Moses Mordecai Epstein, and Abraham Schapiro, Kovno’s Chief Rabbi, which came to raise funds for Jews of Europe and Palestine struggling to survive after WWI. Sendak, however, did not attend this Talmud Torah, which boasted 425 students in 1924, but rather learned Hebrew after school from a private tutor, a Polish immigrant who taught in the home he shared with his mother. It was increasingly common during the Depression years to save money by foregoing synagogue membership and reserving Jewish education to minimal Hebrew schooling in preparation for one’s Bar Mitzvah. Ibid. On Philip Sendak’s side of the family, only two second-cousins made it to America from Europe. Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. According to the grandson of one of those cousins, Ben Ross, even the atheists among Philip’s extended family believed that if one was to pray, one should pray in Hebrew and according to the traditions of the Old Country, rather than in English or with the accompaniment of an organ. Ben Ross assured me that the Sendaks would not have attended a Reform synagogue. Ben Ross (grandson of Jacob Ross [Rzodkiewicz], Philip Sendak’s second cousin), in discussion with the author, July 9, 2014. 587 One illustrative oral history of shtetl life describes the “life of the ‘good Jew’” as “lived in the synagogue, at home, and in the marketplace. No aspect of life was separated from any other, or from the life of any other Jew in the community. The community had not only the right, but the duty, to express its approval or disapproval of the behavior of any member of the town.” Lucille W. Brown and Stephen M. Berk, “Fathers and Sons: Hasidim, Orthodoxy, and Haskalah – A View From Eastern Europe,” The Oral History Review 5, no. 1 (Jan 1, 1977): 17, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History. Congregations like that of Bensonhurst’s Sons of Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in the Sendaks’ Brooklyn neighborhood, held to the dictum that “practically every action of the Jew is governed by our religion, because Judaism is a system of guidance which calls for observance of its rules and regulations in order that the human being’s life may be regulated properly – that a real Utopia may be established on earth.” Congregation Sons of Israel Yearbook, 1947, “The Daily Routine,” American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History. 588 Indeed, as Naomi Prawer Kadar writes of early twentieth-century literature by Jewish immigrants who wrote for educational Yiddish magazines, “The initial narratives that feature a child as a hero reflected the older generation’s tenuous acceptance of America and its abundant treasures as well as their fervent desire to transmit their progressive and Jewish legacies.” Kadar, Raising Secular Jews, 178. 589 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 590 Jonathan Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things” Rolling Stone, December 30, 1976, http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/maurice-sendak-king-of-all-wild-things-19761230?page=3 Sendak said that Brooklyn kids were “old before their time [...] Most of them were Jewish, and they may well look like little greenhorns just off the boat. They had - some of them, anyway - a kind of bowed look, as if the burdens of the world were on their shoulders. […] they’re all a kind of caricature of me. They look as if they've been hit on the head and hit so hard they weren’t ever going to grow up any more.” Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 26. 591 In 1932 Conservative rabbi Jacob Kohn notes the shift from the centuries-old tradition of choosing a spouse based on concerns of the family and “yichus” (lineage) to a modern focus on romantic love and “individual beauty and charm.” Kohn, Modern Problems of Jewish Parents, 95.

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Choosing a non-Jewish, same-sex partner, like Sendak would do, might have registered for traditional Jewish parents as the greatest rebellion against collective priorities in favor of individual attraction, even at the expense of the wider culture’s taboos. 592 Satirizing the Jewish disengagement among American youth, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), a popular Yiddish author whom Sendak’s parents adored, had written an American parody of the four questions traditionally asked at the Passover seder by the youngest child. Ashamed that his Jewish ancestors allowed themselves “to be slashed and cut to pieces, burned and roasted, hanged and drowned, and to watch as their children were killed before their eyes, and to jump into the fire” to protect their faith when faced with forced conversion, the child asks, “Why did we memorize the history of all peoples, the old ones and the new ones, but omit the history of one people—our own Jewish people?” and “Why did you send us to a school to learn only English, and forget to teach us Yiddish, our own language, or Hebrew” and “Why do we know when it’s Christmas [...] but we don't know when it’s khanike.” Sholem Aleichem, “The ‘Four Questions’ of An American Boy,” in Yiddish Literature in America: 1870- 2000, ed. Emanuel S. Goldsmith, trans. Barnett Zumoff (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 2009), 50-52. 593 Philip was the son of a fairly wealthy rabbi who worked in lumber and had access to the non-Jewish world. Sendak shared that Philip originally immigrated in order to chase another young woman who then rejected him. Philip, Sendak explained, “had prestige and was extremely handsome and [devil-may-care]. He came here and became a drudge. His family was sitting shiva for him back in the old country because he had done this terrible thing: chasing a girl, when your father is a rabbi, and schlepping all the way to New York.” Philip’s father never forgave him for leaving Poland – he would only send letters or presents via other relatives, avoiding direct contact with Philip. Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 594 Sendak continued, “when the relatives came over, and these lumbering fat faces loomed over us, pinched us, mauled us, kissed us and said, ‘We could eat you up we love you so,’ we thought, ‘Hey, if Mama doesn't cook dinner fast, they’ll eat anything.” Mark Swed, “‘Wild Things’ in Operaland: Maurice Sendak moves from children’s books to stage designer and librettist,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1990. 595 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. 596 Roger Sutton, “An Interview with Maurice Sendak,” The Horn Book Magazine 79 (2003): 695. 597 Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs (directors), Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, featuring Maurice Sendak, Lynn Caponera, Catherine Keener, Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010, DVD. 598 Marcus, Dear Genius, 184. Sendak’s drawing for the cover of Selma Lanes’s Down the Rabbit Hole (1971), a book of children’s , gestures toward similar tensions between empathizing with downtrodden, immigrant parents and pursuing sensual, potentially dangerous, individual opportunities offered to youth. It depicts a modestly clothed, Old-World matron, dressed in a ruffled bonnet and looking sullenly downward beside the bed of a crouching, naked boy who reaches his hand toward an open, moonlit window, where a giant rabbit, dressed in the garb of a fanciful, eighteenth-century dandy, offers his paw. The bedpost has sprouted into a tree, the carpet into grass. Incorporating elements of Wild Things, Night Kitchen, and other stories, Sendak draws the conflicting emotional worlds of a family burdened with the hardships of recent memory and of a young American individual’s awakening into sensuality, fantasy, and creative agency. Similarly, Sendak’s illustrations for the book jacket of In Grandpa’s House (1985) would depict a husband and wife joining hands in symbolic matrimony, mirrored by the figures of a lion and lioness, and juxtaposed with the image of a boy who flies overhead on the back of a bird, uprooted and solitary in the night sky. See previous chapter for a lengthier discussion on Sendak’s use of birds and the potential connection to expressing subversion or alienation vis-à-vis the traditional family unit. 599 Deborah Dash Moore claims, for example, that public school, charged with unifying children into a common belief system, was a potential arena of conflict between gentile teachers and Jewish students, teachers denigrating Yiddish as lower-class and un-American. Children internalized that they needed to judge their parents’ poor English and follow their teachers’ lead in order to achieve social mobility. Moore, At Home in America, 90-91, 105, 111. 600 Until its amendment in 1952, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 enforced the strictest American barring of Eastern and Southern European immigrants by instating quotas based on country-of-origin that allowed entry to only two percent of each national population as reflected in the American census of 1890. Sarna, American Judaism, 215; see also Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. 601 Sarna, American Judaism, 269. 602 Howe, World of Our Fathers, 254. 603 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 318

604 Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 18-19. 605 Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 606 Zarin, “Not Nice.” 607 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” It was perhaps to relieve guilt from this particular memory that, in Sendak’s Very Far Away (1957), Sendak reverses the power dynamic, depicting a boy named Martin who sulks when ignored by his mother, too distracted caring for the baby to answer his questions. 608 Cited in Anne Commire, “Maurice Sendak,” Something About the Author: Facts and Pictures about Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People 27 (1982), 198. Randall Jarrell, Fly By Night, pictures by Maurice Sendak (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), 26-27. 609 Cited in Jill P. May, “Envisioning the Jewish Community in Children’s Literature: Maurice Sendak and Isaac Singer,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 33, no. 3 / 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2000 - Winter 2001): 148. 610 Hentoff, “Among the Wild Things.” 611 Bertram Slaff, “Creativity: Blessing or Burden?,” Adolescent Psychiatry (1981): 83. 612 This is Phyllis Greenacre’s conception of the artist’s psyche, as described by Glynn. Eugene D. Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008), 15. See Chapter Four for a lengthier discussion of Sendak’s imagined mergers with other relatives and personalities, a “queer romanticist” means of dramatically working through overwhelming, “unacceptable” feelings. 613 “Maurice Sendak: Getting Kids to Read,” 1995, The Hearst Corporation. http://homemarts.com/depts/relat/sendakbb.htm, Accessed June 8, 1999, Georgia Tech Library Archives, Atlanta, GA. 614 Eugene Glynn, “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36, reprinted as “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory” in Glynn, Desperate Necessity, ed. Weinberg, 147. First-generation Israeli writer David Grossman also described writing novels as empathetically embodying other people, imaginatively investing in others’ voices. Son of a Yiddish-speaking, Polish immigrant who taught him as a child to love the works of Sholem Aleichem, Grossman has sought to empathetically embody the voices of Israeli women, Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and Palestinians. David Grossman, Writing in the Dark, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008). 615 Maurice Sendak, Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life (NY: Harper & Row, 1967), 20. 616 Rochman, “The Booklist Interview,” 1848, Blaine Pennington Papers. 617 Eugene Glynn, “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36, reprinted as “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory” in Glynn, Desperate Necessity, ed. Weinberg, 140. 618 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 619 Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, 1999, box 32, folder 9, Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records (DM009), Georgia Institute of Technology Archives, http://finding- aids.library.gatech.edu/repositories/2/resources/436 620 In December 1968, Sendak called Singer a Sendak-family hero, thanking him for an inscribed copy of The Séance, which had brought Philip to tears. Letter, Maurice Sendak to I.B. Singer, Dec. 23, 1968, series 2, Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. 621 These are the words of Leonard Marcus. Introduction to Marcus, ed., Dear Genius, xxxvi-xxxvii. 622 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mary Jarrell, January 1966, Randall Jarrell Collection 1914-1969, New York Public Library. 623 Hammel, “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet,” 1973. 624 Atzel, the hero of “Fool’s Paradise” was modeled after Sendak’s maternal grandmother. In “The First Schlemiel,” the baby is drawn from a photograph of Sendak himself, and the old man’s face was also based on a relative’s photograph. Researcher’s notes, Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records, Georgia Tech Library Archives, Atlanta, GA; Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 625 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, June 23, 1966, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Anticipating the project, Sendak wrote to Singer of his specific excitement about drawing rotund Jewish servants costumed as angels. Letter, Maurice Sendak to I.B. Singer, n.d., series 2, Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers.

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626 In the eponymous story of the Zlateh collection, a lone shtetl boy resists a treacherous snowstorm by hiding inside of a haystack with his family’s goat, Zlateh – a creature whom he has been instructed to sell to the slaughter but whose milk nourishes the boy through the dangerous storm, leading to Zlateh’s salvation. The month following the death of his mother in 1968, Sendak wrote to Singer about how proud Sadie had been about her son working with the latter. Letter, Maurice Sendak to I.B. Singer, Sept. 4, 1968, Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers. Separate from Zlateh, Sendak illustrated a Singer story published in the Saturday Evening Post on May 4, 1968: “Yash the Chimney-Sweep.” He included a drawing of his father and mother, her eyes hidden under a draped headdress. She was then dying. Sendak lost Singer’s friendship by refusing to sell the writer this drawing, infuriating him. Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, video, Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan, 1985, Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art; Justin G. Schiller, “Recollections for an Exhibition,” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 8-13. 627 Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Public Education Program sound recordings. 628 Sendak had persuaded Philip, as he lay dying in the hospital, to put down one of his stories and tell him about his life. Philip did so in Yiddish, Sendak transcribing in a notebook. Unfinished and untitled when Philip died in 1970, it took over a decade to reach publication, as Sendak stressed over doing justice to his father’s memory. Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan, video, 1985, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art. 629 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. 630 Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 69. 631 Lenore J. Weitzman describes the phenomena of role reversals and “role sharing” between husbands and wives, as well as between parents and children in the Jewish ghettos of WWII. Weitzman, “Resistance in Everyday Life: Family Strategies, Role Reversals, and Role Sharing in the Holocaust,” in Jewish Families in Europe, 1939- Present, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic, (Waltham, MA: UPNE/Brandeis University Press, 2017), 46-47. Contemporary examples of the enmeshment, boundary violation, and tight-knit bonds of a post-Holocaust family grappling with matters of sexuality, individuality, and levels of relatedness extend to such popular representations as Jill Soloway’s dramatic comedy series, Transparent (2014-). This series was the subject of the opening plenary session, as well as of several papers presented at the 2016 annual Association for Jewish Studies conference. 632 Zarin, “Not Nice.” 633 Typescript for In Grandpa’s House, page 49, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 634 Bedingfield, “Trans-Memory and Diaspora,” 343, 349. 635 It is worth considering the potentially gendered and queer aspects of supernatural possession. Dybbuks were sometimes invoked in traditional Yiddish culture as excuses for betrothed brides who did not wish to marry the men of their parents’ choosing. To be possessed by a dybbuk was to be carrying too much of another person to be fit to offer oneself fully for marriage, to be pregnant with or dispossessed by another person who has somehow penetrated the victim’s depths. In this way, possession – including, I argue, the emotional possession of secondhand memory transfer – both carries traditionally feminine connotations and offers a creative possibility for queer sidestepping of constraining social expectations placed on an unusual member of the Jewish community. A queer or rebellious subject, for example, might claim to be possessed by an external being in order to resist the unwelcome advances of a society that would enforce a traditional, but personally offensive duty, such as a heterosexual union for a gay person. Eli Somer, “Trance Possession Disorder in Judaism: Sixteenth-Century Dybbuks in the Near East,” Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 5, no. 2 (2004): 143 and Rachel Elior, Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2008), both cited in Justin Almquist, “Confronting Terezín: A Production History of Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner’s Brundibar,” (MA Thesis, Central Washington University, 2014), 40. 636 Cited in Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 126. 637 Almquist, “Confronting Terezín,” 40. 638 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 192-193. As I discuss in the next chapter, Sendak’s Rosie character of The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960) would model the experience of “possession” as a means of self-preservation and child’s play, as she sits beneath a blanket and insists on having lost her identity, waiting for the supernatural intervention of “Magic Man” to rescue her. Sendak would repeat this motif in works like Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967), in which the infant is in fact possessed by the 320 spirit of Mother Goose, who later reveals herself and ascends to the moon. In Outside Over There (1981), goblins would replace an infant with an ice baby in a moment of neglect by her caretaker – an apt metaphor for the experience of demonic possession. Sendak would repeatedly identify the ice baby of Outside Over There as a symbol of his own endangered, displaced self as an infant. Like Rosie, the child Sendak awaited the inspiration of “magic” – in his case, that of the movie palace, comic book, and the dime novel – to conjure outrageous narratives of flight and suspense, as well as to provide the dramatic plots he narrated to other neighborhood children as a means of connecting, if only momentarily, with otherwise indifferent or hostile peers. 639 Letter, Maurice Sendak to I.B. Singer, December 29, 1968, Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers. 640 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Minnie Kane, September 3, 1968, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Sendak’s empathizing with his parents’ emotional states reached a level that bordered on physical when the artist’s heart gave way in 1968, the same year his mother lay dying of cancer. Though not yet forty, he suffered a near-fatal heart attack during an interview in England, from which he needed to excuse himself when he suddenly lost the ability to speak. Amy Sonheim, Maurice Sendak (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 12. 641 These Yiddish transcriptions would later offer the basis of the picture book In Grandpa’s House (1985). Patrick Rodgers (Sendak curator at the Rosenbach Museum & Library), email to author, July 9, 2014. Harper hired Seymour Barofsky to do the translation from Yiddish, because Sendak’s Yiddish was not quite fluent enough. Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 41. Philip had become sick in 1965, requiring back surgery, which had brought Sendak home early from a vacation on Fire Island. Sendak wrote to a friend at that time, “The crisis has drawn the family tight and close together. Buried feelings were revived – lovely talks with my brother and sister – all of us in the same house again – children again.” Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, August 16, 1965, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The story for Night Kitchen was finished by July 1969, before Sendak began the pictures. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, July 21, 1969, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 642 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, May 13, 1969, Coleman Dowell Papers. Sendak’s apartment on West 9th Street was a mere 0.3 miles from the Stonewall Inn – about a six-minute walk. The Stonewall Riots of June 28, 1969 involved the violent resistance of patrons against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a popular Greenwich Village oasis for queer people in a time preceding acceptance of LGBTQ identities in the public sphere. The event is widely credited as the most important one leading to the organized gay liberation movement. Ann Bausum, Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights (New York: Penguin, 2016). 643 Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 111. 644 Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 645 Rather than “to my parents,” Sendak writes that he specified their names, “Philip and Sadie,” in order to emphasize their “individuality.” Harris, “Impressions of Sendak,” in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 41. Sendak’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, would write:

I remember Philip in the hospital, and his notebook with the Yiddish manuscript on which you worked. […] I saw a part of you I’d never seen before, the manly tenderness and love with which you treated him in the hospital. That will always give you happiness, dear, that you did so much for him in the final years, gave him so much love and understanding and support. I don’t know if it is all right to write this sort of letter to a Jewish person, but I wanted to say some of it. And I think I am just about as Jewish as you are anyhow.

Nordstrom even attended the unveiling of Philip Sendak’s gravestone on May 16, 1971. Marcus, Dear Genius, 315, 313. 646 Hammel, “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet.” Sendak wrote that he created Night Kitchen in part to work through his emotions about his mother’s passing, because he “didn't want to feel that her dying was the end.” Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. 647 Burningham, “His stories and illustrations captivate children,” 2005.

