Sendak on Sendak in San Francisco

Last weekend I went to see the Maurice Sendak exhibit at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum. I am not aiming to review the exhibit here but to point out a few of the things that made me think. Like many people, I am a huge fan of Where the Wild Things Are and had read it cover to cover every night as a child. When I first encountered the book I read its Chinese translation, so it wasn't until many many years later when I saw the original English text and found it what Sendak's book really said.

But what the book "really said" isn't really what the text presents at all. A running theme in the exhibit was "The Other Story" - in the sense that Sendak's art told another story in addition to the text of the book. A lot of his "Other story" involved Sendak's Jewish heritage. Casey and I have talked at length about children's books and the ethnicity of characters in children's books. I never realized until I went to the exhibit that Sendak's Jewish heritage was such a huge part of his personal history and appeared in so many of his works.

Suffice it for me to say that you've got to go see this exhibit yourself. And about that movie? After spending the afternoon at the museum, I am wondering why it was necessary to make it into a movie or a New Yorker story at all.

p.s. If you are a fan of Sendak's art, check out the blog, Terrible Yellow Eyes, where other artists pay homage to him with their own work. One of my favorite pieces is this one called Best of All.

p.p.s. While I enjoyed the exhibit and the museum very much, I became ... disturbed and felt upset when I was entering the museum. We lined up to go through a metal detector and had to have our bags checked by some very nice security guards. Just like the airport, except the guards were much much nicer and you don't have to take off your shoes. The reason for this is obvious and one shouldn't be surprised that the Jewish Museum is the only museum in town requiring this security measure. But I found this upsetting because there were several young children in front of me and I thought, how do you explain this to kids?