By Lian Benasuly
Celebrated illustrator and children's books author Maurice Sendak was a Jewish, gay, health-compromised man who grew up during the era of the Nazi Holocaust and bore the psychological imprint of it.
“Sendak grew up with a tangible familiarity with mortality and the need for young people and endangered minorities to fend for themselves,” Tulane University professor Golan Moskowitz told a UC Santa Barbara audience last week.
Moskowitz, an assistant professor of Jewish Studies was speaking at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s first research focus group talk of the year in its series “Global Childhood Ecology.”
Moskowitz wrote “Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context” in 2020, and he outlined Sendak’s life and career during the UCSB Zoom lecture.
Jews have persevered through thousands of years of persecution in the diaspora, he said. But the Holocaust specifically has deeply infiltrated the consciousness of the Jewish people, instilling a newfound sense of generational trauma.
“Brooklyn children of the 1930s were loved while at the same time inculcated with ghetto tribal fears and insecurity,” Moskowitz said.
Golan Moskowitz, a professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane university, spoke last week over Zoom at the IHC’s research group talk on Global Childhood Ecology. He focused on Maurice Sendak, pictured, who wrote and illustrated the children’s classic “Where the Wild Things Are.”
As a highly-sensitive and consistently sick child, Sendak spent most of his early years indoors. He absorbed traditions and stories from his family and was especially interested in the Yiddish trope dybbuk, which refers to a spirit that attaches itself to the living.
Moskowitz said Sendak’s mother believed he was possessed by a dybbuk as an infant. All of these factors instilled in the future author an incessant fear of both surviving and dying.
But, instead of holding onto his trauma privately, Sendak beautifully captured it in the dozens of books he illustrated and wrote from the 1960s up until the early 2010s—most famously "Where the Wild Things Are" in 1963.
For Sendak, creating captivating characters and compelling motifs helped him confront his feelings of anxiety, shame and innate urge to hide.
He illustrated these feelings in different realms—most notably the outside realm. In the outside realm, children would feel potential endangerment but also radical freedom, according to Moskowitz.
All of Sendak’s works revolved around one question: How do children survive?
Sendak didn’t refrain from using his own personal experiences and encounters in his books, Moskowitz added. He illustrated for author Isaac Bashevis Singer in the book “Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories,” to bring Jewish stories to the American public.
“His art functions, in this case, as a living memorial to his loved ones and their lost worlds,” Moskowitz said.
Although Maurice Sendak passed away in 2012, his works live on, allowing reader access to his perspective as a Jewish, gay, health-compromised man living in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Brooklyn, New York, said Moskowitz.
Lian Benasuly is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in communication and pursuing a minor in professional writing. She is a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.