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648 Leonard S. Marcus, “The Artist and His Work,” in Marcus, Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, 15-27, 24. 649 One 1971 review, for example, in Elementary English saw Night Kitchen as striking “a literary blow for the Kid Lib movement” in its invitation to “vicariously wallow nude in cake dough and skinny dip in milk.” Cited in Sonheim, Maurice Sendak, 14. Another critic warned “Sendak […] will doubtless offend those who are unprepared to acknowledge [a child’s sexual] feelings.” Lanes, Art of Maurice Sendak, 185. Sendak included his partner Eugene Glynn’s first name on one of the buildings. On that same page, writes Ellen Handler Spitz, “Mickey pounds the dough into a propeller, which very much resembles a penis.” Ellen Handler Spitz, “Maurice Sendak’s Sexuality,” New Republic, February 21, 2013, Accessed April 20, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/112448/maurice-sendaks-my-brothers-book-reviewed-ellen-handler-splitz 650 Walter Clemons, “Sendak’s Enchanted Land,” Newsweek, May 18, 1981, 102, box 1, folder 21, Series 3, Blaine Pennington Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Special Collections. Indeed, while working on the text for Night Kitchen, he wrote to his friend Coleman Dowell, a writer known for his risqué sexual exploits, requesting both ideas for words related to baking that he might use in Night Kitchen, as well as details about Dowell’s experiences on Shelter Island. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, April 7, 1969, Coleman Dowell Papers. Highlighting the sexual undertones of the book, Sendak ends another letter to Dowell, presumably in response to the latter’s praise of In The Night Kitchen, with a sexually explicit compliment to Dowell from the protagonist, Mickey. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, n.d., Coleman Dowell Papers. 651 Under pressure to censor the book, Nordstrom would distribute a press release on June 9, 1972, which comprised 425 signatures of professors, librarians, artists, authors, and publishers, condemning as artistic “mutilation” librarians’ censoring of Mickey’s genitalia, as it unfairly altered public engagement with the artist’s original work. To one mutilating party, she would personally write in Sendak’s defense:

I am indeed distressed to hear that in the year 1972 you burned a copy of a book. We are truly distressed that you think it is not a book for elementary school children. I assume it is the little boy’s nudity which bothers you. But truly, it does not disturb children! Mr. Sendak is a creative artist, a true genius, and he is able to speak to children directly. For children – at least up to the age of 12 or 13 – are usually tremendously creative themselves. Should not those of us who stand between the creative artist and the child be very careful not to sift our reactions to such books through our own adult prejudices and neuroses? To me as editor and publisher of books for children, that is one of my greatest and most difficult duties. Believe me, we do not take our responsibilities lightly! I think young children will always react with delight to such a book as In the Night Kitchen, and they will react creatively and wholesomely. It is only adults who ever feel threatened by Sendak’s work.

Marcus, Dear Genius, 326, 333-335. 652 Sendak would later write, “I drew Oliver Hardy, not Hitler. But I can see it that way. The Holocaust became the subject of so much of my later work that I have to allow that it was there.” John Burningham, “His stories and illustrations captivate children.” Reesa Sheryl Malca Sorin also suggests that the symbolism of Mickey differentiating himself from the milk and the batter is a matter of resisting acculturation – “Is Mickey really being acculturised by being cooked; initiated into the strange society of the Night Kitchen? […] he pokes his head through the smoke to try to explain that he is not the milk, he is Mickey.” Reesa Sheryl Malca Sorin, “The Fears of Early Childhood: Writing in Response to a Study of Maurice Sendak” (MA Thesis, School of Journalism and Creative Writing, U. of Wollongong, 1994), 48. 653 Hammel, “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet.” 654 Gregory Maguire, Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 145. 655 Similarly, in Higglety Pigglety Pop!, the moon descends to the protagonist’s level, revealing herself as “a lady named “The World Mother Goose” who was “round on top, middle, and bottom, and dressed in shabby white”. Maurice Sendak, Wye Allanbrook, and Stephen Greenblatt, “Mozart, Shakespeare and the Art of Maurice Sendak,” Changelings: Children’s Stories Lost and Found, ed. Christina M. Gillis (Berkeley, CA: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, U. of California, 1996), 49-51. Sendak, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, 46-48. 656 Jack and Guy stand in poses reminiscent of Sendak’s same-sex pairs in his illustrations for I’ll Be You and You Be Me (1954) and Let’s Be Enemies (1961). See Chapter One for a lengthier discussion of these 322 illustrations. They also resemble Bruno Schulz’s unflattering interwar drawings of suffering swarms of dwarf-like Jewish men who cling to each other, faces leaning against one another, in the streets of Eastern Europe. Jerzy Ficowski, ed., Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, trans. Walter Arndt with Victoria Nelson (NY: Harper & Row, 1988).

Chapter Three

657 “Questions to an Artist Who Is Also an Author: A Conversation between Maurice Sendak and Virginia Haviland,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 28, no. 4 (Oct. 1971): 262-80, rpt. in Peter C. Kunze, ed., Conversations with Maurice Sendak (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 25. 658 Cynthia Zarin, “Not Nice: Maurice Sendak and the perils of childhood,” The New Yorker, April 17, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/17/not-nice. 659 Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), 148. 660 To support this assertion, the present chapter will draw on Sendak’s own life and work, as well as cultural theory and psychiatric literature. For further studies, see: Stuart Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Avery, 2009); D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Patricia D. Stokes, Creativity from Constraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough (New York: Springer, 2005); Suzy Tutchell,Young Children as Artists: Art and Design in the Early Years and Key (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Sven Form et al., “Mentoring Functions: Interpersonal Tensions Are Associated with Mentees’ Creative Achievement,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11, no. 4 (2017): 440-450; and Dennis McCarthy, ed., Deep Play - Exploring the Use of Depth in Psychotherapy with Children (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2015). 661 Harper & Row publicity material, box 1, folder 15, Joanna Dougherty Foster Papers, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. 662 See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) and Dennis McCarthy, ed., Deep Play - Exploring the Use of Depth in Psychotherapy with Children (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2015). 663 Endorsement from Robert Phelps (Life Magazine) in Harper and Row promotional material, box 1, folder 21, Blaine Pennington Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives. 664 Maurice Sendak, foreword to R.O. Blechman: Between the Lines, ed. Bea Feitler (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1980), 9. 665 Conversation with Jonathan Weinberg, Oct. 28, 2017. 666 “Questions to an Artist Who is Also an Author,” in Kunze, Conversations, 273. 667 Tony Kushner, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present (NY: Abrams, 2003), 11-12. 668 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, box 2, folders 8-9, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators, Loyola Marymount University Archives & Special Collections. Through his old age Sendak would insist of his picture books, “I don’t see them as children’s books.” Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 669 Robert Haddock, “Sendak Doesn’t Kid ‘Kids’,” News-Times, January 26, 1975, box 3, folder 28, Truman A. Warner Papers, MS 026, Western Connecticut State University Archives. 670 Jean Mercier, “Sendak on Sendak,” Publishers Weekly, April 10, 1981, 45-46. 671 Harriet Stix, “Sendak Draws on Childhood Truths,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1984, box 1, folder 103, Arne Nixon Papers, Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. Reesa Sheryl Malca Sorin notes that “Ida is not a stereotypical child to which young children can easily relate. She is more like the child ‘inside’ whom adults discover after much introspection. Young children have difficulty relating to her.” Reesa Sheryl Malca Sorin, “The Fears of Early Childhood: Writing in Response to a Study of Maurice Sendak” (MA Thesis, School of Journalism and Creative Writing, U. of Wollongong, 1994), 70. 672 Selma Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 27. 673 Sarah Lyall, “Maurice Sendak Sheds Moonlight on a Dark Tale,” New York Times, September 20, 1993, www.nytimes.com/1993/09/20/books/maurice-sendak-sheds-moonlight-on-a-dark-tale.html 674 Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), 223

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675 Clifton Fadiman, “A Meditation on Children and Their Literature,” Afterword to Francelia Butler, Sharing Literature with Children: A Thematic Anthology (New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1977), 477. 676 Inauguration of the Zena Sutherland Lectureship, “Sources of Inspiration,” Maurice Sendak, May 20, 1983, box 7, folder 4, Zena Bailey Sutherland Papers, University of Chicago Graduate School Special Collections. 677 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 49. 678 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 679 “Questions to an Artist Who is Also an Author,” in Kunze, Conversations, 264. 680 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall, Inc. 1963), 88. Recognizing that over fifty years of scholarship on stigma has taken place since Goffman’s study, the present project does not aim to cover the sociological literature on stigma in a comprehensive way, but rather draws from Goffman’s foundational work to help characterize notions of stigma contemporary to Sendak’s era. 681 Goffman, Stigma, 81. Discussing how stigmatized individuals alternate between the need to pass as “normal” or the need to prove one’s authenticity as “different,” depending on the situation, Goffman compares the wife of a mental patient – who might only volunteer the “discrediting information” of her position in such necessary situations as when attempting to collect her husband’s unemployment insurance – to a “married,” closeted gay man who “tries to insure his house and finds he must try to explain his peculiar choice of beneficiary.” Ibid, 83. George Chauncey writes about the spaces described by Goffman as “back” places, arguing that, while midcentury America was “supposedly the heyday of homosexual abjection,” many gay men maintained dual realities, resisting the shame imposed on them in safe domains, their diaries from those years revealing detailed, exuberant, uninhibited accounts of their sexual experiences. As I have gleaned from my research, some of Sendak’s friends participated in what Chauncey describes as “a vast underground of cruising areas and public sex venues in urban streets, parks, subway cars, and tearooms, not to mention the standing-room section of New York's Metropolitan Opera and well-known men’s rooms in department stores and university buildings across the country.” It is not too great a stretch to speculate that Sendak may have been involved in some of the unconventional, sexualized, and socially subversive communities of New York’s gay and bohemian life in the 1950s and ‘60s. He lived in a West Village duplex steps from the Stonewall Inn in the late ‘60s; spent summers on Fire Island; kept a close friendship with Coleman Dowell, who bragged to Sendak of his sexual exploits and was known for cruising Central Park for casual sex; and lost several intimate friends to AIDS. George Chauncey, “The Trouble with Shame,” in David M. Halperin & Valerie Traub, Gay Shame (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 281. 682 Justin Wintle, The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children’s Literature (New York: Paddington Press, 1975), 29. 683 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, box 2, folders 8-9, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators, Loyola Marymount University Archives & Special Collections. 684 Suzy Tutchell,Young Children as Artists: Art and Design in the Early Years and Key (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 141. 685 Slaff listed these primary process-thinking of early childhood, which included “symbolization; condensation and its opposite, dispersion; displacement; distortion; denial; reversal; association; splitting; exaggeration and its opposite, minimizing; identification; internalization; externalization; incorporation[;] projection[;] secondary elaboration, reaction formation, irony, alliteration, punning, and metaphor.” Bertram Slaff, “Creativity: Blessing or Burden?,” Adolescent Psychiatry (1981): 80-81, 84. 686 Eugene Glynn, “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36, reprinted as “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Eugene D. Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008), 139-140. 687 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, box 2, folders 8-9, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators, Loyola Marymount University Archives & Special Collections. 688 Marcus, Dear Genius, 156. 689 Recent studies of Jewish “passing” include Kerry Wallach, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017) and Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009). 324

Studies of Jewish involvement in Broadway, Hollywood, and other channels of popular entertainment emphasize this familiar story. Jewish American playwright Tony Kushner, who was a close friend of Sendak’s, wrote that Sendak was suited to a career in the theater, having come from “stoopside theatrics, the intense drama of a childhood lived in an urban neighborhood, in public, on the concrete stages that are New York City sidewalks, the grandiosity and the opulent imagination that arise in counterpoint to the poverty and deprivations of working-class life.” Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 85. Since the vaudeville era, musical theater celebrated performativity as a liberating alternative to rejected ideas of a “true,” fixed inner self. Andrea Most cites the sometimes-required duplicity of Jewish behavior in exile as an early, cultivated precursor to Jewish American theatricality, as an insider-outsider position sometimes compelled subjects to act differently across in-group and out-group contexts. Moreover, she argues, immigrant children had experience playing two roles as Jews and Americans, as well as navigating urban landscapes studded with the illusions and deceptions of advertising and department store windows drawing on linguistic phrases and emotional styles that their parents may not have understood or accepted. Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Harvard University Press, 2004). Musical comedy came of age in the 1920s and reached its peak in the 1930s before it was eclipsed by television, film, and rock and roll. As writers, composers, lyricists, performers, and producers, Jewish New Yorkers were greatly involved in creating the musical comedy form, drawing from the emotional openness and expressiveness of synagogue cantorial liturgy and Jewish humor. “Tin Pan Alley,” the noisy composers’ district of West 28th Street in the first decades of the 20th century, included a Jewish subculture that even sold some Yiddish sheet music on the Lower East Side. The Broadway musical articulated a self-made, individualist optimism of “pluck and luck” and liberation from dark pasts. Musical theater was also a venue to advertise liberal values through storylines about the emotional suffering caused by prejudice and the tangible possibility of outsiders adapting to insider conventions. Universal values like romantic love were presented as more important than conservative or narrow-minded social barriers. “Show Boat” (1927) controversially integrated African American musical forms and dramatized the constructed and harmful nature of race, as an attractive young female lead is revealed to have a black mother and to suffer unjustly for that fact. “South Pacific” represented racial prejudice as foolish, irrational, socially imposed, and unnaturally divisive. Emile’s Polynesian children are depicted as French-speaking, cultured, and well- mannered. Film, lacking an established corporate structure, was the most significant new art form of the twentieth century, and Jews quickly emerged as Hollywood studio heads in an environment that privileged creative innovation and lacked an antisemitic establishment. Hollywood espoused individualist self-invention and optimism that drew both from American and Jewish ideals of morality, expressive performance, and the ability to alter one’s position to belong. Through WWII, however, Jewish filmmakers were hesitant to deal explicitly with Jewish themes, remaining self-conscious against claims that Jews control Hollywood, as well as bound by restrictive codes against dealing with taboo themes of racial and ethnic difference. Nevertheless, Jews sought to popularize representations that would shape America as a country that valued all of its ethnic and religious groups and that disapproved of intolerance and discrimination. Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1999). 690 Jonathan Weinberg discussing Scott Long’s stance on Camp. Jonathan Weinberg, “Ray Johnson fan club,” in Ray Johnson, Ray Johnson: Correspondences, eds. Donna M. De Salvo and Catherine Gudis (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1999), 106. 691 Some argue that psychoanalysis is central to the creation of modern Jewish American identity within mainstream culture, as conveyed by figures like Woody Allen who perpetuated an identity of self-conscious neuroses and analytical astuteness. Conversation with Professor Paul Morrison, March 1, 2017 692 The Jazz Singer, Warner Bros. Pictures, directed by Alan Crosland, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, starring Al Jolson, 1927. 693 Donald Weber, “Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, eds. Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 143. Other individuals seeking to acculturate or to exist in conflicting cultural spheres while maintaining security in the public social order, including gay or queer people and other ethnic minorities in the first half of the twentieth century, were, out of necessity, also practiced at performing and “passing.” More broadly, they held complicated relationships to what Judith Butler calls performativity, the repetitious, stylized set of behaviors, postures, and mannerisms that one enacts to convincingly embody a given social identity, in an ongoing performance that can unravel at any moment.

