GOLAN MOSKOWITZ BEFORE WILD THINGS: MAURICE SENDAK AND THE POSTWAR JEWISH AMERICAN CHILD AS QUEER INSIDER-OUTSIDER Abstract the former: stars appear in the open window, and tree This article analyzes the late Maurice Sendak’s (1928–2012) trunks emerge from the bedposts and doorframe. In his entry into the field of children’s picture books in the mid- first step toward becoming “King of the Wild Things,” twentieth century and his contribution to the affective shift Max, with eyes now closed, appears to be walking in children’s literature. It examines Sendak’s complex social forward, rather than looking angrily backward as on position and artistic development in the 1940s and 1950s, as the previous page. well as lesser-known illustrations by Sendak, including col- Preceding this most celebrated book, Sendak’s laborations with Ruth Krauss and with the artist’s brother, less studied work in the postwar years also drew Jack. These works began to respond to Sendak’s own childhood from his complex subject position as a queer son of as a queer son of Eastern European Yiddish-speaking immi- Yiddish-speaking immigrants mourning relatives lost grants. They also offered new potential mirrors for midcentury children—perhaps especially queer and otherwise marginal- in Europe. This earlier work conveys how Sendak, like ized children—as they navigated cultural gaps between home Max, internalized a sense of endangerment as a queer and the public sphere, as well as between personal orientations Jewish child who clashed with public American ideals and the social pressures of postwar America. of childhood in those years. Advancing an affective turn in children’s literature, Sendak’s early books comprise Much has been written on the late Maurice Sendak’s some of the first work in children’s media to connect (1928–2012) renowned picture book, Where the Wild American children with the emotional position of the Things Are (1963).1 With its vivid dramatization of insider-outsider—a position with queer resonance Max’s departure into solitary fantasy, it directly conveys for most children as uninitiated members of adult Sendak’s own childhood negotiation between private, society. He began this project, consciously or not, at a queer feelings and his acculturating Jewish immigrant time when Jewish American advocacy groups sought family’s aspirations and values. Like Sendak, Max is to promote a vision of Jews as “normal” White Ameri- a hybrid of an all-American child and a “wild thing.” cans, whose feelings were no different than those of Sendak draws Max standing on a pile of books, nailing “Dick” or “Jane.” By contrast, Sendak reached children his makeshift fort to the wall and pouncing irreverently by grappling with serious emotional predicaments in a cartoonlike wolf suit with an oversized hammer related to his own complex insider-outsider position. and fork extended in his grip. Max defies the preciously Central to his creative work is the vital need to survive crosshatched, almost Victorian aesthetic of the world social incoherence in a reality that fluctuates between that surrounds him and the propriety of his middle- secure and dangerous. As the artist asserted, children class household. His airborne motion interrupts the turn to picture books not only for optimism but also symmetrical architecture of the wood bannister and for self-preservation, in order to “confront the incom- horizontally striped wallpaper. Once punished and sent prehensible in their lives—bullies, school, and the to his room, fantasy turns dejected rage into private vagaries of the adult world.”2 Thus, even before Wild empowerment, as a single turn of the page sprouts new Things and the onset of the liberation movements of organic forms in a composition otherwise identical to the 1960s, Sendak addressed those children not yet 1 Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, and a HarperCollins, 1963). Billie M. Levy Travel and Research Grant. Portions of this article draw from my dissertation, which was 2 Sara Evans, “The Wild World of Maurice Sendak: A Visit with supported by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the the Most Celebrated Children’s Author of Our Time,” Parents, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, November 1992, 583, box 6, folder 67, Phillip Applebaum Collec- tion, American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 IMAGES Also available online—brill.com/ima DOI:10.1163/18718000-12340103 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:02:55PM via free access 86 Golan Moskowitz enfranchised by the dominant social order by engaging based throughout the postwar years. Sendak’s father, them through the universally affective queer prism of Philip, did not learn to read or write English until early childhood emotions. later in life; his mother, Sadie, never learned English. The present article positions the work of Sendak’s With the help of mentors and years of psychoanalysis, emergent career in the 1950s