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Where the Wild Things Are—and aren’t

By Ron Kampeas · October 19, 2009

Rachel wrote a lovely post below on the Jewish roots of Maurice Sendak, his book, Where the Wild Things Are, and of its filmed version's director, Spike Jonze.

I was traveling Friday when it opened, so I caught more than my usual two (Washington Post and New York Times) reviews -- I ended up reading at least five, and these, positive and negative, melded into a curioisity I satisfied over the weekend with my sons.

My 11-year old, who has a prodigious memory and who hasn't read the book in ages, noticed that the sea monsters are missing. No one else seems to have noticed. (Okay, I'm shvitzing.)

More than that was missing, oddly enough for a movie that expands ten sentences into 101 minutes. Or, it was missing precisely because Sendak's original allusions and allegories are filled in by explanation.

It's too much, perhaps, to say that what was missing was the book's Jewishness, or Sendak's Jewishness, but I think the fears he conjures in the books have very much to do with being a first-half-of-the-20th century child of Jewish immigrants; the fears treated by Jonze are quite different, and more sinister in some ways.

This is not to say the film is not a success, although at first Jonze's substitutions -- or imaginings -- threaten to drag it into "Afternoon Special" territory, as one of the reviewers I read described it.

The anger the unseen mother expresses in the book, when she sends Max to bed without supper, was (reportedly) shocking at the time of its publication, 1963. It retains an element of shock, because it relates purely to Max's (wild) actions, or seems to. Max bears its brunt because he occasioned it.

In the movie, the mother, brought to vivid life by Catherine Keener is harried, divorced, trying to impress a boyfriend. Her anger doesn't have much to do with Max, which makes it less threatening -- and more mundane. Of course, she blows up! Don't we all? But this sacrifices the fundamental, frightening unfairness of the blow-up in the book.

The only significant argument between Sendak and Jonze and his collaborator, writer Dave Eggers, was over Max's journey to the land of the wild things. Sendak wanted to preserve the transition of Max's room into a jungle and then an ocean; Jonze and Eggers instead send Max, furious, flying into the suburban night to an industrial riverside, from whence he travels to the land of wild things.

And so Sendak's Max travels (I believe) to the Europe of the imagining of the child of refugees from that scorched earth. (Sendak's parents fled the privations of World War I Europe, and relations died in the Holocaust.). Sendak based the wild things on his relatives -- the ones who would pinch his cheeks and pronounce "I'll eat you up!"

This is the frightening conundrum for the children of refugees: The "other place," the place your family fled, is at once familiar and terrifying. The monsters who threatened to consume -- eat up -- your family are not too unlike your family. Not in moral terms, of course (what child grasps such moral distinctions?), but in how they sound, what they speak, what they eat, how they behave.

The fear, the fury spurring the mother of Sendak's Max, might be the helplessness a refugee feels in such a world not too long ago, familiar and terrifying and now unfamiliar and terrifying. Sendak's Max posesses the inclination of every refugee child faced with his parents' demons: I will defeat these monsters. I will tell them to BE STILL and they will, just as my adoring aunts and uncles heed my commands.

Jonze's Max deals with his own monsters: His own guilt, his collusion in that most American of tragedies, the break up of the modern American family. Two of the "wild things," Carol and DW (persuasively voiced, respectively, by James Gandolfini and Lauren Ambrose) substitute for his parents. Whereas in the prosaic suburban preamble we are (unfortunately) jolted out of Max's world and into an adult understanding of family strife, on the island of wild things we witness a divorcce as a child might: Occasioned by arguments that seem weirdly immaterial (who gets to step on whose head), and by the father figure's baffled jealousies, of Max, and in one hilarious instance, of DW's pair of bleating, breast-like owls -- that jealousy shared, guiltily, by Max.

Sendak's Max conquers his mother's fears, makes them tame; Jonze's Max flees his own fears, occasioned by his parents, especially his father. His wild things devolve into that most American of nightmares: A parent so unsettled by the inherent instability of a family cut off from a broader culture that he threatens to murder his son. (Spoiler alert! Oops.) This is the nightmare borne not of strangers in a distant Old Country, but of American intimates; it is the frontier just beyond the warehouse down past the cul de sac, the Wisconsin death trap.