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694 It should be noted that early twentieth-century psychological studies painted these connections in negative terms. Havelock Ellis, for example, wrote, “The dramatic and artistic aptitudes of inverts are, therefore, partly due to the circumstances of the invert’s life, which render him necessarily an actor—and in some few cases lead him into a love of deception comparable with that of a hysterical woman—and partly, it is probable, to a congenital nervous predisposition allied to the predisposition to inversion.” Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1: Sexual Inversion (Watford, London, and Leipzig: The University Press, 1900), 123- 124. Similarly, Alisa Solomon notes that “anti-Semitic and homophobic rhetoric warned of the Jew’s and homosexual’s predatory ability to pass unnoticed, to masquerade as ‘normal,’ and characterized dissembling itself – a propensity for acting – as an inborn attribute of Jews and of queers.” Alisa Solomon, “Performance: Queerly Jewish/Jewishly Queer in the American Theater,” in The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, ed. Hana Wirth -Nesher (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 548. Current work seeks to revise these assertions, taking more empathetic approaches to understanding queer suffering and the creativity required of marginalized or publically shamed individuals under social pressure and sharp surveillance. Kerry Wallach, for example, has used theories of “passing” developed by Kenji Yoshino in reference to a gay male experience to analyze the experiences of Jewish women of the Weimar Republic. Kerry Wallach, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 5. 695 George Steiner, “In Lieu Of A Preface,” Salmagundi No. 58-59: Homosexuality: Sacrilege, Vision, Politics (Fall 1982-Winter 1983), 8. 696 Bertram Slaff, “Creativity: Blessing or Burden?,” Adolescent Psychiatry (1981): 81. 697 Ira Rosenblum, “SIGNOFF; A Fairy Tale, but Hold the Gingerbread,” The New York Times, Dec. 14, 1997, www.nytimes.com/1997/12/14/tv/signoff-a-fairy-tale-but-hold-the-gingerbread.html 698 This excerpt is an English translation of the original Hebrew: Yigal Schwartz, Makhela Hungarit (Kineret: Dvir, 2014), 158-159. 699 See Stuart Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Avery, 2009); D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Patricia D. Stokes, Creativity from Constraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough (New York: Springer, 2005); Suzy Tutchell,Young Children as Artists: Art and Design in the Early Years and Key (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); Sven Form et al., “Mentoring Functions: Interpersonal Tensions Are Associated with Mentees’ Creative Achievement,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 11, no. 4 (2017): 440-450; and Dennis McCarthy, ed., Deep Play - Exploring the Use of Depth in Psychotherapy with Children (London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2015). 700 David Shneer, “Queer is the New Pink: How Queer Jews Moved to the Forefront of Jewish Culture,” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 1, no. 1 (January 2007): 56-57. 701 Frank Corsaro, “Chapter VI: On Stage: Theater, Opera, and Ballet: M&M (Maurice and Me),” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 134. For more on Sendak’s involvement in theater arts, see Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak. 702 Stephen Godfrey, “Designing a nightmare world,” The Globe and Mail, Sept. 25, 1982, University of Guelph Archival & Special Collections. 703 Conversation with Christopher Mattaliano, September 7, 2016. 704 Martin Bernheimer, “Sendak’s Picturesque ‘Zauberflote’,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1990, articles.latimes.com/1990-04-16/entertainment/ca-934_1_maurice-sendak 705 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work: Fearful Symmetries,” 18-19. 706 “Maurice Sendak,” interview with Steven Heller, Innovations of American Illustration, 1986, 70-81, reprinted in Peter C. Kunze, ed., Conversations with Maurice Sendak (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 102. 707 See Judith Butler’s work on performativity, as well as Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), originally published in 1971 by Tavistock Publications, Ltd. Fantasy and play are not to be confused with escapism. For a further discussion see Courtney T. Goto, The Grace of Playing: Pedagogies for Leaning into God’s New Creation (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick, 2016), especially Chapter Two. Eric Klinger’s 1969 article “Development of Imaginative Behavior” claims that fantasy is for the exploration of goals and desires that the child cannot yet achieve; the emotional integration of overwhelming events; 326 and as a means of achieving continuity between familiar and new experiences. Francelia Butler, Sharing Literature with Children: A Thematic Anthology (New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1977), 458. 708 Marcus, ed., Dear Genius, xix-xx. 709 Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work: Fearful Symmetries,” 19. Sendak regularly read memoirs, biographies, and collected letters of those figures who most interested him. In October 1962 Sendak told his friend Minnie Kane that he had just finished reading the memoirs of Katherine the Great and was now excitedly reading the letters of composer Richard Strauss and his librettist-poet collaborator Hugo Von Hofmannsthal. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, October 29, 1962, Kane family letters, Rosenbach Library. 710 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Miss Lanes, August 20, 1967, MS 292, Rare Book Room, Smith College Library. 711 Eugene Glynn, “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36, reprinted as “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory” in Glynn, Desperate Necessity, ed. Weinberg, 149. 712 Sara Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak: A Visit with the Most Celebrated Children’s Author of Our Time,” Parents, November 1992, box 6, folder 67, Phillip Applebaum Collection, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History. 713 Tony Kushner has written more extensively about Sendak’s involvement in theater arts, which, since the late 1970s, included his creation of set and costume designs and librettos for opera, song lyrics and animated pieces for television, and the creation of his own children’s theater company in 1990 with Arthur Yorinks. Sendak also turned three of his theater designs into picture books: The Love for Three Oranges (1984), (1985), and (1984). Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak. 714 Amy Sonheim, Maurice Sendak (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 54. 715 Kenneth B. Kidd, Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 150. 716 Marc Michael Epstein also draws a comparison between Max’s wolf suit and the medieval fool’s costume, noting a “hooded fool’s face” painted in the opening folio of a fourteenth-century German manuscript of talmudic commentary. Marc Michael Epstein, ed., Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts (Princeto and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 16 717 William Reddy has defined “emotional regimes” as “the set of normative emotions and official rituals, practices, ‘emotives’ that express and inculcate them: a necessary underpinning of any stable political regime.” William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feelings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129. 718 Peter Dobrin, “Rosenbach reels in rare Sendak trove,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan 29, 2017, Philly.comhttp://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/arts/Maurice_Sendaks_personal_library_comes_to_Philadelp hia.html 719 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 9. 720 Dowell’s writing, according to some critics, embodied the “New Gothic” style, one that, drawing from the American Gothic of Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and others, evokes “psychological and spiritual horror and suspense, often brought on by history’s effects on the present.” Dowell embellished the tradition further by emphasizing the power of dreams and imagination. Edmund White, preface to Eugene Hayworth, Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), xix. 721 Sendak wrote that Mozart’s letters were to him what the Bible is to many. He felt moved especially by how everything Mozart wrote exuded his individuality and brutally honesty. Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan, video, 1985, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art. 722 Sendak similarly entered Vincent Van Gogh’s emotional world while reading his letters during his stay on Fire Island in July 1964. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, July 8, 1964, Kane family letters, Rosenbach Library. 723 Sendak’s collections included eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century chapbooks. Marcus, Dear Genius, 154. 724 Lee Bennett Hopkins, Books are by People: Interviews with 104 Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young Children (New York: Citation Press, 1969), 250. 725 Muriel Harris, “Impressions of Sendak,” 1970, reprinted in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 36-37. 726 Dramatizing this phenomenon, Frank Wedekind’s German play Spring Awakening; A Children’s Tragedy, written between 1890-1891 and staged in English in Manhattan in 1917, starkly conveys late nineteenth- 327 century children in Germany who are forced to memorize Virgil and other antiquated thinkers but, to their grave misfortune and consequential doom, are refused access to the facts of their own bodies and budding sexualities. 727 For example, In Grandpa’s House (1985), a story Sendak translated from his father’s oral dictation in Yiddish, includes a scene in which the boy protagonist David is invited by a lion cub into the lions’ den. The archetypal Sendak lion appears also in other variations in Higglety Pigglety Pop and “Pierre” of The Nutshell Library. Typescript, Maurice Sendak, no date, “In Grandpa’s House,” Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, PA. 728 Maurice Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things,” Vassar Quarterly 92, no. 4, September 1, 1996, 12. 729 Dissociating himself from what he viewed as an insipid “kiddie book” industry and aligning himself with figures like the Grimms, Sendak took comfort in the fact that the Grimm stories began as a scholarly publication to preserve peasant tales and folk heritage during a time of political upheaval. “Questions to an Artist Who is Also an Author,” in Kunze, Conversations, 274. 730 Eugene Glynn, “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36, reprinted as “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Eugene D. Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008), 149. 731 Peter Dobrin, “Rosenbach reels in rare Sendak trove,” Jan 29, 2017, Philly.comhttp://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/arts/Maurice_Sendaks_personal_library_comes_to_Philadelp hia.html 732 Cited in Jill P. May, “Envisioning the Jewish Community in Children’s Literature: Maurice Sendak and Isaac Singer,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 33, no. 3 / 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2000-Winter 2001): 147. 733 Kenneth Kidd, “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picture-Book Psychologist,” in The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, edited by Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 212-213. 734 Kidd, “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams,” 216. 735 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 77. 736 Inauguration of the Zena Sutherland Lectureship, “Sources of Inspiration,” Maurice Sendak, 20 May 1983, box 7, folder 4, Zena Bailey Sutherland Papers, University of Chicago Graduate School Special Collections. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, Sept. 24, 1962, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. In the mid-1970s, he would call attention to this fact in an animated musical cartoon, titling it Really Rosie. Really Rosie combined The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1960) with Nutshell Library (1962) characters in an animated cartoon with music composed and performed by Carole King. Sendak wrote and directed it, and it first appeared on CBS in 1975 and eventually became a live-action, off-Broadway children’s musical at the Chelsea Theater Center in 1980, revived in 2017. “Chapter V: Really Rosie: Rosie and the Nutshell Kids” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 121. 737 Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 43. 738 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 739 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, Nov. 6, 1961, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 740 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 741 Ibid. 742 Ibid. 743 Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 79; Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak.” 744 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 745 Ibid. 746 Book jacket study, The Sign on Rosie’s Door, Maurice Sendak Papers MC 1174, Kerlan Collection, Elmer Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries. 747 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, Nov. 6, 1961, Kane Family Letters, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 748 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” (1964), in Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (New York: Picador, 2001), 283, 287. 328

749 Sound cassette (2 sound files), Maurice Sendak, September 14, 1993, Unit DA00228, September 14, 1993, Public Education Program Sound Recordings, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. 750 Maurice Sendak, The Sign on Rosie’s Door (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960). 751 Sontag, “Notes on Camp” (1964), in Against Interpretation, 289. 752 Ibid, 291. 753 Sadie’s faith in chicken soup seems to have derived from Yiddish folk culture; in a draft of Philip Sendak’s Yiddish story, which Sendak translated, In Grandpa’s House (1985), a boy helps free his parents from captors by offering them his mother’s chicken soup, which, once eaten, causes a person to grow at a superhuman, rapid pace. Typescript for In Grandpa’s House, page 30, Maurice Sendak Collection, The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia. 754 Cech Angels and Wild Things, 68-69. Leslie Tannenbaum reads this version of Rosie as more explicitly Jewish than the original iteration in picture-book form, because this animated Rosie, voiced by the Jewish Carole King, has a brother whom she calls “Chicken Soup,” and she peppers her performance with an ironic, brash, subversive tone characteristic of Jewish female stars like Fanny Brice, Barbra Streisand, and Bette Middler. He describes “The Ballad of Chicken Soup” as a “bobe mayse” and notes the exclamations of “oy vay” in Yiddish, as well as the Jewish undertones of the song “Such Suffering.” Leslie Tannenbaum, “Betrayed by Chicken Soup: Judaism, Gender and Performance in Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie,” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 3 (2003): 362-364, 368. 755 Conversation with Christopher Mattaliano, September 7, 2016. 756 Jason Vondersmith, “Magical Mozart,” Portland Tribune, May 3, 2016, portlandtribune.com/pt/11- features/304797-182425-magical-mozart-; Conversation with Christopher Mattaliano, September 7, 2016. 757 Hazel Rochman, “The Booklist Interview: Maurice Sendak,” Booklist (June 15, 1992), 1849, box 1, folder 21, Blaine Pennington Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives. 758 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CA Press, 1990), 144. 759 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 760 Cited Anne Commire, “Maurice Sendak,” Something About the Author: Facts and Pictures about Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People 27 (1982), 192. 761 There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak, Rosenbach Museum and Library, retrospective of Sendak Interviews, DVD, Portia Productions, 2008. As Ellen Kellman noted to me in conversation, milk sometimes signifies emasculation in Yiddish literature, as in the case of Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye der Milkhiker,” Tevye’s masculinity symbolically wounded by his position as a dairyman. Conversation with Prof. Ellen Kellman, March 13, 2017, Brandeis University. Indeed, Tevye queers and emasculates himself at times, lamenting his fatherly separation anxiety by comparing himself to a mother hen who strangely hatches ducklings that swim away. Sylvia Fishman, ed., Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press and the University Press of New England, 1992), 88. 762 Judy Taylor, “Chapter II: Influences on Book Illustration: Some Influences on the Work of Maurice Sendak,” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus (New York: Abrams, 2013), 28-31; Maurice Sendak, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, Or, There Must be More to Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1967) 10, 12. 763 John Mitzel, “An Approach to the Gay Sensibility in Literature,” The Gay Alternative 11 (Spring 1976): 46, Archive.org, accessed Feb. 6, 2018, https://archive.org/details/TheGayAlternative11Spring1976 764 Ellen Handler Spitz, “Maurice Sendak’s Sexuality,” New Republic, February 21, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/112448/maurice-sendaks-my-brothers-book-reviewed-ellen-handler-splitz 765 Goffman, Stigma, 88. 766 Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs (directors), Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, perf. Maurice Sendak, Lynn Caponera, Catherine Keener. Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010, DVD; Goffman, Stigma, 81. 767 “King of Dreams,” There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak, Rosenbach Museum and Library, retrospective of Sendak Interviews, DVD, Portia Productions, 2008. 768 Maurice Sendak, “A Tribute to a Friend,” American Book Collectors of Children's Literature, 14, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 6.

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769 Dr. Louise Schneider, memorial essay for Bertram Slaff, American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry Newsletter (Winter 2013), 14. 770 Goffman, Stigma, 87. 771 Coleman Dowell Papers. For more on the performance of Eastern European Jewish ethnicity as queer difference, see Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009); Edmund White preface to Eugene Hayworth, Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), xiii. Sendak enjoyed playful flirtation with other men, as well, presumably for similar reasons. Christopher Mattaliano, for example, a heterosexual, married man who worked with Sendak on operas in the 1970s and ‘80s reminisced, “He would flirt with me, but it was always very playful and very safe, and kind of fun.” Conversation with Christopher Mattaliano, September 7, 2016. 772 Eugene Hayworth writes of Dowell, “Dowell demanded respect and admiration from his literary friends, but he also sought out a series of uneducated, impoverished lovers, men he often paid for sexual favors. His relationship with these men meant more than physical gratification: Dowell took pleasure in adopting a passive role when he seduced them. The emotional trysts counterbalanced the otherwise placid home life he shared with Bert and Tammy […] His machismo required he present himself as the active, dominant male, which hardly made sense given that his partners were usually young black heterosexual men.” Eugene Hayworth, Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), xvi, xii. 773 Letters, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, May 9, 1975, and Jan. 4, 1978, Coleman Dowell Papers. 774 Conversation with Christopher Mattaliano, September 7, 2016. 775 Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 776 Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 280. 777 Ibid, 291. 778 Before opening a successful psychiatric practice, Sendak’s therapist in the 1950s, Betram Slaff, who with his partner Coleman Dowell remained close friends of Sendak’s for decades afterward, loved theater and made several failed attempts at playwriting. In 1954 Slaff met Dowell, a flamboyant writer who invented his age and his family’s past, while summering on Nantucket, where Slaff rented a house in order to write a play there. Though Slaff’s playwriting did not take off, his partner’s daring novels would earn him the friendship of authors like Gilbert Sorrentino, John Hawkes, George Whitmore, and Edmund White. For years Dowell also corresponded with Sendak, occasionally hosting him and Eugene Glynn in his and Slaff’s apartment. Eugene Hayworth, introduction to Eugene Hayworth, Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), xvi-xviii. Sendak entered therapy after struggling to function emotionally as an independent adult after graduating high school and attempting to live in Manhattan in the late ‘40s. It seems that he sought therapy to understand himself by recalling the emotions connected to a confusing childhood that consisted of deep, overwhelming feeling, psychological entwinement with his parents’ hardships and destroyed pasts, and social alienation as a somewhat unusual child in Brooklyn. He claims to have become conscious of his homosexual orientation by his late teenage years and never felt comfortable admitting it to his family. 779 Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 780 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 781 Sedgwick Epistemology of the Closet, 67-68. 782 Conversation with Christopher Mattaliano, September 7, 2016. 783 “Sendak” likely derives from “sandak” or “sandek,” the medieval Ashkenazi term for a child’s “godfather,” designated with holding the male infant during his circumcision ceremony. Tali Berner, “Children and Rituals in Early Modern Ashkenaz,” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7, no. 1 (2014): 75; Harvey E. Goldberg, Jewish Passages: Cycles of Jewish Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 45; Lawrence A. Hoffman, Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 200; Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak,” 583. 784 Lisa Hammel, “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet,” New York Times, January 5, 1973, Maurice Sendak Art & Artist Files, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, D.C., Nov. 13, 2015. A 1974 children’s news article also describes Sendak as a “45-year-old bachelor.” Betty Debnam, “Meet the Author and Artist of ‘The Monster Book,’” The Mini Page, March 31, 1974.

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Harriet Stix of the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1984 that “Few children intrude into this structured, bachelor life.” Harriet Stix, “Sendak Draws on Childhood Truths,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1984, box 1, folder 103, Arne Nixon Papers, Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, State University of California, Fresno, CA. 785 Amy Sonheim, Maurice Sendak (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 12; Harriet Stix, “Sendak Draws on Childhood Truths,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1984, box 1, folder 103, Arne Nixon Papers, Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. 786 Leonard S. Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work: Fearful Symmetries: Maurice Sendak’s Picture Book Trilogy and the Making of an Arist,” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 20. 787 Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 126-127. 788 Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), 147. 789 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, box 2, folders 8-9, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators, Loyola Marymount University Archives & Special Collections. Sendak first considered naming Max Johnny, then Kenny. Patrick Rodgers, “Chapter X: Where the Wild Things Are: Mad Max: On Three Preliminary Drawings for Where the Wild Things Are,” in Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 196. 790 In the summer of 1966 he stayed in the Ocean Beach neighborhood for at least portions of August and July. Letter, Joan Robins to Mr. L.C. Bigge, August 23, 1966, Morton E. Wise Collection of Maurice Sendak - Manuscript MS-1038, Dartmouth Rauner Library. In September of 1966, Sendak wrote to his friend Mary von Schrader Jarrell (married to Randall Jarrell) that he was struggling to accomplish his work in the city and planned to head to Fire Island for a couple of weeks. Postcard, Maurice Sendak to Randall and Mary von Schrader Jarrell, Sept. 18, 1966, Randall Jarrell Collection 1914-1969, New York Public Library. After thinking about writing Wild Things for three years, Sendak wrote the book in a single hour before the year and a half of illustrating it. Betty Debnam, “Meet the Author and Artist of ‘The Monster Book,’” The Mini Page, March 31, 1974; Harriet Stix, “Sendak Draws on Childhood Truths”; Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. 791 Other gay men in Sendak’s social orbit similarly retreated to gay-friendly islands and beach towns in the summers of the 1960s and ‘70s. Dowell and Slaff bought a home in 1968 in Shelter Island’s Harbor View neighborhood, which was known as the summer residence of several prominent gay and lesbian couples. For eight years, Dowell spent most of his time on the island, Slaff joining him on weekends. He based his novel Island People (1976) on his own experiences of emotional isolation and sexual exploits on the island, of which he also wrote to Sendak in the late ‘60s. Hayworth, Fever Vision, 106. 792 , “GRIM COLBERTY TALES WITH MAURICE SENDAK,” Part One, Jan. 24, 2012, www.cc.com/video-clips/gzi3ec/the-colbert-report-grim-colberty-tales-with-maurice-sendak-pt--1; 793 Maurice Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things” (Commencement address), Vassar Quarterly vol. 92, Number 4, September 1, 1996. 794 Avi Steinberg, “Maurice Sendak on ‘Bumble-Ardy’,” The Paris Review, Dec. 27, 2011, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/27/maurice-sendak-on-bumble-ardy/ 795 Together, Vogel and Sendak would later publish How Little Lori Visted Times Square (2001). Sendak rented a home near Vogel, who encouraged him to visit him there. Rumor has it that Vogel’s son Lori also helped inspire the creation of Sendak’s Max in Wild Things. Correspondence with Deborah de Furia (whose family owned the vacation home in which Sendak wrote Wild Things), via VRBO.com, August 29, 2015. 796 Writer Herman Wouk had founded an Orthodox synagogue in Seaview in 1952, using a Torah scroll from the Conservative synagogue of Long Island’s Bay Shore community. Rabbi De Sola Pool of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan (America’s oldest Jewish congregation) also vacationed in the area and joined this new synagogue for prayer. Jas Chana, “Herman Wouk’s Fire Island Synagogue,” May 28, 2015, Tablet, www.tabletmag.com/scroll/191279/herman-wouks-fire-island-synagogue Paul Cadmus and his circle were one example of artists who treated Fire Island as a space of liberation in which to make homoerotic art. 797 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, June 21, 1964, Kane Family Letters, Rosenbach Library. 798 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, August 16, 1965, Kane Family Letters, Rosenbach Library. 331

799 Marcus, Dear Genius, 226. 800 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Laurie E. Deval, Sept. 16, 1966; Autograph File, S, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 801 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, July 8, 1964, Kane family letters, Rosenbach Library. 802 Referring to Estelle, the wife of writer Harvey Jacobs, one of his social companions in Seaview. Letter, Maurice Sendak to the Feiffers, July 14, 1967, Jules Feiffer Papers 1919-1995, MSS83993, box 11:1967, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 803 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Leroy Richmond, Aug. 7, 1966, Maurice Sendak Archive, 1965-2007, Columbia Rare Books & Special Collections Manuscripts Collection, University of South Carolina. 804 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Selma Lanes, March 25, 1968, MS 292, Smith College Library. Sendak’s father, Philip, was a chain-smoker and had taught Sendak to smoke. The artist would quit smoking altogether in 1977 after a long illness and a nodule infection on his vocal chord. Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 15. 805 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mary Jarrell, May 6, 1968, Randall Jarrell Collection 1914-1969, New York Public Library. 806 Silverstein had asked the artist if he would illustrate Where the Sidewalk Ends. Marcus, Dear Genius, 255. Silverstein worked as a columnist for Playboy for over forty years. Andrew Belonsky, “ Covered Fire Island For ‘Playboy’,” Out Magazine Andrew Belonsky, “Shel Silverstein Covered Fire Island For ‘Playboy’” May 22, 2013, Accessed August 27, 2016, https://www.out.com/entertainment/popnography/2013/05/22/shel-silverstein-covered-fire-island-playboy 807 In one drawing, Silverstein depicts himself looking into a stroller pushed by a gay male couple with the caption “Actually we just use it for carrying the groceries—but it sure shakes everyone up!” Drawing attention both to the heavy Jewish presence on the island and to the controversy of that fact for the twentieth-century Jewish family, another drawing depicts a lesbian couple in bed, one answering her mother’s phone call: “No...I didn't take my pink chiffon gown, because I don't have any use for it here...Well, sure, Mom...sure there are lots of nice Jewish boys around, but...” Another, narrated by a gay male cross-dresser, conveys the fragmentation of identity and personal presentation experienced by some of the island’s inhabitants:

I’m relaxing in my cottage yesterday afternoon, when the doorbell rings—and me—thinking it’s Philip, I run and put on my best cologne, I put on my garter belt, I put on my nylons and spike heels, I put on my black negligee, I put on my wig and make-up, and I run to the window and peek out—and it's my parents!! So I run back into the other room, I wipe off my make-up, pull off my wig, slip out of the negligee, kick off the heels, remove the nylons and take off the garter belt—put on a pair of blue jeans, a flannel shirt and a pair of loafers, and run back to the door.

