Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Moskowitz (review)

Several times in his later life, the renowned illustrator and author Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) would claim that the highest compliment his work ever received was when a child to whom he had sent an autographed drawing had loved it so much that he actually ate it, putting into literal practice the cry of the Wild Things in Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (1963) that "we'll eat you up—we love you so!" This anecdote encapsulates the blurriness between life and art, between constructive and destructive wildness, and between emotion and action that characterized the work of Maurice Sendak, lauded as "the most important children's book artist of the 20th century" (per his obituary in The New York Times). In Moskowitz's hands, this story serves as a demonstration of one of Sendak's recurring themes: the fantasy of fusion, which Moskowitz explains as "the emotional and physical mergers that small children feel with their intimate caretakers, [and] the sometimes comical anxiety that accompanies the idea that this merger might lead to one party consuming the other" (54–56).

Moskowitz's wonderfully-crafted and sensitive treatment engages with Sendak's work not only to draw out the concerns that animated it, but to show how those concerns emerged out of the context of Sendak's lived experience as a queer, Jewish, American-born child of Ashkenazi immigrants. This is neither a biography of Sendak nor a literary or art-historical reading of his books, but a study that unites Sendak himself with his books and art to excavate what he taught us and what he can still teach us. Urging us to consider Sendak with historical empathy, Moskowitz reminds his readers that "art and life are strands in a single thread. … The circumstances of Sendak's life affected his art, and making art repeatedly interacted with his life" (20). This methodology prompts Moskowitz to dive into a wide array of sources to tie those strands together, including not only Sendak's published books but also his sketches and typescripts; his correspondence and interviews; and conversations with Sendak's relatives, friends, and colleagues. Weaving anecdotes, quotations, and personal reflections into his analysis of Sendak's published and unpublished work, Moskowitz insists on animating Sendak in his full humanity and complexity.

The book begins by laying out the different lenses through which Sendak and his work can be examined: as a leader in a new kind of children's literature; as a window into American Jewish life at midcentury; and as a representative of a queer sensibility that may not have expressed itself explicitly but which seeped into every story and drawing. Moskowitz argues that the confluence of Sendak's identities and experiences led him to use picture books as a tool of emotional education, to help readers (children and adults alike!) understand, articulate, and navigate the full range of inner feelings, all the way to what might have been considered emotional excess: passion, rage, terror, triumph.

Moskowitz then presents five thematic studies, which are loosely linked to the chronology of Sendak's biography but which pull examples from throughout his life and career. In the first two chapters, Moskowitz situates Sendak's own childhood and adolescence in interwar Brooklyn, the son of working-class, Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Poland, and explores the tensions between the rosy innocence of popular depictions of childhood and the "gritty realities" of Sendak's upbringing. Moskowitz shows how Sendak's understanding of childhood as a time of roughness and outsiderness, but also "valuable exposure to emotional honesty" (60), was shaped both by the events and popular culture of his childhood and by the social contexts of his family and neighborhood, like his parents' and grandmother's mayselekh ("little stories"), which created an imagined Old World full of fantasy, mythology, and the terror of mortality.

The young Sendak's sense of constant danger, the tumultuous fantasy of fusion...