There lies the integrity of Jonze's movie: Once it leaves suburban realities, it becomes an indictment of the shattered American social landscape.

Jonze's ending is melancholy; Max has failed. His fears live on, baying at the moon on a distant island.

Sendak's Max, by contrast, has triumphed.

Most telling is the very ending: Jonze's Max returns home to a meal kept hot for him because his mother has been worried sick by his disappearance.

Sendak's Max returns to a hot dinner brought up to his room. It's just there.

The mother of Sendak's Max doesn't need a motive, a reason, to feed her son. The monsters on the other side are reason enough.

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Jewish roots for ‘Where the Wild Things Are’

By Rachel Tepper · October 19, 2009

Warner Bros. Entertainment.  Max Records as Max and Lauren Ambrose as KW in Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are."

Causing a rumpus in the box office this week: Spike Jonze’s fanciful film adaption of the perennial childhood favorite, Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak.  The flick was officially the film of choice this weekend, pulling in a whopping $32.5 million.

Sendak’s story, well known for its poignant themes of family and the conflicts it engenders, has some interestingly Jewish roots.  Born in 1928 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Sendak modeled his “wild things” on aunts and uncles who visited his family’s Brooklyn home on weekends during his childhood.

In a 2005 interview with The Jewish Museum in Manhattan, Sendak said that his only relief from these family members, who pinched his cheeks and had voracious appetites, "was to examine those relatives critically and make note of every mole, every bloodshot eye, every hair curling out of every nostril, every blackened tooth."  Sendak even modeled one of the book’s famed phrases, “I’ll eat you up!” from a similar, albeit friendlier saying these relatives used to use: “You're so cute, I could eat you up.”

Two years earlier, Sendak told the Los Angeles Times that he originally intended to title the book ‘Where the Wild Horses Are,’ but ran into a brick wall when his drawings of horses left something to be desired.  He credits his editor for the present title, saying she hoped he “could at the very least draw 'a thing'!”  Those ‘things’ were his relatives, a truth he now feels comfortable revealing.  “They're all dead now, so I can tell people."

Where the Wild Things Are is not the only place Sendak’s heritage pops up.  Several of Sendak’s books borrow from his childhood in Brooklyn amongst Yiddish-speaking immigrant families.  The Sign on Rosie’s Door, one of several short stories which were eventually adapted into the Broadway musical Really Rosie, depicts a young girl who sings and dances on her New York City apartment building’s stoop.  Though Sendak’s original Rosie was Italian, the character’s most recognizable musical incarnation is a Jewish heroine who exclaims “Oy Vey!”

Several of Sendak’s darker works borrow from the Holocaust and the personal impact it had on his own family.  As a first generation American, many of Sendak’s relatives back in Europe fell victim to the Nazis during World War II, including his paternal grandfather, aunts, uncles and cousins.

His 1973 illustrations for The Juniper and Other Tales of Grimm reflect an interest in German culture and Sendak’s constant journey to emotionally process the Holocaust.  In the same vein, Sendak’s illustrations in Zlateh the Goat, a book based on several of Isaac Bashevis Singer's children’s stories, include portraits of Sendak's relatives lost in the Holocaust.

Most recently, Brundibar, published in 2003, is both an illustrated book and opera based on a 1938 children's opera composed Czech-Jewish composer Hans Krása.  The libretto was adapted by playwright Tony Kushner and Sendak created the illustrations for the book.  Sendak also designed the sets and costumes for the opera.  Brundibar follows two penniless children, Pepicek and Aninku, who set out in search of milk to feed their sick mother.  The hurdles they overcome in the process, including an encounter with the teenaged bully Brundibar, became symbolic of the resistance of inmates at Terezin concentration camp, where the opera was originally performed by young Jewish prisoners.

Sendak’s Jewish sensibility seems in keeping with that of Spike Jonze; the two worked closely on Where the Wild Things Are and reportedly got along swimmingly.  Jonze, born Adam Spiegel, has notoriously kept mum on his own Jewish background, but once revealed he is the great-great grandson of Joseph Spiegel, founder of the Spiegel catalogue at the turn of the 20th century and the son of a German rabbi.