Belonsky, “Shel Silverstein Covered Fire Island For ‘Playboy’.” 808 The writer, whether knowingly or not, contributes to a homophobic narrative that demonizes homosexuals as stunted children unable or unwilling to grow up. It fails to appreciate the creative expression and camaraderie that emerges, even if exaggeratedly, from a place of social alienation, suppression, and endangerment. As the writer herself is aware, before the 1970s, gay men “lived in a rather different relation to, say, the police than we did. Any one of them, caught in the wrong attitude in the wrong bar in the wrong neighborhood on the wrong night, might be subjected to humiliations that no record of good citizenship and no amount of high position in society would protect him from.” The writer understands that the police “were a presence, if only as a theoretical possibility, in the life of virtually every homosexual. As were other embodiments of authority whom we heterosexuals never thought about except to suppose that they were working for us.” The Pines, then, was for gay men an anxiously valued respite from a daily life in which they were “kept out of desirable housing[,] barred from employment—most particularly employment as schoolteachers” and “forced by social and economic necessity, and above all shame, into living a life of concealment.” Comparisons between gay men and children abound in twentieth-century culture, but they do not always reflect a negative critique, as child-like qualities are also sometimes celebrated in adults who see the benefit in remaining “young at heart.” One journalist visiting Sendak’s Greenwich Village duplex in the late 1960s, wrote that the artist “resembles the child characters he has created in his works.” Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary Magazine, Sept. 1, 1980, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-boys-on-the-beach/; Lee Bennett Hopkins. Books are by

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People: Interviews with 104 Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young Children (New York: Citation Press, 1969), 254. 809 See Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child (2009) for her theory of “growing sideways,” a strategy that queer children employ to stall socialization into roles that do not fit. 810 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. 811 Steven Bruhm, Curiouser: On The Queerness Of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd, eds., Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 812 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, New York Public Library. 813 Cited in Stephanie Nettell, “Maurice Sendak obituary,” The Guardian, May 8, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/08/maurice-sendak 814 Stockton, The Queer Child, 11, 3. 815 Steinberg, “Maurice Sendak on ‘Bumble-Ardy’.” 816 Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things,” 12. 817 Nat Hentoff, “Among the Wild Things,” New Yorker, January 15, 1966. 818 Eugene T. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 8, cited in Courtney T. Goto, The Grace of Playing, 15. 819 Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan, video, 1985, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art. 820 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, Sept 24, 1962, Kane family letters, Rosenbach Library. 821 Ibid. 822 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, Nov. 6, 1961, Kane family letters, Rosenbach Library. 823 Sexually exoticizing black men in the 1970s, Dowell also corresponded with imprisoned black men, asking them to write to him about violently penetrating him. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, May 1, 1975, Coleman Dowell Papers. 824 Eugene Hayworth, Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), xii, 155. 825 Maurice Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things,” Vassar Quarterly 92, no. 4, September 1, 1996, 11. 826 Rochman, “The Booklist Interview: Maurice Sendak,” 1848. 827 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Jan Wahl, July 20, 1961, Rosenbach Library. 828 “Maurice Sendak,” interview with Steven Heller, in Kunze, ed., Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 104. 829 Roger Sutton, “An Interview with Maurice Sendak,” The Horn Book (Nov/Dec 2003): 687-99, rpt. in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 146. 830 Slaff, “Creativity: Blessing or Burden?,” 78-80. 831 “Maurice Sendak,” interview with Steven Heller, in Kunze, ed., Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 102. 832 Jonze, Tell Them Anything You Want. 833 Glynn, Desperate Necessity, ed. Weinberg, 15. 834 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, June 23, 1966, Kane family letters, Rosenbach Library. 835 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Mrs. Kane, April 14, 1962, Kane family letters, Rosenbach Library. 836 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, May 9, 1975, Coleman Dowell Papers. 837 Eugene Glynn, review of Egon Schiele’s Portraits and Schiele in Prison both by Alessandra Comini, The Print Collector’s Newsletter 6, no. 3 (July-Aug 1975): 77-79, reprinted in Glynn, Desperate Necessity, ed. Weinberg, 119. 838 Jonathan Weinberg introduction to Glynn, Desperate Necessity, ed. Weinberg, 11.

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839 Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs (directors), Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, Maurice Sendak, Lynn Caponera, Catherine Keener, Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010, DVD. 840 Gregory Maguire, Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 114. 841 John Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 244. 842 Ellen Handler Spitz, “Ethos in Steig’s and Sendak’s Picture Books: The Connected and the Lonely Child,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 43, no. 2, (Summer, 2009): 74. 843 Ibid, 74, 70, 72. 844 Jean Perrot, “Deconstructing Maurice Sendak’s Postmodern Palimpsest,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 16, no. 4 (Winter 1991-1992): 262, cited in Reesa Sheryl Malca Sorin, “The Fears of Early Childhood: Writing in Response to a Study of Maurice Sendak” (MA Thesis, School of Journalism and Creative Writing, U. of Wollongong, 1994), 18. 845 “‘Don’t assume anything’: A Conversation with Maurice Sendak Philip Nel,” 2001, rpt. in Kunze, Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 146. Jerry Griswold critiques Jonathan Cott’s There’s a Mystery There, an extended study of Outside Over There, for neglecting to consider the possibility that this picture-book might in fact be a grappling with homosexual identity, as suggested to Griswold in 1982 by child psychologist Chris Carstens, who noted the father’s disapproval of his “backward” offspring’s “serious mistake,” the “hornpipe that makes sailors wild beneath the ocean moon,” and the failed goblin honeymoon. Jerry Griswold, “Outside Over There and Gay Pride,” The Horn Book, June 28, 2017, www.hbook.com/2017/06/authors-illustrators/outside-over-there-and-gay-pride/ 846 Pamela Warrick, “Facing the Frightful Things These Days, Maurice Sendak’s Wild Creatures Are Homelessness, AIDS and Violence--Big Issues for Small Kids,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1993, pangaea.org/street_children/world/sendak.htm 847 Mariana Cook, “Postscript: Wild Things,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2012, rpt. from 2009 interview, 58. 848 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” Upon receiving The Prince and the Pauper from his sister as a child, he developed a physical ritual with it:

The first thing was to set it up on the table and stare at it for a long time. Not because I was impressed with Mark Twain; it was just such a beautiful object. Then came the smelling of it... it was printed on particularly fine paper, unlike the Disney books I had gotten previous to that. The Prince and the Paper – Pauper – smelled good and it also had a shiny laminated cover. I flipped over that. I remember trying to bite into it, which I don’t imagine is what my sister intended when she bought the book for me. But the last thing I did with the book was to read it. It was all right. But I think it started then, my passion for books and bookmaking. There’s so much more to a book than just the reading. I’ve seen children touch books, fondle books, smell books, and it’s all the reason in the world why books should be beautifully produced.

Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things,” 1976. 849 ChaeRan Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2002), 26. 850 Catherine R. Stimpson, “The Beat Generation And The Trials Of Homosexual Liberation,” in Salmagundi No. 58-59: Homosexuality: Sacrilege, Vision, Politics (Fall 1982-Winter 1983), 387-388. 851 Isaac Bashevis Singer, Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, pictures by Maurice Sendak, translated from the Yiddish by I.B. Singer and Elizabeth Shub (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966), 5. 852 Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies: A Love Story (New York: FSG, 1972), 57, 76. 853 After suffering “writer’s block” for nearly six decades, Roth published A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park in 1994 and followed it with a sequel that handled brother-sister incest explicitly between the fictional siblings Ira and Minnie Stigman: A Diving Rock on the Hudson, published in 1995, also the year of Roth’s death. The book upset Broder so much that she “threatened to sue Roth and his publisher, though it was unclear on what grounds,” arguing that the book would reduce her reputation to that of a “stupid and uncontrollable slut.” Broder would drop the case upon receiving ten thousand dollars and a promise from Roth to “edit out sibling incest material from the already written manuscripts of the remaining two volumes” about the fictional siblings. Whether or not Sendak read Roth, his oeuvre articulates a sensitive, marginal, inwardly creative boyhood similar to that of David Schearl and similarly illuminating in its juxtaposition of social obscurity with the violation of conventional social and emotional 334 boundaries. Schearl’s urban landscape is Sendakian in its prevalence of milk bottles (David’s father is a milkman), like in In the Night Kitchen (1970); its unwelcome heterosexual pressures; and in its private fantasies that spring, in part, from Jewish literary sources, and that border on delusions of grandeur (David imagines that the electricity generated in a railroad track is divine, recalling a passage from Isaiah 6 about an angel cleansing sin with hot coal). Elizabeth Manus, “A Sister’s Angry Letter Unravels Roth Incest Tale,” , May 18, 1998, observer.com/1998/05/a-sisters-angry-letter-unravels-roth-incest-tale/ 854 As Cott writes, “In the 19th century we discover them in the story written by Edmond Goncourt about two acrobats (actually foils for himself and his beloved brother Jules) who ‘joined their nervous systems to master an impossible trick,’ as well as in the unsurpassed visionary tales of George MacDonald. But they are most deeply imprinted in our minds in the Grimms’ ‘Little Brother, Little Sister.’” Jonathan Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 855 Ira Rosenblum, “SIGNOFF; A Fairy Tale, but Hold the Gingerbread,” The New York Times, Dec. 14, 1997, www.nytimes.com/1997/12/14/tv/signoff-a-fairy-tale-but-hold-the-gingerbread.html 856 Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust (New York: Penguin Books, 1979); Alan L. Berger, Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust (London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992). 857 Bedingfield, “Trans-Memory and Diaspora,” 341; See also Lenore J. Weitzman, “Resistance in Everyday Life: Family Strategies, Role Reversals, and Role Sharing in the Holocaust” and Dalia Ofer, “Parenthood in the Shadow of the Holocaust,” in Jewish Families in Europe, 1939-Present, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic, (Waltham, MA: UPNE/Brandeis University Press, 2017). 858 Tony Kushner, The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present (NY: Abrams, 2003), 190. 859 As cited from 2009 in Mariana Cook, “Postscript: Wild Things,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2012, 58. In a later interview, he similarly claimed, “They were like the parents I wanted, and behind them, the parents I really had. I mistreated my parents because I didn’t understand their troubles, and then it gets too late.” Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 860 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 861 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 862 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 863 Tim Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die,” The Times, September 24, 2011, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maurice-sendak-im-ready-to-die-f6zrhvmh6pk; Zarin, “Not Nice.” 864 Sound cassette (2 sound files), Maurice Sendak, September 14, 1993, Unit DA00228, September 14, 1993, Public Education Program sound recordings, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library; Maurice Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things,” Vassar Quarterly 92, no. 4, September 1, 1996, 11. 865 Avi Steinberg, “‘We Are Inseparable!’: On Maurice Sendak’s Last Book,” The New Yorker, March 12, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/maurice--sendaks--book--for--obsolete--c hildren.html 866 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 867 Meindert DeJong, House of Sixty Fathers, pictures by Maurice Sendak (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1956), 130; Pencil draft, Maurice Sendak, House of Sixty Fathers, Maurice Sendak Papers MC 1175, Kerlan Collection, Elmer Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries. 868 Gregory Maguire’s phrasing. Gregory Maguire, Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 142. 869 Eugene Glynn, “To Express a Serious Sorrow,” a review of Vincent van Gogh: A Psychological Study by Humberto Nagera and Stranger on the Earth: A Psychological Biography of Vincent van Gogh by Albert J. Lubin, The Print Collector’s Newsletter 4, no. 4 (Sept-Oct 1973): 88-90, reprinted in Eugene D. Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008), 90. 870 Ibid, 88-89. 871 Jodi Eichler-Levine, “Maurice Sendak’s Jewish Mother(s),” Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, eds. Marjorie Lehman, Jane Kanarek, and Simon J. Bronner (Liverpool, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization and Liverpool U. Press, 2017), 9. 872 Allison Flood, “Maurice Sendak tells parents worried by Wild Things to ‘go to hell’,” The Guardian, Oct. 20, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/20/maurice-sendak-wild-things-hell 873 Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’” 335

874 There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak, Rosenbach Museum and Library, retrospective of Sendak Interviews, DVD, Portia Productions, 2008. 875 Antonia Saxon, “A Loving Tribute: Maurice Sendak on ‘My Brother's Book’,” Publishers Weekly, Feb. 22, 2013, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/56059-a-loving-tribute.html 876 Stephen Greenblatt, foreword to Maurice Sendak, My Brother’s Book (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 6. 877 Sendak, My Brother’s Book (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 28-29. 878 There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak, Rosenbach Museum and Library, retrospective of Sendak Interviews, 2008, DVD. 879 Ellen Handler Spitz describes the book thusly:

Two scantily clad, occasionally nude characters called Jack and Guy, who are identified as brothers and love each other passionately, suffer a violent cosmic upheaval on page one. […] Reunited in a warren of green, spaghetti-like vegetation, Guy bites Jack’s nose, and the story ends abruptly with the two figures sleeping in each other's arms and dreaming of one another. Although My Brother’s Book is ostensibly an elegy for Sendak’s brother Jack, who died in 1995, Guy may well represent Glynn as well, who died in 2007. Jack and Guy seem to love each other with an overweening passion. We see them nude or draped in gossamer cloths but minus clearly identifiable male genitalia. When I showed pages of My Brother’s Book to people and asked them whether they thought the figures were male or female, each person took some time deciding. Showing the closeness of brothers without showing their genitals pushes away the issue of sexuality; had Sendak drawn the two male figures with all their parts, he might have stimulated thoughts and feelings that exceed the bounds of brotherly love. The loneliness and occasional anger of Sendak's protagonists may be another element of his work that suggests the as yet unexamined influence of his sexuality. Is it possible that the isolation and belligerence of Sendak’s characters may have been fueled by some of his own aggression toward a world that could not accept him as he was?

Ellen Handler Spitz, “Maurice Sendak’s Sexuality,” New Republic, Feb. 21, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/112448/maurice-sendaks-my-brothers-book-reviewed-ellen-handler-splitz 880 Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” 881 Tony Kushner, endorsement for Sendak, My Brother’s Book (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), back cover. 882 Eugene Glynn, “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36, reprinted as “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Eugene D. Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008), 147. 883 Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak, “In The Dumps,” Sept. 27, 1993, The New Yorker, 80, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/09/27/in-the-dumps 884 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, Feb 2, 1969, Coleman Dowell Papers. 885 Katie Roiphe, “The Wildest Rumpus: Maurice Sendak and the Art of Death,” The Atlantic, March 7, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/maurice-sendak-art-of-death/472350/ 886 According to Green’s review of the 2017 production of Really Rosie, Rosie tries “to get the others to play roles in the film of her own life, a film in which she is inevitably a glamorous star,” the other children sometimes consenting “to be her extras, but even so maintain their own imaginative autonomy.” Jesse Green, “Review: Reviving a ‘Really Rosie’ That’s Hard-Candy Cute,” The New York Times, Aug 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/theater/really-rosie-review-maurice-sendak-carole-king.html 887 Moyers, “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’” 888 Warren Hoffman’s The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (2009) examines how Americanization was itself a process of culturally “passing” as white, middle-class, and properly civilized people in ways that mirror the homosexual’s performative struggle to “pass” as heterosexual in a homophobic, or at least heteronormative, mainstream. The need to alter one’s performance and habitus, combined with the pressures to alter traditional Jewish models to fit the shape of gender-polarized bourgeois families, colors “authentic” Jewish identity as “queer,” regardless of that term’s literal connotations of sexual orientation. Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009). 336

