Reviewed by: Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context by Golan Y. Moskowitz Gregg Drinkwater Golan Y. Moskowitz. Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 298 pp. Since the 1990s, Jewish studies scholars have increasingly applied queer theory to the study of Jewish life and culture, and in more recent decades, have [End Page 173] begun exploring the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Jews. In Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context, Golan Y. Moskowitz simultaneously draws meaning from the life and work of Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), a gay Jewish man, while deploying queer theory to re-imagine standard narratives of twentieth-century Jewish history; the history of childhood; the purpose of children's literature; and the processes of socialization. Writing as a cultural historian and literary scholar, Moskowitz touches on such subjects as the Holocaust, gay male social worlds, the AIDS crisis, the Great Depression, the children's book industry, narratives of Jewish acculturation, and the social liberation movements of the post–World War II decades. In this engaging study of the famed children's book author, Moskowitz argues that Sendak's Jewish and queer identities deeply informed his creative work. Moskowitz builds on earlier scholars who linked Jewishness and queerness as categories that have long troubled normative boundaries and binaries. Moskowitz adds two new dimensions to these comparisons and linkages. He brings to Jewish studies an emerging understanding from literary scholars and queer theory of childhood as inherently "queer," as well as a vision of the families of acculturating immigrants—particularly Jews—as occupying unstable and liminal statuses that can be productively analyzed using insights from queer theory. Seeing childhood and migration narratives as two categories that exceed societal efforts to maintain clear and normative boundaries, Moskowitz applies queer theory to deepen our understanding of both. Moskowitz's exploration of Sendak's childhood is especially rich, providing a portrait of a boy who grew up immersed in his parents' eastern European Jewish cultural ghetto (at times sparking shame for Sendak), while also drawn to such icons of American popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s as comic books, Laurel & Hardy, Mickey Mouse, and popular movies of the era. Moskowitz describes a child torn between the conflicting norms of these two realms, acting as a bridge or familial mediator between the private space of his Yiddish-speaking home and the broader public sphere. Elaborating on this liminal, or interstitial position, Moskowitz turns to the concept of "trans-memory" (64), a kind of secondhand memory that Sendak experienced through the weight of the emotional and psychological burdens of his parents, rooted in Yiddish and eastern European culture, while Sendak himself was being simultaneously pulled toward the language and culture of America. From this, Sendak learned key lessons about childhood as performative, in which children, chameleon-like, learn to perform whatever role their parents or caretakers expect of them, while masking their own private self-awareness and "intensely felt and imagined experiences" (51) that belong to them, alone (a lesson reenforced for Sendak by The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy's journey remains a private experience, dismissed by those around her in post-Oz Kansas). This conception of childhood as one in which children, in order to secure the care they need for survival, must fend for themselves, and, at times, mask their realities or surrender themselves to the emotional needs of others, informed much of Sendak's work. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Sendak entered his adolescent years during World War II and the Holocaust, a tragedy that profoundly shaped the emotional [End Page 174] register of his home. Sendak learned of the violence and danger facing relatives in Europe and at an early age became fully aware of the precarity of life, even for young children, a topic from which children in culturally mainstream American families might otherwise have been shielded. The compounded realities of migration (and the attendant difficulties of acculturating into American society), the collective trauma of the legacies of European antisemitism, and the immediate tragedy of the Holocaust separated Sendak's household from other American homes. In Sendak's own words...
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Jun 29, 2024
Johannes Due Enstad 
Open Access