against the normalizing Sendak carved his way to professional distinction and project implicit in postwar American children’s media. personal actualization through an unyielding devotion As I will argue, Sendak’s early work draws connections to the craft of sublimating his childhood emotions into between his own subject position as a queer son of universal aesthetic experiences. As a mild-mannered Yiddish-speaking immigrants and the queer feelings teenager with a rich inner world, he made private of early childhood itself. It does so in ways that both illustrations for stories like Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy subverted prevalent ideals of social conformism and Prince” (1888) and Bret Harte’s The Luck of Roaring helped carve space for unusual and endangered subject Camp (1868). For the former, Sendak visualized the positions like his own. Speaking more substantially impossible love that Wilde narrates between a princely to the queer positions of insider-outsiders, the vivid statue and a male swallow whose selfless devotion to emotional content of the picture books that I examine the statue ends with a kiss on the lips and death at the draws in part from comic books as well as from the statue’s feet in the cold of winter. For the latter, Sendak social strangeness and sensitive emotional vitality of depicted Harte’s story of an abandoned, illegitimate early childhood. infant adopted by a band of lumberjacks.5 These war- time projects demonstrate the young artist’s primary Sendak in the Postwar Landscape question of focus: how do emerging individuals survive insufficient emotional guidance, physical and social In the 1946–1947 Jewish Book Annual, Fanny Goldstein, danger, and forbidden or impossible desires? By the a librarian at the Boston Public Library, proclaimed: early 1950s, his picture books drew from recollections “The 20th Century may well be termed ‘The Children’s of his own Depression-era childhood filtered through Century,’ for everywhere people are striving to create the perspective of a troubled coming of age. An avid for their children a more ideal environment and a reader of comics at his after-school job, he became more secure future.” Stressing the value of literature for familiar with the inner workings of that industry. children’s character-building, Goldstein insisted that Sendak’s responsibility at All-American Comics was children needed books to help them develop “normal a mundane one of adapting famous strips like Mutt emotions and responses” and to learn how to integrate and Jeff for the comic-book format by filling in back- into “the world at large.”3 Accordingly, children’s lit- ground details such as trees, houses, and puffs of dust erature portrayed Jews as seamlessly American in the (to indicate motion).6 He once recalled that he would postwar years, one example being Sydney Taylor’s All sometimes skip school and “take my stack of papers of a Kind Family (1951), which follows a well-mannered back home, shut the door, make [my parents] believe Jewish family on the Lower East Side. The book’s uni- I was doing my homework, and what I was doing was versal tone and wholesome American sensibility led it backgrounds for Scribbly, backgrounds for Mutt and to become the first Jewish book to be widely read by Jeff, backgrounds for Tipsy and Captain Stubbs.” Sen- non-Jewish children.4 dak’s future prospects at All-American Comics were At the time of Goldstein’s pronouncements, Sendak limited by his disinterest in the heterosexual fantasy was a closeted gay Brooklyn teenager in an immigrant in which women were drawn as “sexy” and men as family, with an after-school job at All-American Comics. valiant heroes.7 Most paid work for artists of the His family remained lower middle class and Brooklyn- time required adherence to a sexually and ethnically 3 Fanny Goldstein, “The Jewish Child in Bookland,” Jewish Book rollingstone.com/culture/news/maurice-sendak-king-of-all-wild Annual 5 (1946–1947): 85. -things-19761230?page=3. 4 Devra Ferst, “The Twisty History of Jewish Kid Lit,” Jewish Daily 6 Selma Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak (New York: Harry N. Forward, November 24, 2010, https://forward.com/articles/133388/ Abrams, 1980), 24–25. the-twisty-history-of-jewish-kid-lit/. 7 “Gary Groth Interviews Maurice Sendak,” Comics Journal 302 5 Quoted in Jonathan Cott, “Maurice Sendak, King of All (2013): 57. Wild Things,” Rolling Stone, December 30, 1976, http://www. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:02:55PM via free access Before Wild Things: Maurice Sendak and the Postwar Jewish American Child 87 conservative social order. Postwar goals of reviving a hide “in plain sight.” Children’s literature was a place unified national culture required a focus on the com- from which to be loud and passionate and emotion- mon denominators that united most Americans rather ally honest, even when the adult public deemed the than on the experiences of marginal outliers.