889 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, New York Public Library. 890 Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, “The Sovereign Self: Jewish Identity in Post-Modern America,” Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints 453 (May 2001), Berman Jewish Policy Archive, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Accessed Dec.31, 2017, http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/17923; Arnold Dashefsky and Irving M. Levine, “The Jewish Family: Continuity and Change,” in Families and Religions: Conflict and Change in Modern Society, eds. William V. D’Antonio and Joan Aldous (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985); Herbert J. Gans, “Symbolic ethnicity: The future of ethnic groups and cultures in America,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2.1 (2010): 1- 20; Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 891 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 211. 892 Ibid, 213. 893 Ibid, 211. 894 See, for example: Hamida Bosmajian, “Hidden Grief: Maurice Sendak’s Dear Mili and the Limitations of Holocaust Picture Books,” in Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 215-240; and Hamida Bosmajian, “Memory and Desire in the Landscapes of Sendak’s Dear Mili,” The Lion and the Unicorn 19, no. 2 (1995): 186-210. 895 Hasia Diner, Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 896 Kushner also cites Gershom Scholem on the preservative value of isolation: “If we want to be holy, we must bind ourselves together in isolation. Any community that does not arise out of isolation is a fraud.” Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 190. 897 Naomi Pfefferman, “‘Dance’s’ Conflict Is Center Stage,” Jewish Journal, April 17, 2003, http://www.jewishjournal.com/arts/article/dances_conflict_is_center_stage_20030418 898 Mirra Bank, dir., Last Dance, dir., featuring Robby Bernett, Maurice Sendak, Michael Tracy, Jonathan Wolken, and Arthur Yorinks, First Run Features, 2002. 899 Katie Roiphe, The Violet Hour (New York: The Dial Press, 2016), 204-205. 900 Bank, Last Dance. 901 Saul Braun, “Sendak Raises the Shade on Childhood,” The New York Times Magazine, June 7, 1970, series 2, box 9, folder: “Sendak, Maurice (Author),” Francelia Butler Papers, Dodd Center, University of Connecticut Special Collections, Storrs, CT. 902 Harriet Stix, “Sendak Draws on Childhood Truths,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1984, box 1, folder 103, Arne Nixon Papers, Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. 903 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 193. 904 James Bohlman, “Truly Wealthy!” (blog post), May 16, 2002, https://journey2kona2019.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/truly-wealthy/ 905 Monks of New Skete, Art of Raising a Puppy (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1991), 253. 906 Ibid, 248-249. 907 Ibid, 249- 250. 908 Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs (directors), Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, featuring Maurice Sendak, Lynn Caponera, Catherine Keener, Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010, DVD. 909 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Leroy Richmond, undated, The Maurice Sendak Archive, 1965-2007, Columbia Rare Books & Special Collections Manuscripts Collection, University of South Carolina. 910 Tim Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 911 Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters, eds., Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006), 12. 912 Sarah Lyall, “Maurice Sendak Sheds Moonlight on a Dark Tale,” New York Times, September 20, 1993, www.nytimes.com/1993/09/20/books/maurice-sendak-sheds-moonlight-on-a-dark-tale.html 913 interviews Tomi Ungerer, “From Kids’ Books To Erotica, Tomi Ungerer’s ‘Far Out’ Life,” Fresh Air, National Public Radio, July 1, 2013, https://www.npr.org/2013/07/01/196335794/from-kids-books-to- erotica-tomi-ungerers-far-out-life 914 Sarah Cowan, “All in One: An Interview with Tomi Ungerer,” The Paris Review, Jan. 30, 2015, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/30/all-in-one-an-interview-with-tomi-ungerer/; Joanna Carey, “Tomi

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Ungerer, rennaisance man of children’s book illustration,” The Guardian, Feb 24, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/24/tomi-ungerer-childrens-book-illustration 915 Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 58-59. 916 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 917 John Updike, “Randall Jarrell Writing Stories for Children,” Nov. 14, 1976, New York Times, www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/01/specials/jarrell-fly.html 918 John Mitzel, “An Approach to the Gay Sensibility in Literature,” The Gay Alternative 11 (Spring 1976): 46, Archive.org, accessed Feb. 6, 2018, https://archive.org/details/TheGayAlternative11Spring1976 “ 919 As Eugene Hayworth writes:

Much of Dowell's work explores the psychology of the taboo in its evocations of incest. homosexuality, and pedophilia. His characters have been separated from society, and only through human contact can they find salvation. Core to his characters' relationships is the act of sex, which moves from oblique references to Millicent's lesbian lifestyle in One of the Children is Crying, through a pedophilic fantasy in Too Much Flesh and Jabez, until it finally becomes the central theme in White on Black on White, the title of which Dowell explains in a quote from the book: 'it's America fucking, twos and threes and mores, white on black on white. Even more than sexuality, the novels are concerned with the association between madness, creativity, and desire. They examine the power one person holds over another and reveal the multiple manners of human deception: by words, actions, and the failure to take action.

Eugene Hayworth, introduction to Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), xix. 920 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, March 1971, Coleman Dowell Papers. 921 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, March 1971, Coleman Dowell Papers. Twentieth-century society reimagined the ancient practice of pederasty (practiced by heterosexually coupled, older male educators and their young male disciples) as a crime and sickness connected specifically to modern gay men. This association, along with general discomfort around emergent sexuality in youth, has made it difficult for queer people who teach or write for children to publically admit their homosexual orientation, even after the gay rights movement gained traction. Conversation with Professor Paul Morrison, March 1, 2017. 922 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, February 12, 1971, Coleman Dowell Papers; Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, March 1971, Coleman Dowell Papers. 923 Ibid. 924 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CA Press, 1990), 74. 925 Specifically, the decision upheld a Georgia sodomy law that criminalized oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults, particularly with respect to homosexual sodomy. “Bowers v. Hardwick,” Supreme Court, Decided June 30, 1986, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/478/186. 926 Jonathan Weinberg, introduction to Eugene Glynn, Desperate Necessity, Weinberg, ed., 13. 927 Drake, “Born to be Wild,” 87-88. 928 Ibid, 88. 929 Tim Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 930 Caroline Bermudez, “How a Social-Service Fund Raiser Lured a $1-Million Gift,” Chronicle of Philanthropy 22, no. 16 (August 2010): 19. 931 Letter, Maurice Sendak to James Bohlman, August 1, 1993, Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Library, Philadelphia, PA. 932 Ibid. After Marshall’s death, Sendak helped facilitate the publication of Marshall’s The Owl and the Pussycat (1998), and he would illustrate Marshall’s Swine Lake (1999). Norman D. Stevens, “Celebrating the Life and Work of James Marshall (1942-1992),” American Book Collectors of Children’s Literature 14, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 5. 933 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Selma Lanes, July 24, 1980, MS 292, Smith College Library. 934 Letter, Maurice Sendak to James Bohlman, Feb 3, 1988, Maurice Sendak Collection, Rosenbach Library. 935 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 141. 338

936 Maurice Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things,” Vassar Quarterly 92, no. 4, September 1, 1996, 12. 937 David Drake, “Born to be Wild,” 89. 938 “Maurice Sendak Talks About We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy,” promotional literature for We Are All in the Dumps (New York: HarperCollins, July 1993), 2. 939 Maurice Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things,” Vassar Quarterly 92, no. 4, September 1, 1996, 12. 940 Sasha Weiss, “Art Spiegelman Discusses Maurice Sendak,” New Yorker, May 9, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/art-spiegelman-discusses-maurice-sendak 941 , Penthesilea, trans. Joel Agee, pictures by Maurice Sendak (New York: Harper Collins, 1998), 89. 942 Ibid, 43 943 Jonathan Cott, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children's Literature (New York: Random House, 1981), 64-65; John Bryant, “Pierre and Pierre: Editing and Illustrating Melville,” review of Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities. The Kraken Edition by Herman Melville, ed. Hershel Parker, pictures by Maurice Sendak, College English 60, no. 3 (Mar., 1998): 336-341. 944 John Bryant, “Pierre and Pierre: Editing and Illustrating Melville,” review of Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities. The Kraken Edition by Herman Melville, ed. Hershel Parker, pictures by Maurice Sendak, College English 60, no. 3 (Mar., 1998): 340. 945 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 70. 946 Conversation with Patrick Rodgers conversation, Rosenbach Museum and Archives, Jan. 7-9, 2015; Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs (directors), Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, Maurice Sendak, Lynn Caponera, Catherine Keener, Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010, DVD. 947 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 65, 69. Sendak had earlier named Pierre of his Nutshell Library (1962) after Melville’s character, as well. 948 Tim Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die”; Zarin, “Not Nice,” 2006; Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 73. 949 John Russell, “Art: Sendak and Friends At the Morgan Librray,” New York Times Sept. 4, 1981, Maurice Sendak Art & Artist Files, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, D.C., Nov. 13, 2015. 950 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 13. 951 Jaqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), 25. As discussed in Chapter One, Sendak adored the symbol of the bird, which appeared in Philip Sendak’s shtetl tales and also connoted the weightless flight of his own liberation fantasies as a queer boy. He often included birds in his drawings. 952 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 9-10. 953 “Questions to an Artist Who Is Also an Author: A Conversation between Maurice Sendak and Virginia Haviland,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 28, no. 4 (Oct. 1971): 262-80, rpt. in Peter C. Kunze, ed., Conversations with Maurice Sendak (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 265. 954 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, box 2, folders 8-9, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators, Loyola Marymount University Archives & Special Collections. 955 Ibid. 956 Ibid. 957 Maurice Sendak, “Enamored of the Mystery,” Innocence and Experience: Essays & Conversations on Children’s Literature, eds. Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire (New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1987), 363. 958 Terry Gross interviews Maurice Sendak, “This Pig Wants to Party: Maurice Sendak’s Latest,” Fresh Air, aired Sept 20, 2011, rpt. in Kunze, Conversations, 197. 959 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 5. 960 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 210. 961 Lisa Hammel, “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet,” New York Times, January 5, 1973, Maurice Sendak Art & Artist Files, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, D.C., Nov. 13, 2015. 339

962 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. 963 Hammel, “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet.” 964 Eugene Glynn, review of Egon Schiele’s Portraits and Schiele in Prison both by Alessandra Comini, The Print Collector’s Newsletter 6, no. 3 (July-Aug 1975): 77-79, reprinted in Eugene D. Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008), 119. 965 Eugene Glynn, “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36, reprinted as “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Eugene D. Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008), 137-138. 966 Sound recording, Edna Edwards interviews Maurice Sendak, 1973, Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. 967 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Coleman Dowell, March 1971, Coleman Dowell Papers. 968 Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 11. 969 Eugene Glynn, “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36, reprinted as “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Eugene D. Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008), 144. 970 Justin Wintle interviews Maurice Sendak, The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children’s Literature (New York: Paddington Press, 1975), 25. In 1985, however, Sendak admitted to loathing Wagner as a person and being unwilling to ever design for one of his pieces, despite loving the music itself. Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, video, Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan, 1985, Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art. 971 Justin G. Schiller, “Recollections for an Exhibition,” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 11. 972 “Questions to an Artist Who is Also an Author,” in Kunze, 30. 973 These helped Sendak obtain a job as a window-display assistant at F.A.O. Schwarz, where he met Ursula Nordstrom, who became his editor at Harper. Harper and Row catalog, c.1971, box 1, folder 21, Blaine Pennington Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives. 974 Ink study, Maurice Sendak, “Kenny’s Window,” folder 1, Maurice Sendak Papers, Kerlan Collection. His later works Outside Over There (1981) and Dear Mili (1988) would draw most of its aesthetic from German Romanticism. 975 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. 976 Hammel, “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet.” Sendak both illustrated Juniper Tree and worked with Randall Jarrell and Lore Segal to select which Grimm tales to include, leaving out the legends and religious stories, which he found repulsive and aesthetically uninteresting. Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection; Sendak, “Enamored of the Mystery,” 362-374. 977 Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 37-38. 978 Runge had painted children close-up and naturalistically, in ways that displayed pudgy, moody unattractiveness and subverted previous idealization of childhood. One of his child portraits had once been purchased by Adolf Hitler. Robert Rosenblum, The Romantic Child (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 24. After his Sealyham terrier, Jennie, died in the late ‘60s, Sendak’s dogs, in order, were: Erda (a German shepherd), Io (a golden retriever drawn in his Some Swell Pup and Dear Mili), and Aggie and Runge (both German shepherds). All three German shepherds feature in Outside Over There and Dear Mili. Monks of New Skete, Art of Raising a Puppy, 245. 979 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 980 James Marshall inscription to Maurice Sendak in Sendak’s copy of The Stupids Die by James Marshall (1981), Maurice Sendak Collection of James Marshall, box 1, University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, Storrs, CT. 981 Amy Blau, “Afterlives: Translations of German Weltliteratur into Yiddish” (Dissertation, University of at Urbana, 2005), 55, YIVO, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY. Even before Germany’s armies destroyed the villages of their youths and murdered their relatives and communities, Sendak’s mother and father, born respectively in 1895 and 1896 to Orthodox Jewish families in 340

Polish-speaking lands, would have grown up with ambivalent associations around Germany’s cultural influence; German was perceived as eliciting both high art and reason, but also heresy and assimilation – a ticket out of traditional Jewish society via the early access it granted Yiddish-speaking Jews to mathematics, science, philosophy, and secular literature. In his oral dictation of the stories that would become In Grandpa’s House, Philip recounted a shtetl memory of a traditional rabbi fired by the “freethinkers” in control of the local shul. Angry at Philip's father, this rabbi fled the area, cursing the village that it would not have any joy from its children. Following this, Philip and his siblings suffered typhoid fever, leading the family to relocate. Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 41. 982 Conversation with Christopher Mattaliano, September 7, 2016. 983 Eugene Glynn, “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36, reprinted as “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory,” in Eugene D. Glynn, Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, ed. Jonathan Weinberg (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008), 149. 984 Despite his curiosity about Germany, Sendak seemed less comfortable visiting Poland and, as far as I have been able to determine, never did. He wrote to his friend and former lover Leroy Richmond in 1966 that he doubted he would ever visit the country due to his ambivalent feelings toward it. U. South Carolina. Sendak Archive. Letter, Maurice Sendak to Leroy Richmond, Feb. 1966, Maurice Sendak Archive, 1965-2007, Columbia Rare Books & Special Collections Manuscripts Collection, University of South Carolina; Leonard S. Marcus, ed., Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998), 315. 985 Justin G. Schiller, “Recollections for an Exhibition,” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 8, 11. 986 Donald Haase, “Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales,” The Lion and the Unicorn 24, no. 3 (2000): 363-364. 987 Interview transcript, Selma Lanes, 1989, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations; Lecture, Maurice Sendak, “Descent into Limbo: The Creative Process,” April 18, 1989, , https://vimeo.com/143889683; Hamida Bosmajian, “Memory and Desire in the Landscapes of Sendak’s Dear Mili,” The Lion and the Unicorn 19, no. 2 (1995): 187. 988 Interview transcript, Selma Lanes, 1989, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Records. 989 Haase, “Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales” (2000): 361. 990 See Amy Sonheim, Maurice Sendak (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 239; Researcher’s notes, Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records, Georgia Tech Library Archives, Atlanta, GA. For further study of Sendak’s use of Holocaust memory in Dear Mili, see Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, “Romantic and Jewish Images of Childhood in Maurice Sendak’s Dear Mili,” European Judaism 42, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 5-16; Hamida Bosmajian, “Hidden Grief: Maurice Sendak’s Dear Mili and the Limitations of Holocaust Picture Books,” in Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 215-240; and Hamida Bosmajian, “Memory and Desire in the Landscapes of Sendak’s Dear Mili,” The Lion and the Unicorn 19, no. 2 (1995): 186-210. 991 Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Public Education Program sound recordings. 992 Interview transcript, Selma Lanes, 1989, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Records. 993 Ibid. 994 Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” 995 These resemble the miniature men of Bruno Schulz’s Book of Idolatry, which paint Jewish men as small and feminine by the standards of advertising and popular fashion in interwar Poland. Kushner, Art of Maurice Sendak, 45. 996 Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 65. 997 Quoted in Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 49. 998 Kidd, “Wild Things and Wolf Boys,” 216. 999 Cited in Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 51. 1000 Ibid, 256. Psychiatrist and professor Stuart Brown also wrote in 2009, “the threat to play is even greater than it was a generation or more ago. Parents who had the experience, as I did, of exploring fields or woods in freedom, worry that kids today are spending too much of their time on video games or in ‘safe’ activities. […] Schools have evolved into assembly lines for high test scores, where skills are drilled, supposedly all the better to prepare kids for college.” Stuart Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (New York: Avery, 2009), 79. 341

1001 Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 227. 1002 Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan, video, 1985, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art; Interview transcript, Selma Lanes, 1989, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Records. 1003 Leslie Tannenbaum, “Betrayed by Chicken Soup: Judaism, Gender and Performance in Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie,” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 3 (2003): 372-373. 1004 Quoted in Sonheim, Maurice Sendak, 12. 1005 Letter, Maurice Sendak to Selma Lanes, July 16, 1969, MS 292, Smith College Library; Cech, Angles and Wild Things, 20. Kenneth Kidd also registers the queerness of Sendak, as a male artist, envisioning himself as pregnant. Kenneth Kidd, Freud in Oz: at the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 126. 1006 Jodi Eichler-Levine, “Maurice Sendak’s Jewish Mother(s),” Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, eds. Marjorie Lehman, Jane Kanarek, and Simon J. Bronner (Liverpool, UK: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization and Liverpool U. Press, 2017), 149. For a similar dynamic, see Harvey Fierstein’s character in Torch Song Trilogy (1988), directed by Paul Bogart. 1007 Gregory Maguire, Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 62. 1008 Maurice Sendak, “Enamored of the Mystery,” 364. 1009 See Sholem Aleichem’s “Hodel,” in which Tevye imagines his daughters as ducklings leaving his “nest.” Sylvia Fishman, ed., Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press and the University Press of New England, 1992), 88. 1010 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” in Gay Shame, eds. David M. Halperin & Valerie Traub (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 54. 1011 Ibid, 57. 1012 Katie Roiphe, “The Wildest Rumpus: Maurice Sendak and the Art of Death,” The Atlantic, March 7, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/maurice-sendak-art-of-death/472350/ 1013 Conversation with Pacifico Palumbo and Michael Collins (who owned a store neighboring Glassman’s on Hudson Street), October 8, 2017; Judith Rosen, “Two NYC Kids’ Stores Celebrate 70 Years—Combined,” Publishers Weekly, Nov 15, 2010, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry- news/article/45161-two-nyc-kids-stores-celebrate-70-years-combined.html 1014 Philip Nel, “Wild Things, Children and Art: The Life and Work of Maurice Sendak,” The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 27. 1015 Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 68. 1016 “Questions to an Artist Who is Also an Author,” in Kunze, Conversations, 78. Resounding in the artist’s relationship to his work are tensions one finds elsewhere in twentieth-century Jewish American literature and culture: tensions between particularism vs. universalism, self-preservation vs. socialized actualization, private family relationships vs. wider societal integration. Like the stereotypical Jewish mother, famously epitomized in the film The Jazz Singer (1927), Sendak experiences competing feelings of pride, excitement, disappointment, and betrayal when sharing his “offspring” with the wider society beyond the safety of his private world. These tensions also parallel those of the not-yet-socialized child’s negotiation with his or her surroundings, more generally. In order to understand, perform, and pass as any given social identity, a child is asked to compromise certain drives, desires, urges, and other dimensions of its personality. This social identity, like a finished book or an immigrant’s acculturated child, must speak to the wider society in order to succeed and survive. To do so, however, it must experience the loss of diminishing those parts that do not translate or do not fit. It is usually only later, from a safe distance, that those parts – queer, Old World, serious, sensitive, etc. – may be more deeply accessed and re-integrated. 1017 Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 41 1018 Haase, “Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales,” 363. 1019 Wilhelm Grimm, Dear Mili, translated by Ralph Manheim, pictures by Maurice Sendak (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988).