If ever there were questions of Sendak’s place in the history of children’s literature, the success of Where the Wild Things Are in both the box office and the best seller lists seems to have dispelled them.

As far as the Jewish influences in Where the Wild Things Are go, one thing is clear.  Its wolf suit-wearing hero, the temperamental Max, is the ultimate vilde chaya.  All signs point to him wreaking havoc for many years to come.

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Bolton: U.S. should quit U.N. Human Rights Council

By Uriel Heilman · October 19, 2009

Last Friday's endorsement by the U.N. Human Rights Council of the Goldstone report on the Gaza war shows that it was a mistake for the United States to join the flawed council, writes John Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in The Wall Street Journal.

The U.N. General Assembly created the HRC on March 15, 2006, to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission, which had spent much of its final years concentrating on Israel and the U.S. rather than the world's real human rights violators. The Bush administration voted against establishing this body and declined to join it, believing, correctly, that it would not be an improvement over its predecessor. President Barack Obama changed course, and the U.S. won election to the HRC in May. Mr. Obama argued that engagement would be more effective than shunning the HRC and attempting to delegitimize it.

The Goldstone Report thus provides a stark test of Mr. Obama's analysis. Predictably, the administration blamed the report's underlying mandate and its stridently anti-Israel tilt on America's earlier absence from the HRC when the investigation was authorized and launched. Yet the new administration's diplomacy had no discernible impact on the HRC's disgraceful resolution...

Mr. Obama has now met the new HRC, same as the old HRC, thus producing a "teachable moment," a phrase he often uses. Quasi-religious faith in "engagement" and the U.N. has run into empirical reality. When the administration picks itself up off the ground, it should become more cognizant of that organization's moral and political limitations.

Although it will be hard for Mr. Obama to swallow, the logical response to Friday's debacle is to withdraw from and defund the HRC. Otherwise the Goldstone Report will merely be the beginning, next time perhaps with Washington as its unmistakable target.

Full column here.

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Goldstone’s motivation

By Uriel Heilman · October 19, 2009

Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist who led the U.N. Human Rights Council's fact-finding mission into the 2009 Gaza war, whose controversial report was endorsed by the council last week, explains his mission and motivation in an Op-Ed piece in the Jerusalem Post. The report, which cited evidence of Israeli and Hamas "war crimes," was denounced by Israel. Goldstone writes:

I begin with my own motivation, as a Jew who has supported Israel and its people all my life, for having agreed to head the Gaza mission. Over the past 20 years, I have investigated serious violations of international law in my own country, South Africa, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and the alleged fraud and theft by governments and political leaders in a number of countries in connection with the United Nations Iraq Oil for Food program. In all of these, allegations reached the highest political echelons. In every instance, I spoke out strongly in favor of full investigations and, where appropriate, criminal prosecutions. I have spoken out over the years on behalf of the International Bar Association against human rights violations in many countries, including Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Iran, Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

I would have been acting against those principles and my own convictions and conscience if I had refused a request from the United Nations to investigate serious allegations of war crimes against both Israel and Hamas in the context of Operation Cast Lead.

AS A Jew, I felt a greater and not a lesser obligation to do so. It is well documented that as a condition of my participation I insisted upon and received an evenhanded mandate to investigate all sides and that is what we sought to do.

I sincerely believed that because of my own record and the terms of the mission's mandate we would receive the cooperation of the Israeli government. Its refusal to cooperate was a grave error. My plea for cooperation was repeated before and during the investigation and it sits, plain as day, in the appendices of the Gaza report for those who actually bother to read it. Our mission obviously could only consider and report on what it saw, heard and read. If the government of Israel failed to bring facts and analyses to our attention, we cannot fairly be blamed for the consequences. Those who feel that our report failed to give adequate attention to specific incidents or issues should be asking the Israeli government why it failed to argue its cause.

Israel missed a golden opportunity to actually have a fair hearing from a UN-sponsored inquiry. Of course, I was aware of and have frequently spoken out against the unfair and exceptional treatment of Israel by the UN and especially by the Human Rights Council.

I did so again last week. Israel could have seized the opportunity provided by the even-handed mandate of our mission and used it as a precedent for a new direction by the United Nations in the Middle East. Instead, we were shut out.

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