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IN THE BRAINSTORMING STAGE OF BEGINNING TO PLAN THIS conference, a member of our planning committee mentioned the classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. As we discussed the book, images of the Wildthings immediately popped up in people's minds, and for the remainder of the meeting the group lit up — talking fast and excitedly about associations to the book and, more generally, about the theme of the scary and exciting things on the minds of children and adolescents in today's world.
Sendak's book was a catalyst for the theme of this conference. As a starting point for today's panel, it is interesting to note that the original illustration of the Wildthings were, in fact, inspired by Sendak's relatives, who occasionally visited from the old country when he was a young child in the early 1930s. He once recalled in a television interview that he remembers being scooped up by these aunts and uncles of his, who at the time appeared in his own words, “unkempt with hair unraveling from their noses” — he recalled fearing that they might gobble him up out of love and adoration.
As a small person at the time these relatives of his appeared extremely large and scary looking. He became aware at an early age of the voracious hunger which accompanies love.
Of course, it was not just his relatives who fed into the evolution of the Wildthings. Sendak was a sickly child whose parents were haunted by the fear he could die at any moment. In addition, as a child of a Jewish family in the 1920s and 30s, who to this day recalls feeling terrified by the kidnapping of the Lindburg baby, the so-called ‘crime of the century,’ the young Sendak was preoccupied with death and dying. If the kidnapping and eventual murder could happen to the gentile Lindburg baby, it could certainly happen to a Jew such as himself or his family.
For Sendak, mischievous Max (the main character featured in the story) like other kids is struggling w