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1020 Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, February 8, 1989, Public Education Program sound recordings. Full text available in Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children, eds. William Knowlton Zinsser et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 1021 Ibid. Like Dorothy who, even amidst the riches of Oz, craves the comfort of home, Sendak’s Martin abandons “very far away” for home, and Max also chooses to return to his mother and home once he has sufficiently indulged in the wild freedom of his imagination. 1022 Leonard S. Marcus, “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work: Fearful Symmetries: Maurice Sendak’s Picture Book Trilogy and the Making of an Arist,” in Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, ed. Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David (NY: Abrams, 2013), 26. 1023 Walter Clemons, “Sendak’s Enchanted Land,” Newsweek, May 18, 1981, 102, box 1, folder 21, Series 3, Blaine Pennington Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Special Collections. 1024 Kidd, Freud in Oz, 98. 1025 “Maurice Sendak,” interview with Steven Heller, Innovations of American Illustration (1986): 70-81, reprinted in Kunze, ed., Conversations with Maurice Sendak, 104. 1026 Roger Sutton, “An Interview with Maurice Sendak,” The Horn Book Magazine 79 (2003): 690. In addition to therapy, Sendak claimed that seeing William Blake’s watercolors for Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” at the Morgan Library in September 1977 gave Sendak the courage to make paintings out of the initial drawings he had done for Outside Over There. Jean Mercier, “Sendak on Sendak,” Publishers Weekly, April 10, 1981, 45-46. 1027 Stephen Hayward and Sarah Lefanu, God: An Anthology of Fiction (London and New York: Serpent's Tail, 1992), 128. 1028 Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” theorizes that the dominant social emphasis on protecting children as “our future” is a delusional and selfish means by which certain adults ensure their own security and immortality at the expense of others. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. (Duke University Press, 2004), 13 1029 Chauncey, Gay New York, 179-180. Works of fine art by artists like Paul Cadmus in the 1930s, such as The Fleet’s In! (1934) also depict sexually provocative flirtations and solicitations between sailors, gay men, and female prostitutes on New York’s boardwalks. Cadmus wrote, “I always enjoyed watching them when I was young. I somewhat envied them the freedom of their lives and their lack of inhibitions.” David Leddick, Intimate Companions, 48. 1030 Kenneth Kidd connects the contrast between these goblin babies and the “real” baby with that of the rough lumberjack miners and the abandoned infant that they are forced to care for in Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” a favorite story of Sendak’s youth, which he independently illustrated as a teenager, and which Kidd reads in relation to Sendak’s queer sensibilities. Kidd, Freud in Oz, 126. 1031 Sutton, “An Interview with Maurice Sendak,” 689. 1032 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Bantam Classics, 1981), 69. 1033 Ibid, 24. 1034 Sendak would write, “My picture book Outside Over There, is a replay of the Lindberg case. There is a drawing of the baby in the cave which is a very good likeness of Charlie Lindberg Jnr. But I changed history and the baby is found by my sister and comes home alive. Outside Over There is all about my sister being stuck with me, and wishing me dead, but a part of her not hating me that much and wishing me back and so she saves my life.” Maurice Sendak in John Burningham, ed., When We Were Young (Bloomsbury: London, 2004), 123. 1035 John Burningham, “His stories and illustrations captivate children, but Maurice Sendak – the author of Where the Wild Things Are – explains why for him they are a means of exorcising a painful past My life with the wild things,” The Telegraph, Jan 12, 2005, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3634807/His-stories-and- illustrations-captivate-children-but-Maurice-Sendak-the-author-of-Where-the-Wild-Things-Are-explains-why-for- him-they-are-a-means-of-exorcising-a-painful-past-My-life-with-the-wild-things.html 1036 Interview transcript, Selma G. Lanes, June 22, 1989, American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, New York Public Library. 1037 Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak, The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 83-84. 1038 Sara Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak: A Visit with the Most Celebrated Children’s Author of Our Time,” Parents, November 1992, box 6, folder 67, Phillip Applebaum Collection, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History; Stephanie Nettell, “Maurice Sendak obituary,” May 8, 2012, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/08/maurice-sendak 343

1039 Terry Gross interviews Maurice Sendak, “Maurice Sendak: On Life, Death And Children’s Lit,” Fresh Air, NPR.org, December 29, 2011 (originally broadcast September 20, 2011), www.npr.org/2011/12/29/144077273/maurice-sendak-on-life-death-and-childrens-lit 1040 Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” 1041 Terry Gross interviews Maurice Sendak, “Maurice Sendak: On Life, Death And Children’s Lit.” 1042 Mercier, “Sendak on Sendak.” 1043 Zarin, “Not Nice.” 1044 Roiphe, Violet Hour, 212. 1045 Jonze, Tell Them Anything You Want. 1046 Roiphe, Violet Hour, 214. 1047 Peter Dobrin, “Bulk of Sendak collection leaving Rosenbach,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 14, 2014, www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/20140914_Bulk_of_Sendak_collection_leaving_Rosenbach.html 1048 Sound recording, Maurice Sendak, September 14, 1993, Unit DA00228, September 14, 1993, Public Education Program sound recordings, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. 1049 Teeman, “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.”

Conclusion

1050 James Bohlman, “THE Maurice Sendak?!!!,” Journey2Kona2019 (blog), July 14, 2015, https://journey2kona2019.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/the-maurice-sendak/ 1051 Cech, Angels and Wild Things, 112; Kidd, “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams,” 223. 1052 Reesa Sheryl Malca Sorin, “The Fears of Early Childhood: Writing in Response to a Study of Maurice Sendak” (MA Thesis, School of Journalism and Creative Writing, U. of Wollongong, 1994); Mark Bixler and Mariano Castillo, “Author of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ Dies,” CNN, May 8, 2012, www.cnn.com/2012/05/08/us/maurice-sendak-obit/index.html 1053 The latter two are also avowedly gender-queer, transcending the confines expected of mainstream femininity. 1054 Cited in Amy Sonheim, Maurice Sendak (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 20. 1055 Emma Brockes, “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence,” The Believer, November/December 2012, Accessed 22 April, 2016, http://www.believermag.com/issues/201211/?read=interview_sendak. 1056 Mariana Cook, “Postscript: Wild Things,” The New Yorker, May 21, 2012, rpt. from 2009 interview, 58. 1057 Sophie N. Cederbaum, “American Jewish Juvenile Literature During the Last Twenty-Five Years,” Jewish Book Annual (1967-1968): 192. 1058 Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 118. 1059 Sasha Weiss, “Art Spiegelman Discusses Maurice Sendak,” New Yorker, May 9, 2012, Accessed May 7, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/art-spiegelman-discusses-maurice-sendak 1060 Sara Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak: A Visit with the Most Celebrated Children’s Author of Our Time,” Parents, November 1992, 583, box 6, folder 67, Phillip Applebaum Collection, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History. 1061 Maurice Sendak, “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things,” Vassar Quarterly 92, no. 4, September 1, 1996, 11.

344 Bibliography

Archival Collections

Arne Nixon Papers. Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. California State University. Fresno, CA. Art & Artist Files. Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library. Smithsonian Libraries. Washington, DC. Autograph File, S. Harvard University Houghton Library. Cambridge, MA. Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records (DM009). Georgia Institute of Technology Archives. Atlanta, GA. http://finding-aids.library.gatech.edu/repositories/2/resources/436. Beulah Campbell Papers. A.B. Colvin Collection and Archives. Montgomery Library. Campbellsville University. Campbellsville, KY. Blaine Pennington Papers. University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives. Kansas City, MO. Coleman Dowell Papers. Fales Library. NYU. New York, NY. Comics Project Files. Social Welfare History Archives. University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections. Minneapolis, MN. De Grummond Children’s Literature Collection. McCain Library & Archives University of Southern Mississippi. Hattiesburg, MS. Edna Edwards Interviews with Children’s Authors and Illustrators. Loyola Marymount University Archives & Special Collections. Los Angeles, CA. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. records. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Francelia Butler Papers. University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections. Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. Storrs, CT. Isaac Bashevis Singer Papers. Harry Ransom Center. Austin, TX. Joanna Foster Dougherty Papers. Special Collections & University Archives. University of Oregon. Eugene, OR. Jules Feiffer Papers, 1919-1995. Library of Congress. Washington, DC. Kinder Zhurnal/Farlag Matones Records, 1924-1963. YIVO. Center for Jewish History. New York, NY. Lillian Hoban Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University. New Haven, CT. Maurice Sendak Archive, 1965-2007. Columbia Rare Books & Special Collections Manuscripts Collection. University of South Carolina. Columbia, SC. Maurice Sendak Collection. Rosenbach Museum & Library. Philadelphia, PA. Maurice Sendak Collection of James Marshall. Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections, Storrs, CT. Maurice Sendak Papers. Kerlan Collection. Elmer Andersen Library. University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections. Minneapolis, MN.

345

Morton E. Wise Collection of Maurice Sendak. Dartmouth Rauner Library. Hanover, NH. Muir mss. II, 1892-1981. Manuscripts Dept. Indiana University Lilly Library. Bloomington, IN. Oral History Collection. American Jewish Committee. New York Public Library. New York, NY. Phillip Applebaum Collection. American Jewish Historical Society. Center for Jewish History. New York, NY. Public Education Program sound recordings. New York Public Library Archives. The New York Public Library. Randall Jarrell Collection 1914-1969. New York Public Library. New York, NY. Ruth Krauss Papers. Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. University of Connecticut Archives & Special Collections, Storrs, CT. Smith College Library Special Collections. Northampton, MA. Stuart Wright Collection: Randall Jarrell Papers, Collection No. 1169-005. East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C. Truman A. Warner Papers. Western Connecticut State University Archives. Danbury, CT. University of Guelph Archival & Special Collections. Guelph, ON, Canada. Zena Bailey Sutherland Papers. University of Chicago Graduate School Special Collections. Chicago, IL.

Illustrated by Sendak

Bond, Gladys Baker. Seven Little Stories on Big Subjects. New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1955. Chanover, Hyman and Alice. Happy Hanukah Everybody. New York: United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education, 1954. DeJong, Meindert. House of Sixty Fathers. New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1956. Eidinoff, Maxwell. Atomics for the Millions. New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1947. Garvey, Robert. Good Shabbos, Everybody! New York: United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education, 1951. Grimm, Wilhelm. Dear Mili, translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Jarrell, Randall. Fly By Night. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976. Kleist, Heinrich von. Penthesilea, translated by Joel Agee. New York: Harper Collins, 1998. Krauss, Ruth. A Hole Is To Dig. New York: HarperCollins, 1952. Krauss, Ruth. I’ll Be You and You Be Me. New York: HarperCollins, 1954. Kushner, Tony. Brundibar. New York: Michael di Capua Books/Hyperion Books for Children, 2003. Marshall, James. Swine Lake. New York: Harper Collins, 1999. Melville, Herman. Pierre, or The Ambiguities. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Minarik, Else Holmelund. Father Bear Comes Home. New York: Harper & Row, 1959. Minarik, Else Holmelund. A Kiss for Little Bear. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1968. Minarik, Else Holmelund. Little Bear. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Minarik, Else Holmelund. Little Bear’s Friend. New York: Harper Brothers, 1960.

346 Minarik, Else Holmelund. Little Bear’s Visit. New York: Harper, 1961. Minarik, Else Holmelund. No Fighting, No Biting! New York: Harper, 1958.

Nash, Ogden. You Can’t Get There from Here. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953. Opie, Iona and Peter. I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 1992. Segal, Lore, translator. The Juniper Tree and Other Tales by Grimm. New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1973. Sendak, Jack. Circus Girl. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. Sendak, Jack. The Happy Rain. New York: Harper Collins, 1956. Sendak, Philip. In Grandpa’s House. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, translated by I.B. Singer and Elizabeth Shub. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1966. Udry, Janice May. Let’s Be Enemies. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993.

Written and Illustrated by Sendak

Bumble-Ardy. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Fantasy Sketches. Philadelphia: Philip H. & A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1970. Hector Protector and As I Went Over the Water: Two Nursery Rhymes with Pictures. New York: Harper Collins, 1965. Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. In the Night Kitchen. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Kenny’s Window. New York: Harper and Row, 1956. Mommy? Scenario by Arthur Yorinks, paper engineering by Matthew Reinhart. New York: Scholastic, 2006. My Brother’s Book. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. Nutshell Library (Alligators All Around, One Was Johnny, Chicken Soup With Rice, and Pierre). New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Outside Over There. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. The Sign on Rosie’s Door. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. Some Swell Pup, Or, Are You Sure You Want a Dog? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Very Far Away. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: HarperCollins, 1963.

Writings and Public Speaking by Sendak

Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988. Changelings: Children’s Stories Lost and Found, with Stephen Greenblatt, Herbert A. Schreier, and Wye Jamison Allanbrook. Berkeley, CA: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, U. of California, 1996. “Descent into Limbo: The Creative Process.” Lecture. Bennington College, April 18, 1989,

347 https://vimeo.com/143889683. “Dreamer of Beauty.” In Little Nemo, by Winsor McCay. New York: Nostalgia Press, 1976.

“Enamored of the Mystery.” In Innocence and Experience: Essays & Conversations on Children’s Literature, edited by Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire. New York: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1987, 362-374. Foreword to R.O. Blechman: Between the Lines, ed. Bea Feitler. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1980. Introduction to The Maxfield Parrish Poster Book. New York: Harmony Books, 1974. “Moby Dick, Creativity, and Other Wild Things.” Vassar Quarterly 92, no. 4. September 1, 1996. Sound cassette (2 sound files), Feb.8, 1989 and Sept. 14, 1993, Public Education Program Sound Recordings, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “Sources of Inspiration.” Inaugural Zena Sutherland Lecture, May 20, 1983. Zena Bailey Sutherland Papers, box 7, folder 4. University of Chicago Graduate School Special Collections. “A Tribute to a Friend,” American Book Collectors of Children’s Literature 14, no. 2 (Fall 2002).

Interviews and Reflections

Braun, Saul. “Sendak Raises the Shade on Childhood.” The New York Times Magazine, June 7, 1970. Francelia Butler Papers, series 2, box 9, folder: “Sendak, Maurice (Author).” Dodd Center. University of Connecticut Special Collections, Storrs, CT. Brockes, Emma. “I Refuse to Cater to the Bullshit of Innocence.” The Believer, Nov./Dec. 2012. Cohen, Patricia. “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are.” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2008. Commire, Anne. “Maurice Sendak.” In Something About the Author: Facts and Pictures about Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young People 27. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Research Company, Book Tower, 1982. Cott, Jonathan. “Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things.” Rolling Stone, December 30, 1976. “‘Don’t assume anything’: A Conversation with Maurice Sendak and Philip Nel” (2001). Reprinted in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, edited by Peter C. Kunze. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Drake, David. “Born to be Wild: Interview by David Drake.” Poz Magazine, Sept. 1999. 87-89. ONE Archives Foundation, Los Angeles, CA. Evans, Sara. “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak: A Visit with the Most Celebrated Children’s Author of Our Time.” Parents (Nov. 1992). Phillip Applebaum Collection, box 6, folder 67. American Jewish Historical Society. Center for Jewish History. Hammel, Lisa. “Maurice Sendak: Thriving on Quiet.” New York Times, Jan. 5, 1973. Maurice Sendak Art & Artist Files, Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian Libraries, Washington D.C., consulted November 7, 2015. Harris, Muriel. “Impressions of Sendak.” 1970. Reprinted in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, edited by Peter C. Kunze. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Heller, Steven. Interview with Maurice Sendak. In Innovators of American Illustration. New

348 York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986, 70-81. Reprinted in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, edited by Peter C. Kunze. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Hentoff, Nat. “Among the Wild Things.” New Yorker, Jan. 15, 1966. Hopkins, Lee Bennett. Books are by People: Interviews with 104 Authors and Illustrators of Books for Young Children. New York: Citation Press, 1969. Kunze, Peter C. ed. Conversations with Maurice Sendak. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Lanes, Selma G. Interview transcript. June 22, 1989. American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection. New York Public Library. New York, NY. Lyall, Sarah. “Maurice Sendak Sheds Moonlight on a Dark Tale.” New York Times, Sept. 20, 1993. “Maurice Sendak.” In When We Were Young, edited by John Burningham, 121-130. Bloomsbury: London, 2004. “Maurice Sendak: Childhood Books I remember,” 1995. The Hearst Corporation. Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records. Georgia Tech Library Archives. “Maurice Sendak: Getting Kids to Read,” 1995. The Hearst Corporation. Benjamin Hirsch and Associates, Inc. Records. Georgia Tech Library Archives. Mercier, Jean. “Sendak on Sendak.” Publishers Weekly, April 10, 1981. Monks of New Skete, Art of Raising a Puppy. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1991. Moyers, Bill. “Maurice Sendak: ‘Where the Wild Things Are.’” PBS NOW. March 12, 2004. Poole, Buzz. “The Wisdom of Sendak: Children are Wild, Honest, Immoral Beings.” Literary Hub, May 22, 2017. “Questions to an Artist Who Is Also an Author: A Conversation between Maurice Sendak and Virginia Haviland.” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 28, no. 4 (Oct. 1971): 262-80. Reprinted in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, edited by Peter C. Kunze. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Rochman, Hazel. “The Booklist Interview: Maurice Sendak.” Booklist, June 15, 1992. Rodgers, Patrick. “Selected Sendak: Interviews by the Rosenbach.” Rosenbach Museum Archives, 2007-2008. Reprinted in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, edited by Peter C. Kunze. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Sadler, Glenn Edward. “A Conversation with Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss.” 1982. Reprinted in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, edited by Peter C. Kunze. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Saxon, Antonia. “A Loving Tribute: Maurice Sendak on ‘My Brother’s Book’.” Publishers Weekly, Feb. 22, 2013. Secrest, Meryle. “Sendak Hasn’t Lost That Direct Link With Childhood” (c.1970). Francelia Butler Papers, Dodd Center. Smith, Jeffrey Jon. “A Conversation with Maurice Sendak.” Article based on transcript of a phone conversation with Sendak. August 27, 1974. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Steinberg, Avi. “Maurice Sendak on ‘Bumble-Ardy’.” The Paris Review, Dec. 27, 2011. Sutton, Roger. “An Interview with Maurice Sendak.” The Horn Book (Nov/Dec 2003): 687-99. Reprinted in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, edited by Peter C. Kunze. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Teeman, Tim. “Maurice Sendak: I’m ready to die.” The Times, Sept. 24, 2011. Wintle, Justin. Interview with Maurice Sendak. The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential

349 Creators of Children’s Literature. New York: Paddington Press, 1975. Zarin, Cynthia. “Not Nice: Maurice Sendak and the perils of childhood.” The New Yorker, April 17, 2006.

