Published: 13 June 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
How many Wild Things fans know the first book Sendak illustrated was called Good Shabbos, Everybody?
Born in 1928 in the US, Maurice Sendak saw himself, in a way, as a Holocaust survivor. He always remembered that he was alive by chance; that if his parents had not boarded the ship from Poland when they did, he would not be here.
An interview with Emma Brockesof The Guardian just a few months before his death captured his sarcastic wit: The reporter, arriving at his house in rural Connecticut, was greeted first by Sendak’s big German Shepherd named Herman (after Herman Melville).
When Sendak came out to meet her, he whispered: “He doesn’t know I’m Jewish”.
From careful reading between the lines of Sendak’s books, as well as from various interviews with the author, it appears that the melancholic atmosphere of his parents’ home, each of whom had left their family behind after a falling out, greatly influenced Sendak and his work.
“The wild things are my aunts, uncles and cousins who came from the old country, those few who got in before the gate closed, all on my mother’s side. These people didn’t speak English, only Yiddish. And they were unkempt. Their teeth were horrifying. They had hair unravelling out of their noses. And they’d pick you up and hug you and kiss you. ‘Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up’, they’d say. And we knew they would eat anything. Anything,” he said.
The first book he illustrated was called Good Shabbos, Everybody, published in 1951 by the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education.
Another Jewish-themed work written and illustrated by Sendak was Chicken Soup with Rice— a lovely book that teaches toddlers about the months of the year, and describes how chicken soup — the traditional Jewish dish known as a cure for almost everything — is suitable for every month.
