By Cassiel Chadwick

Look to the wall: there hangs a simple, childish drawing of a man and his monkey, evidently meant for a children’s book. And what do they wear? Why, those look like Nazi uniforms! And they are, as this is the work of Maurice Bernard Sendak, who once said, “Evil will persist, and (children) have to know that, whether their parents like them to know it or not.”

The drawing, and others of the same artist, now hangs in the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, which is exhibiting Sendak’s illustrations through to Jan. 19, 2010. A man of many talents, Sendak is most widely known for writing and illustrating Where The Wild Things Are, a classic children’s story published in 1963 and winner of the 1964 Caldecott Medal for “Most Distinguished Picture Book of the Year.” Throughout his work pulsates the vibrancy of childhood, most prominently because he is not afraid to tell the truth.

“We can get away with things in children’s books that nobody in the adult world ever can because the assumption is that the audience is too innocent to pick it up,” Sendak once said. “And in truth they’re the only audience that does pick it up.”

True to his word, many of Sendak’s tales allude to the “Other Story”, the story hidden within the story, whether that be his tumultuous past as a Jew living in Brooklyn during the time of the Holocaust, or simply his life secrets.

A “Final drawing for Dear Mili,” depicting a young girl lost among a forest’s gnarled arms, is of the many illustrations displayed that distinctly evoke this Other Story. Illustrating it, Sendak sought to express, in a drawing, the photographs and films of concentration camps he had seen throughout life. The allusions are explicit to adults, innate to children: warped faces in the trees, starved legs among the roots, and the faint outline of an Auschwitz guard tower, hidden among night and fog.

Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, released on Oct. 16, 2009, aspired to this very quality, of telling the Other Story, and, according to Sendak himself, monumentally succeeded in its task.

“The film has an entire emotional, spiritual, visual life which is as valid as the book,” Sendak said in a featurette publicizing the film. “He’s done it like me whether he’s known it or not, but in a more brilliant, modern, fantastical way.”

Jonze, like Sendak, knew not to speak down to children. “(Sendak) said from the beginning that we had to make it dangerous to make something that respects kids and doesn’t talk down to them, or if not, it wasn’t worth doing,” he said later in the featurette.

Sophomore Zoe Rosenfeld thought it “beautiful.” “It was all of the visuals… the fact that they had these incredible, intricate costumes.”

Junior Daniel Moattar agreed in some respects, considering it “well-done, though very repetitive”, mirroring many critics’ sentiments about the film. “Where The Wild Things Are is a children’s book,” Moattar said. “There’s about, maybe, twenty minutes, half-an-hour, worth of material there to make a movie out of it, and it seems like at the beginning they captured what it is to be a kid… and then they kind of repeated that same sensation in, maybe, half-a-dozen scenes.”

Though many have reservations about Jonze’s interpretation, others are praising it very highly. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone Magazine said the film “honors the explosive feelings of childhood by creating a visual and emotional tour de force,” just the intention of Sendak’s original children’s book of ten-sentence length.

Considering Sendak’s work, like the film, brings to heart an utter wonder. The exhibit, located at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, just twenty minutes by tram and foot from Urban, feels like a step back to childhood. Visit the museum, and watch the film, to relive that strange, extraordinary beauty of old.

Link to video: Sendak talks about what illustrating means to him.

http://www.rosenbach.org/exhibitions/sendakonsendak/gallery_video1.html