Exhibitions and Catalogs

The ABC of It. New York Public Library exhibit. Curated by Leonard S. Marcus. June 21, 2013 – March 23, 2014. Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, New York, NY. Anderson, Brian. Catalogue for an Exhibition of Pictures by Maurice Sendak. December 16 – February 29, 1975-76. Ashmolean Museum. Oxford, UK. London: Bodley Head, 1975. Collecting Inspiration: Contemporary Illustrators and Their Heroes. Curated by Tony DiTerlizzi and Mo Willems. May 23 – Nov. 26, 2017. The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA. Hanrahan, Joyce Y. Works of Maurice Sendak: Revised and Expanded to 2001. Saco, Maine: Custom Communications, 2001. Harper and Row catalog, c.1971. Box 1, folder 21. Blaine Pennington Papers. University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives. Kansas City, MO. Marcus, Leonard S. The Art of Maurice Sendak: A Conversation with Maurice Sendak conducted by Leonard S. Marcus. The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Nov. 22, 2002 – Jan. 12, 2003. Amherst, MA. Schiller, Justin G. “Recollections for an Exhibition.” In Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, edited by Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David. New York: Abrams, 2013. Sendak at the Rosenbach. Exhibition catalog. Curated by Vincent Giroud and Maurice Sendak. April 28 - October 30, 1995. Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, PA. Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak: A Selling Exhibition. Maurice Sendak Foundation. Nov. 14 – Dec. 18, 2015. Sotheby’s Gallery, New York, NY.

Critical Reception of Sendak

Arakelian, Paul G. “Text and Illustration: A Stylistic Analysis of Books by Sendak and Mayer,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1985): 122-127. Bernheimer, Martin. “Sendak’s Picturesque ‘Zauberflote’.” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1990. Bosmajian, Hamida. “Hidden Grief: Maurice Sendak’s Dear Mili and the Limitations of Holocaust Picture Books.” In Sparing the Child: Grief and the Unspeakable in Youth Literature about Nazism and the Holocaust. New York and London: Routledge, 2002, 215-240. Bosmajian, Hamida. “Memory and Desire in the Landscapes of Sendak’s Dear Mili.” The Lion and the Unicorn 19, no. 2 (1995): 186-210. Brown, Jennifer M. “The Rumpus Goes On: Max, Maurice Sendak and a clan of bears pay tribute to a lifelong mentorship.” Publishers Weekly, April 18, 2005. Bryant, John. “Pierre and Pierre: Editing and Illustrating Melville.” Review of Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities. The Kraken Edition, by Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker, pictures by Maurice Sendak. College English 60, no. 3 (Mar., 1998): 336-341.

350 Cech, John. Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Corsaro, Frank. “Chapter VI: On Stage: Theater, Opera, and Ballet: M&M (Maurice and Me).” In Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, edited by Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David, 133-136. New York: Abrams, 2013. Cott, Jonathan. There’s a Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak. New York: Doubleday, 2017. Eichler-Levine, Jodi. “Maurice Sendak’s Jewish Mother(s).” In Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, edited by Marjorie Lehman, Jane Kanarek, and Simon J. Bronner. Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017. Godfrey, Stephen. “Designing a nightmare world.” The Globe and Mail, Sept. 25, 1982. University of Guelph Archival & Special Collections, Guelph, ON, Canada. Gottlieb, Richard M. “Maurice Sendak’s Trilogy.” In Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 63, edited by Robert A. King and Samuel Abrams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Green, Jesse. “Review: Reviving a ‘Really Rosie’ That’s Hard-Candy Cute.” The New York Times, Aug. 3, 2017. Greenblatt, Stephen. Foreword to My Brother’s Book, by Maurice Sendak. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Mozart, Shakespeare and the Art of Maurice Sendak.” In Changelings: Children’s Stories Lost and Found, edited by Christina M. Gillis. Berkeley, CA: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, U. of California, 1996. Kidd, Kenneth. “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picture-Book Psychologist.” In The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, edited by Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg, 211-230. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. “Romantic and Jewish Images of Childhood in Maurice Sendak’s Dear Mili.” European Judaism 42, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 5-16. Kushner, Tony. The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present. New York: Abrams, 2003. Lahr, John. “The Playful Art of Maurice Sendak.” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 12, 1980. Lanes, Selma G. The Art of Maurice Sendak. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980. Lerer, Seth. “Wild Thing: Maurice Sendak and the Worlds of Children’s Literature.” Lecture at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Published on Youtube Sept. 29, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lducj5nUkrI Maguire, Gregory. Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Marcus, Leonard S. “Chapter I: The Artist and His Work: Fearful Symmetries: Maurice Sendak’s Picture Book Trilogy and the Making of an Artist.” In Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, edited by Leonard S. Marcus. Curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David, 15-27. New York: Abrams, 2013. Marcus, Leonard S. “The Resilience of Children in Maurice Sendak’s Books.” Interview by NYU Child Study Center Grand Rounds. Published on Youtube by NYU Langone Medical Center. October 28, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q9UgR3Zyxs May, Jill P. “Envisioning the Jewish Community in Children’s Literature: Maurice Sendak and Isaac Singer.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 33, no. 3 / 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2000-Winter 2001): 137–151. Nel, Philip. “Wild Things, Children and Art: The Life and Work of Maurice Sendak.” The

351 Comics Journal 302 (2013): 12-29. Perrot, Jean. “Deconstructing Maurice Sendak’s Postmodern Palimpsest.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 16, no. 4 (Winter 1991-1992): 259-263. Perrot, Jean. “Maurice Sendak’s Ritual Cooking of the Child in Three Tableaux: The Moon, Mother, and Music.” Children’s Literature 18 (1990): 68-86. Pfefferman, Naomi. “‘Dance’s’ Conflict Is Center Stage.” Jewish Journal, April 17, 2003. Poole, L.M. Maurice Sendak And the Art of Children’s Book Illustration. Maidstone, Kent, Great Britain: Crescent Moon, 1996. Rodgers, Patrick. “Chapter X: Where the Wild Things Are: Mad Max: On Three Preliminary Drawings for Where the Wild Things Are.” In Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, edited by Leonard S. Marcus, curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M. V. David, 195-201. New York: Abrams, 2013. Rosenblum, Ira. “SIGNOFF; A Fairy Tale, but Hold the Gingerbread.” The New York Times, Dec. 14, 1997. Singer, Rachel. “Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are: An Exploration of the Personal and the Collective.” Ars Judaica 7 (2011): 17-32. Sonheim, Amy. Maurice Sendak. New York: Twayne Publishers. 1991. Spitz, Ellen Handler. “Ethos in Steig’s and Sendak’s Picture Books: The Connected and the Lonely Child.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 43, no. 2 (Summer, 2009): 64-76. Spitz, Ellen Handler. “Maurice Sendak’s Sexuality.” New Republic, Feb. 21, 2013. Steinberg, Avi. “‘We Are Inseparable!’: On Maurice Sendak’s Last Book.” The New Yorker, March 12, 2013. Stix, Harriet. “Sendak Draws on Childhood Truths.” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 7, 1984. Arne Nixon Papers, box 1, folder 103. Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. Tannenbaum, Leslie. “Betrayed by Chicken Soup: Judaism, Gender and Performance in Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie.” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 3 (2003): 362-376. Taylor, Judy. “Chapter II: Influences on Book Illustration: Some Influences on the Work of Maurice Sendak.” In Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, edited by Leonard S. Marcus. New York: Abrams, 2013. Updike, John. “Randall Jarrell Writing Stories for Children.” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1976. Warrick, Pamela. “Facing the Frightful Things These Days, Maurice Sendak’s Wild Creatures Are Homelessness, AIDS and Violence--Big Issues for Small Kids.” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 11, 1993. Weiss, Sasha. “Art Spiegelman Discusses Maurice Sendak.” New Yorker, May 9, 2012.

Historical Sources

Beth Sholem Peoples Temple Yearbook, 1928. American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History, New York, N.Y. “Bowers v. Hardwick,” Supreme Court, decided June 30, 1986. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/478/186. Brown, Lucille W. and Stephen M. Berk. “Fathers and Sons: Hasidim, Orthodoxy, and Haskalah – A View From Eastern Europe.” The Oral History Review 5, no. 1 (Jan 1, 1977). American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History, New York, N.Y.

352 Congregation Sons of Israel Yearbook, 1947. American Jewish Historical Society. Center for Jewish History. New York, N.Y. Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex 1: Sexual Inversion. Watford, London, and Leipzig: The University Press, 1900. Hartshorne, E. Y. German Youth and the Nazi Dream of Victory by America in a World at War 12. New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1941. Kohn, Jacob. Modern Problems of Jewish Parents: A Study in Parental Attitudes. New York: The Women’s League of the United Synagogue of America, 1932. McNally, Evalyn Grumbine. Reaching Juvenile Markets: How to Advertise, Sell, and Merchandise Through Boys and Girls. New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1938. Reprinted in The Children’s Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Proceedings of the White House Conference on Children in a Democracy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Print. Office, 1940. Digitized by the Boston Public Library, https://archive.org/details/proceedingsofwhi00whit. Roskies, Diane K. Teaching the holocaust to children. Brooklyn, New York: Ktav Pub. House, 1975. “Selling Food to Children: The Mother’s Own Book (1928).” Reprinted in The Children’s Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins, 463-467. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Wilson, Jess H. “Does Your ‘Research’ Embrace the Boy of Today?” Printers Ink 118 (March 16, 1922). Reprinted in The Children’s Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Wise, Stephen S. Child Versus Parent: Some Chapters On the Irrepressible Conflict in the Home. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922.

Secondary Literature, Art, and Cultural Documents

Bernstein, Leonard. The Leonard Bernstein Letters, edited by Nigel Simeone. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Butler, Francelia. Sharing Literature with Children: A Thematic Anthology. New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1977. Cederbaum, Sophie N. “American Jewish Juvenile Literature During the Last Twenty-Five Years.” Jewish Book Annual (1967-1968): 192-203. Chaver-Paver. Di ḳinder fun Ṭsheri sṭriṭ, 192-?/193-? YIVO, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY. (my translation from the Yiddish). Decter, Midge. “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, Sept. 1, 1980. Eisner, Will. A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories. New York: Baronet Books, 1978. Epstein, Helen. Children of the Holocaust. New York: Penguin Books, 1979. Epstein, Marc Michael, ed. Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts. Princeto and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. Fadiman, Clifton. “A Meditation on Children and Their Literature.” Afterword to Sharing Literature with Children: A Thematic Anthology, by Francelia Butler. New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1977.

353 Ficowski, Jerzy ed. Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, translated by Walter Arndt with Victoria Nelson. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Glynn, Eugene. “Desperate Necessity: Art and Creativity in Recent Psychoanalytic Theory.” The Print Collector’s Newsletter 8, no. 2 (May-June 1977): 29-36. Reprinted in Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, edited by Jonathan Weinberg. Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008. Glynn, Eugene. “To Express a Serious Sorrow.” Review of Vincent van Gogh: A Psychological Study, by Humberto Nagera, and Stranger on the Earth: A Psychological Biography of Vincent van Gogh, by Albert J. Lubin. The Print Collector’s Newsletter 4, no. 4 (Sept- Oct 1973): 88-90. Reprinted in Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, edited by Jonathan Weinberg. Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008. Glynn, Eugene. Review of Egon Schiele’s Portraits and Schiele in Prison, both by Alessandra Comini. The Print Collector’s Newsletter 6, no. 3 (July-Aug 1975): 77-79. Reprinted in Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, edited by Jonathan Weinberg. Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008. Glynn, Eugene. “Television and the American Character” (1956). Reprinted in Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, edited by Jonathan Weinberg. Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2008. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963. Goldstein, Fanny. “The Jewish Child in Bookland.” The Jewish Book Annual 5 (1946-1947): 84- 100. Grossman, David. Writing in the Dark, translated by Jessica Cohen. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008. The Jazz Singer. Directed by Alan Crosland, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, starring Al Jolson. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1927. Kazin, Alfred. New York Jew. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Kinder Zhurnal, 1924-1963. YIVO, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY. Krauss, Ruth. The Great Duffy, pictures by Mischa Richter. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946. Leib, Mani. Yingl Tsingl Khvat, illustrated by El Lissitzky. Warsaw: Kultur-Lige, 1922. Malamud, Bernard. A Malamud Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967. Marcus, Leonard S. ed. Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1998. McCay, Winsor. Little Nemo. New York: Nostalgia Press, 1976. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Collins, 1993. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Bantam Classics, 1981 (originally published 1851). Mitzel, John “An Approach to the Gay Sensibility in Literature,” The Gay Alternative 11 (Spring 1976): 4-7 and 43-46. Archive.org, accessed Feb. 6, 2018, https://archive.org/details/TheGayAlternative11Spring1976 Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1934. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1967. Schwartz, Yigal. Makhela Hungarit. Kineret: Dvir, 2014. Sholem Aleichem. “The ‘Four Questions’ of An American Boy” (n.d.). In Yiddish Literature in America: 1870-2000, edited by Emanuel S. Goldsmith, translated by Barnett Zumoff. Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, Inc., 2009.

354 Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Enemies: A Love Story. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp” (1964). In Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001. Spiegelman, Art. Metamaus. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. Steiner, George. “In Lieu Of A Preface.” Salmagundi 58-59: Homosexuality: Sacrilege, Vision, Politics (Fall 1982-Winter 1983). Thurber, James and E.B. White. Is Sex Necessary. Garden City, NY: Blue Ribbon Books, 1944 (originally printed by Harper & Brothers, 1929). Torch Song Trilogy. Written by Starring Harvey Fierstein. Directed by Paul Bogart. Produced by Ronald K. Fierstein, starring Harvey Fierstein, Anne Bancroft, and Matthew Broderick. New Line Cinema, 1988. Where the Wild Things Are (film), directed by Spike Jonze, produced by , Gary Goetzman, Maurice Sendak, John Carls, and , screenplay by Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2009.

Secondary Studies

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355 Brown, Stuart. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Avery, 2009. Bruhm, Steven and Natasha Hurley, eds. Curiouser: On The Queerness Of Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Chinn, Sarah E. Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the- Century America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Cohen, Beth B. Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Cohen, Naomi W. What the Rabbis Said: The Public Discourse of Nineteenth-Century American Rabbis. New York: New York University, 2008. Cott, Jonathan. Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature. New York: Random House, 1981. Dawidowicz, Lucy S. On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881-1981. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. Diner, Hasia. Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Diner, Hasia. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962. New York: NYU Press, 2009. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Egan, R. Danielle and Gail Hawkes. Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Elior, Rachel. Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore. Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2008. Fingeroth, Danny. Disguised As Clark Kent. New York and London: Continuum, 2007. Fishman, Sylvia Barack, ed. Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction. Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press and the University Press of New England, 1992. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. Negotiating Both Sides of the Hyphen: Coalescence, Compartmentalization, and American Jewish Values. Cincinnati: Judaic Studies Program, University of Cincinnati, 1996. Flanzbaum, Hilene, ed. Americanization of the Holocaust. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995. Freeze, ChaeRan. Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia. Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2002. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Fuchs, Lawrence. Beyond Patriarchy: Jewish Fathers and Families. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2000. Gendlin, Eugene T. Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and

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357 Kramer, Michael P. and Hana Wirth-Nesher, eds. Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Krasner, Jonathan B. The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, edited by Leon S. Roudiez, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Lambert, Joshua. Unclean Lips: Jews, Obscenity, and American Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Leddick, David. Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Lerer, Seth. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, from Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009. Litvak, Olga. Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Marcus, Ivan G. Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe. New Haven: Yale University, 1998. McCarthy, Dennis, ed. Deep Play - Exploring the Use of Depth in Psychotherapy with Children. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2015. Miller, Alice. Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Moore, Deborah D. At Home in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Morgan, Bill and Nancy J. Peters, eds. Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2006. Mosse, George. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Most, Andrea. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical. Harvard University Press, 2004. Nel, Philip. Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feelings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Roiphe, Katie. The Violet Hour. New York: The Dial Press, 2016. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. New York: Macmillan Press, 1984. Rosen, David. Sin, Sex & Subversion: How What Was Taboo in 1950s New York Became America’s New Normal. New York: Carrel Books, 2016. Rosenblum, Robert. The Romantic Child. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988. Roskies, David G. and Naomi Diamant. Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2012. Sammond, Nicholas. Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven and London: Yale University

358 Press, 2004. Sarna, Jonathan D. JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888-1988. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CA Press, 1990. Seidman, Naomi. The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Stampfer, Shaul. Families, Rabbis, and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in Nineteenth- Century Eastern Europe. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010. Stearns, Peter N. Anxious Parents. New York and London: NYU Press, 2003. Stearns, Peter N. and Jan Lewis, eds. An Emotional History of the United States. New York: NYU Press, 1998. Sternlicht, Sanford. The Tenement Saga The Lower East Side and Early Jewish American Writers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Tosh, Jemma. Perverse Psychology: The Pathologization of Sexual Violence and Transgenderism. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Wallach, Kerry. Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Wardi, Dina. Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust. London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992. Waters, Mary C. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Wenger, Beth S. New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Whitfield, Stephen J. In Search of American Jewish Culture. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1999. Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932 – 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Zelizer, Viviana. Pricing the Priceless Child. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Ziegelman, Jane and Andrew Coe. A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. New York: Harper, 2016.

Articles

Anderson, Mark M. “The Child Victim as Witness to the Holocaust: An American Story?” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 1 (2007): 1-22. Angelides, Steven. “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 141-177. Bedingfield, Agnieszka. “Trans-Memory and Diaspora: Memories of Europe and Asia in American Immigrant Narratives.” In Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas, edited by William Boelhower et al. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004. Berner, Tali. “Children and Rituals in Early Modern Ashkenaz.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 7, no. 1 (2014): 65-86.

