With its ornery protagonist and nightmarish monsters, Where the Wild Things Are has become a much-beloved American children’s book, perhaps because it is so different from typical fare. Its author, Maurice Sendak, once commented that he based the monsters on his foreign-seeming Jewish immigrant relatives. He also illustrated multiple books with more explicitly Jewish themes, as Yael Ingel relates:
Maurice was born in 1928, the youngest of three children, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents. His mother Sarah didn’t speak a word of English when she arrived in the United States on her own at the age of sixteen in the early 1920s, following a terrible quarrel with her mother. His father Philip also arrived alone from Poland.
The first book he illustrated was called Good Shabbos, Everybody, published in 1951 by the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education. . . . His parents did not particularly appreciate his work and were even disappointed when he took a job as an illustrator instead of going to university. However, a momentous reconciliation occurred when Sendak was asked to illustrate the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize-winning writer. This was something his parents could be proud of.
Before starting work on the illustrations for [Singer’s] Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, Maurice pulled out his parents’ family photo albums from Poland. Inside he found pictures of his father standing next to his tall handsome brothers and women with long hair adorned with flowers. He went through all the albums, selecting some of his father’s relatives and some of his mother’s, and drew them with great precision. His parents burst into tears when they saw the drawings and recognized their relatives. Maurice cried with them.
Read more on The Librarians: https://blog.nli.org.il/en/maurice_sendak/