“We were the ‘chosen people,’ chosen to be killed?” Maurice Sendak told the New York Times in 2008. Chosen to be killed. This criticism encapsulates Sendak’s post-Holocaust milieu and exemplifies his darkly irreverent—and quintessentially Jewish—voice.
Sendak, who died this week at age 83, lived out core paradoxes of American Jewish identity. A son of immigrants in Brooklyn, he longed for Manhattan, calling the shining spires of the city “America.” He held religiosity at arm’s length but based the images of his Wild Things on his Jewish relatives, the ones who threatened to pinch his cheeks and consume him with their love and their desperate longing for continuity on the shores of this new world: “We’ll eat you up!”
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