359 Bilge, Sirma. “Intersectionality Undone: Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10, no. 2 (2013): 405-424. Bos, Pascale. “Positionality and Postmemory in Scholarship on the Holocaust.” Women in German Yearbook 19 (2003): 50-74. Chauncey, George. “The Trouble with Shame.” In Gay Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, 277-282. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 2009. Cho, Sumi, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 785-810. Cohen, Steven M. and Arnold M. Eisen. “The Sovereign Self: Jewish Identity in Post-Modern America.” Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints 453 (May 2001). Berman Jewish Policy Archive, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Accessed Dec. 31, 2017, http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/17923. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Intersectionality and Identity Politics: Learning from Violence against Women of Color.” In Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Mary Lyndon Shanley and Uma Narayan, 178-193. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Cummins, June. “Becoming an ‘All-of-a-Kind’ American: Sydney Taylor and Strategies of Assimilation.” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 3 (2003): 324-343. Dashefsky, Arnold and Irving M. Levine. “The Jewish Family: Continuity and Change.” In Families and Religions: Conflict and Change in Modern Society, edited by William V. D’Antonio and Joan Aldous. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985. DiAngelo, Robin. “White Fragility.” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 54-70. Eustace, Nicole. “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions.” The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1487–1531. Ferst, Devra. “The Twisty History of Jewish Kid Lit.” The Jewish Daily Forward, November 24, 2010. Gans, Herbert J. “Symbolic ethnicity: The future of ethnic groups and cultures in America.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 2, no. 1 (2010): 1-20. Goren, Arthur. “A ‘Golden Decade’ for American Jews: 1945-1955.” In American Jewish Experience, edited by Jonathan Sarna. New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1986. Greenbaum, Avraham. “The Girls’ Heder and the Girls in the Boys’ Heder in Eastern Europe before World War I.” East/West Education 18, no. 1 (1997): 55-62. Greenspan, Henry. “Imagining Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness.” In Americanization of the Holocaust, edited by Hilene Flanzbaum. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Haase, Donald. “Children, War, and the Imaginative Space of Fairy Tales.” The Lion and the Unicorn 24, no. 3 (2000): 360-377. Halberstam, J. “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies.” In In a Queer Time and Place. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Reprinted in Reading Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity, edited by Susan Archer Mann and Ashly Suzanne Patterson. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Herszenson, David. “Of Fags, Flags, Faggots and Feygeles.” The Jewish Daily Forward, April 21, 2010. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103-28.

360 Hyman, Paula E. “The Jewish Family: Looking for a Usable Past.” In On Being a Jewish Feminist, edited by Susannah Heschel, 19-26. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Kellman, Ellen. “Aiding Immigrant Readers of Entertaining Them?: The Jewish Daily Forward and Its ‘Gallery of Missing Husbands’ (ca. 1909).” In New York and the American Jewish Communal Experience, edited by Fruma Mohrer and Ettie Goldwasser (based on the Milstein Conference on New York and the American Jewish Experience). New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2013. Krasner, Jonathan B. “A Recipe for American Jewish Integration: The Adventures of K’tonton and Hillel’s Happy Holidays.” The Lion and the Unicorn 27, no. 3 (September 2003): 344-361. Krutikov, Mikhail. “An End to Fairy Tales: The 1930s in the mayselekh of Der Nister and Leyb Kvitko.” In Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity, edited by Gennady Estraikh, Kristin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov. Cambridge, England, and New York: Legenda, 2016. Lederhendler, Eli. “Orphans and Prodigies: Rediscovering Young Jewish Immigrant ‘Marginals’.” American Jewish History 95, no.2 (June 2009): 135-155. Levine, Hillel. “To Share A Vision.” In Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology, edited by J.N. Porter and P. Dreier. New York: Grove Press, 1973. Lipstadt, Deborah E. “America and Memory of the Holocaust, 1950-1965.” Modern Judaism 16, no. 3 (Oct. 1996): 195-214. Love, Heather K. “Emotional Rescue.” In Gay Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Lugowski, David M. “Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics of Hollywood’s Production Code.” Cinema Journal 38, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 3–35. Mantovan, Daniela. “Reading Soviet-Yiddish Poetry for Children: Der Nister’s Mayselekh in ferzn 1917-39.” In Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post- Modernity, edited by Gennady Estraikh, Kristin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov. Cambridge, England, and New York: Legenda, 2016. Mickenberg, Julia. “The Pedagogy of the Popular Front: ‘Progressive Parenting’ for a New Generation, 1918-1945.” In The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Caroline Field Levander. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Ofer, Dalia. “Parenthood in the Shadow of the Holocaust.” In Jewish Families in Europe, 1939- Present, edited by Joanna Beata Michlic. Waltham, MA: UPNE/Brandeis University Press, 2017. Plamper, Jan. “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Sterans.” History and Theory 49, no. 2 (May 2010): 237–265. Prell, Riv-Ellen. “Family Economy/Family Relations: the Development of American Jewish ethnicity in the Early Twentieth Century.” In National Variations in Jewish Identity, edited by Steven M. Cohen and Gabriel Horenczyk, 177-198. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Rosen, Aaron. “Bernard Perlin: Europe’s American.” In In Focus: Orthodox Boys 1948 by Bernard Perlin, edited by Aaron Rosen. Tate Research Publication, 2016. Accessed Nov. 4, 2016, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/orthodox-boys-bernard- perlin/europes-american. Sammond, Nicholas. “Dumbo, Disney, and Difference: Walt Disney Productions and Film as

361 Children’s Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, edited by Lynne Vallone and Julia Mickenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Sarna, Jonathan. “From K’tonton to the Torah.” Moment Magazine (October 1990): 44-47. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “How to Bring Your Kids up Gay.” Social Text 29 (1991): 18-27. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” In Gay Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, 49-62. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Shneer, David. “Queer is the New Pink: How Queer Jews Moved to the Forefront of Jewish Culture.” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 1, no. 1 (January 2007): 55-64. Sholokhova, Lyudmila. “Soviet Propaganda in Illustrated Yiddish Children’s Books: From the Collections of the YIVO Library, New York.” In Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity, edited by Gennady Estraikh, Kristin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov. Cambridge, England, and New York: Legenda, 2016. Slaff, Bertram. “Creativity: Blessing or Burden?,” Adolescent Psychiatry (1981): 78-87. Solomon, Alisa. “Performance: Queerly Jewish/Jewishly Queer in the American Theater.” In The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature, edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Somer, Eli. “Trance Possession Disorder in Judaism: Sixteenth-Century Dybbuks in the Near East.” Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 5, no. 2 (2004): 131-146. Spigel, Lynn. “Seducing the Innocent: Childhood and Television in Postwar America.” In The Children’s Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins, 110-135. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Stearns, Peter N. and Carol Z. Stearns. “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards.” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 813-836. Stimpson, Catherine R. “The Beat Generation And The Trials Of Homosexual Liberation.” In Salmagundi 58-59: Homosexuality: Sacrilege, Vision, Politics (Fall 1982-Winter 1983). Sweet, Michael J. “Talking about Feygelekh: A Queer Male Representation in Jewish American Speech.” In Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, edited by Anna Livia and Kira Hall. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Udel, Miriam. “The Sabbath Tale and Jewish Cultural Renewal.” In Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity, edited by Gennady Estraikh, Kristin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov. Cambridge, England, and New York: Legenda, 2016. Weber, Donald. “Accents of the future: Jewish American popular culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer, 129-148. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Weinberg, Jonathan. Introduction to Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis, by Eugene Glynn, edited by Jonathan Weinberg. New York: Periscope Pub., 2008. Weinberg, Jonathan. “Ray Johnson Fan Club.” In Ray Johnson: Correspondences, by Ray Johnson, edited by Donna M. De Salvo and Catherine Gudis. Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 1999. Weitzman, Lenore J. “Resistance in Everyday Life: Family Strategies, Role Reversals, and Role Sharing in the Holocaust.” In Jewish Families in Europe, 1939-Present, edited by Joanna Beata Michlic. Waltham, MA: UPNE/Brandeis University Press, 2017. White, Edmund. Preface to Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell, by Eugene Hayworth. Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007.

362 Young, Jennifer. “‘A Language is Like a Garden’: Shloyme Davidman and the Yiddish Communist School Movement in the United States.” In Children and Yiddish Literature: From Early Modernity to Post-Modernity, edited by Gennady Estraikh, Kristin Hoge, and Mikhail Krutikov. Cambridge, England, and New York: Legenda, 2016. Zipperstein, Steven J. “Transforming the Heder: Maskilic Politics in Imperial Russia.” In Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky, edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein, 87-109. London: Halban, 1988.

Videos, Blogs, and Radio Shows

Bohlman, James. “THE Maurice Sendak?!!!” Journey2Kona2019 (blog), July 14, 2015, https://journey2kona2019.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/the-maurice-sendak/. Bohlman, James. “Truly Wealthy!” Journey2Kona2019 (blog), May 16, 2002, https://journey2kona2019.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/truly-wealthy/. Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, directed by Brad Bernstein. Far Out Films, 2013. “‘Fresh Air’ Remembers Author Maurice Sendak.” NPR.org. May 8, 2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152248901/fresh-air-remembers-author-maurice-sendak. “From Kids’ Books To Erotica, Tomi Ungerer’s ‘Far Out’ Life” (radio transcript). Terry Gross interviews Tomi Ungerer. Fresh Air, broadcast July 1, 2013, https://www.npr.org/2013/07/01/196335794/from-kids-books-to-erotica-tomi-ungerers- far-out-life. Glass, Ira. “204: 81 Words” (radio show transcript). This American Life, January 18, 2002. Accessed Nov. 3, 2016, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/204/transcript. “Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak,” The Colbert Report, Jan. 24, 2012, www.cc.com/video-clips/gzi3ec/the-colbert-report-grim-colberty-tales-with-maurice- sendak-pt--1. Last Dance. Directed by Mirra Bank, featuring Robby Bernett, Maurice Sendak, Michael Tracy, Jonathan Wolken, and Arthur Yorinks. First Run Features, 2002. “Maurice Sendak On Being a Kid.” Animated video created by Andrew Romano and Ramin Setoodeh, produced by David Gerlach. PBS Digital Studios (based on Newsweek interview, September 9, 2009). “Maurice Sendak: On Life, Death And Children’s Lit” (radio transcript). Terry Gross interviews Maurice Sendak. Fresh Air, Dec. 29, 2011 (originally broadcast September 20, 2011), www.npr.org/2011/12/29/144077273/maurice-sendak-on-life-death-and-childrens-lit. Nel, Philip. “In or Out?: Crockett Johnson, Ruth Krauss, Sexuality, Biography.” Nine Kinds of Pie (blog), Feb. 17, 2011. http://www.philnel.com/2011/02/17/in-or-out/. Popova, Maria. “How Ursula Nordstrom, the Greatest Patron Saint of Modern Childhood Stood, Up for Creativity Against Commercial Cowardice.” Brain Pickings, Feb. 2, 2015. Popova, Maria. “Peanuts and the Quiet Pain of Childhood: How Charles Schulz Made an Art of Difficult Emotions.” Brain Pickings, Jan. 20, 2015. Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. Directed by Spike Jonze and Lance Bangs, featuring Maurice Sendak, Lynn Caponera, and Catherine Keener. Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010.

363 There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak. Rosenbach Museum and Library. Retrospective of Sendak Interviews, 2008. DVD. “This Pig Wants to Party: Maurice Sendak’s Latest” (radio transcript). Terry Gross interviews Maurice Sendak. Fresh Air, broadcast Sept. 20, 2011. Reprinted in Conversations with Maurice Sendak, edited by Peter C. Kunze, 195-203. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Writers Talk: Maurice Sendak with Paul Vaughan (video interview, 1985). Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Roland Collection of Films and Videos on Art. San Francisco, California: Kanopy Streaming, 2014. Accessed through University of Massachusetts Amherst Library, June 18, 2016.

Press and Obituaries

Alverson, Brigid and Era Volin. “Comics Censorship, from ‘Gay Batman to Sendak’s Mickey.” School Library Journal, Sept. 23, 2014. Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists Newsletter 30, no. 2 (April 2004). Bader, Barbara. “Five Gay Picture-Book Prodigies and the Difference They’ve Made.” The Horn Book, March 5, 2015. Belonsky, Andrew. “Shel Silverstein Covered Fire Island For ‘Playboy’.” Out Magazine. May 22, 2013. Bermudez, Caroline. “How a Social-Service Fund Raiser Lured a $1-Million Gift.” Chronicle of Philanthropy 22, no. 16 (August 2010): 19. Bixler, Mark and Mariano Castillo. “Author of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ Dies.” CNN.com, May 8, 2012. Blewett, Kelly. “Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer History of the Children’s Book.” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 28, 2016. Brigada, Gerry and Warren Taylor. “Sendak’s childrens books come from personal life.” The Connecticut Daily Campus, April 29, 1981. Burningham, John. “His stories and illustrations captivate children, but Maurice Sendak – the author of Where the Wild Things Are – explains why for him they are a means of exorcising a painful past.” The Telegraph, Jan 12, 2005. Cahalan, Susannah. “‘Goodnight Moon’ author was a bisexual rebel who didn’t like kids.” New York Post, Jan. 7, 2017. Canning, Richard. “Something Unforgettable, Forgotten.” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 14, no. 6 (Nov/Dec 2007): 19-21. Carey, Joanna. “Tomi Ungerer, rennaisance man of children’s book illustration.” The Guardian, Feb 24, 2012. Chana, Jas. “Herman Wouk’s Fire Island Synagogue.” Tablet, May 28, 2015. Clemons, Walter. “Sendak’s Enchanted Land.” Newsweek, May 18, 1981. Blaine Pennington Papers, series 3, box 1, folder 21. University of Missouri-Kansas City Special Collections. Cook, Mariana. “Postscript: Wild Things.” The New Yorker, May 21, 2012. Cowan, Sarah. “All in One: An Interview with Tomi Ungerer.” The Paris Review, Jan. 30, 2015. Crane, Peter. Letter to the editor. New York Times, April 10, 2016. Accessed April 11, 2016,

364 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/books/review/letters-every-college-girls- dream.html?_r=0 Debnam, Betty. “Meet the Author and Artist of ‘The Monster Book.’” The Mini Page, March 31, 1974. Dobrin, Peter. “Bulk of Sendak collection leaving Rosenbach.” Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 14, 2014. Dobrin, Peter. “Rosenbach reels in rare Sendak trove.” Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 29, 2017. Everett-Green, Robert. “Maurice Sendak draws on his passions and past.” The Globe and Mail, Jan. 23, 1998. University of Guelph Archival & Special Collections, Guelph, ON, Canada. Flood, Allison. “Maurice Sendak tells parents worried by Wild Things to ‘go to hell’.” The Guardian, Oct. 20, 2009. Fox, Margalit. “Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83.” New York Times, May 8, 2012. Griswold, Jerry. “Outside Over There and Gay Pride.” The Horn Book, June 28, 2017. Groth, Gary. Interview with Maurice Sendak. The Comics Journal 302 (2013): 30-109. Haddock, Robert. “Sendak Doesn’t Kid ‘Kids’.” News-Times, Jan. 26, 1975. Truman A. Warner Papers, MS 026, box 3, folder 28. Western Connecticut State University Archives. Italie, Hillel. “Maurice Sendak with the Wild Things.” The Associated Press, 8 May 2012. Christian Science Monitor. Kakutani, Michiko. “Digging to the Roots of Maurice Sendak’s Vision.” New York Times, May 15, 2017. Kirsch, Adam. “Henry Roth Slept With His Sister and Cousin.” Review of Mercy of a Rude Stream, by Henry Roth. Tablet Magazine, July 2014. Manus, Elizabeth. “A Sister’s Angry Letter Unravels Roth Incest Tale.” The Observer, May 18, 1998. Nettell, Stephanie. “Maurice Sendak obituary.” May 8, 2012, The Guardian. Roiphe, Katie. “The Wildest Rumpus: Maurice Sendak and the Art of Death.” The Atlantic, March 7, 2016. Rosen, Judith. “Two NYC Kids’ Stores Celebrate 70 Years—Combined.” Publishers Weekly, Nov. 15, 2010. Russell, John. “Art: Sendak and Friends At the Morgan Libray.” New York Times, Sept. 4, 1981. Maurice Sendak Art & Artist Files, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery Library, Washington D.C., consulted November 7, 2015. Schneider, Louise. Memorial essay for Bertram Slaff. American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry Newsletter (Winter 2013). Spiegelman, Art and Maurice Sendak. “In The Dumps,” Sept. 27, 1993, The New Yorker. Stevens, Norman D. “Celebrating the Life and Work of James Marshall (1942-1992).” American Book Collectors of Children’s Literature 14, no. 2 (Fall 2002). Stokes, Colin. “‘Frog and Toad’: An Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love.” New Yorker Magazine, May 31, 2016. Swed, Mark. “‘Wild Things’ in Operaland: Maurice Sendak moves from children’s books to stage designer and librettist.” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1990. Vondersmith, Jason. “Magical Mozart.” Portland Tribune, May 3, 2016. Wheeler, Andrew. “R.I.P. ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ Creator Maurice Sendak (1928-2012).” Comics Alliance, May 8, 2012.

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Dissertations and Theses

Almquist, Justin. “Confronting Terezín: A Production History of Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner’s Brundibar.” MA Thesis, Central Washington University, 2014. Blau, Amy. “Afterlives: Translations of German Weltliteratur into Yiddish.” Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana, 2005. YIVO, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY. Langlois, Dagmar. “The Influence of Maurice Sendak, Leo and Diane Dillon, and Chris Van Allsburgh on Contemporary American Children’s Book Illustration.” MA Thesis, Syracuse University, 1991. Taft, Sigmund C. “A Study and Evaluation of the Jewish Community of Bensonhurst, Borough Park, Flatbush and Williamsburg, Neighborhoods in the Borough of Brooklyn in New York City.” M.A. Thesis, New York School of Social Work, Columbia University, 1943. YIVO, Center for Jewish History, New York.

Reference

Book of Zambrow, Center for Jewish History Reading Room Library, New York, NY. Cooney, Patrick L. “History of Cornwall, Connecticut: Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut.” NY-NJ-CT Botany Online, n.d. Accessed Nov. 3, 2016, http://www.nynjctbotany.org/lgtofc/cornwallhistory.html. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust 3, edited by Shmuel Spector. New York: NYU Press, 2001. Center for Jewish History Reading Room Library, New York, NY. Frischer, Rita Berman. “Children’s Literature in the United States.” Jewish Women’s Archive. Long, Marion. “Maurice Sendak: A Western Canon, Jr.” HomeArts. Archive.org Internet Archive. Accessed October 10, 2016. Salmon-Mack, Tamar. “Childhood.” Yivo Encyclopedia. Accessed March 20, 2015, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Childhood Sefer Zambrov: zikaron li-ḳehilat ha-ḳodesh she-hushmedah h. y. d., edited by Yom-Tow Lewinski (1899). Tel Aviv: ha-Irgunim shel yotsʾe ha-ʻir be-ʾArtsot ha-Berit Argenṭinah ṿe- Yiśraʾel, 1963. YIVO, Center for Jewish History, New York, NY.

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