Surviving a Queer Boyhood: Gendered Explorations of Post-Holocaust Subjectivity in Maurice Sendak and Beyond
Jan. 21, 2016
By Golan Moskowitz
Editor’s note: Golan Moskowitz spoke on his blog topic Jan. 26 at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.
One of the interesting concerns shared by the fields of Jewish studies and gender studies is about how private life (whether personal or collective) becomes vulnerable to the social and political forces of history and the larger public. This reality has often caused the disempowered and the marginal (including people of color; disabled, GLBTQA, and uneducated people; women, and children) to suffer, sometimes without even having access to the tools needed to understand their own suffering.
Expansive as it appears, history is personal; and, like Pierre Bourdieu argued, it is also physical. We carry history with us in our bodies. It is the embedded material of our grandparents' heart-wrenching stories, the posture we inherit from a teacher's example, the genetic lottery we win or lose in relation to a biased social world.
Studying history and culture, it is impossible to ignore the story of one’s own body and how that story infuses perception. In my case: long before I was a doctoral student analyzing the subjectivity and creative work of Maurice Sendak, I was a sensitive, reserved, gender-alienated, Jewish, gay boy (if my gay adult self can claim my younger self in that way), growing up in suburban 1990s America and intensely invested in family memory. Though today, you may perceive me at face value through my privilege as a white, able-bodied, and educated man, my story concerns the emotional murkiness of growing up somewhat obscure to myself.
Being a serious, queer boy, privately more invested in fashion design, "girls’ toys," and family stories than in sports or in most of my peers, it was challenging to find appropriate role models, people to genuinely and safely emulate without losing touch with my own voice and desires. Struggling to belong, I absorbed the emotionally charged memories of my young Israeli immigrant mother and of my maternal grandmother, a child Holocaust survivor. They connected me to a heritage of enduring vulnerability, of persisting through isolation, invisibility, even through mortal danger. As we all do, I continue to carry my history inside of me — and, with it, the weight and creativity it has inspired in relation to my own life circumstances.
When I enrolled in Brandeis' joint MA program in Near Eastern & Judaic Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies, I was a visual artist seeking more academic ground on which to rest the hand-drawn graphic memoir I was creating about navigating and surviving the seriousness and emotional alienation of my childhood. With this project on hold, I came to Brandeis to strengthen my foundation in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and gender theory.
Grounded in social scientific studies, literature, and gender and literary theory, my interview-based MA thesis on grandsons of Holocaust survivors explored post-Holocaust subjectivity through a male-gendered lens and investigated the intersections between a vulnerable, but empowering heritage and expectations of contemporary masculinity. Heritage, though understood as traditional and sometimes as constraining or obsolete, is a dynamic force, I found, as it interacts, grows, and changes in its relationship with lived experience and circumstance in the now.
Beginning my PhD in 2012, my dissertation topic emerged that year as the public mourned the passing away of Maurice Sendak. The beloved Jewish, American, and gay artist had revolutionized children's publishing with his groundbreaking depictions of children misbehaving and grappling with their own stormy emotional worlds through fantasy, bravery, and psychological resourcefulness. Like the interviewees and artists featured in my thesis, Sendak speaks to me as a person marked by internalized proximity to the Holocaust (many of Sendak’s relatives were killed in the camps during his Brooklyn youth, and he was repeatedly reminded by his mother that, unlike his murdered cousins, he should be grateful, and he should behave).
What appeals to me most about this towering figure is how, through inwardness and external observation, he managed to direct the challenges of his own particular experience of childhood alienation into a timeless creative vision that enriches the larger human world.
In his non-idealized depictions of childhood, we see children as animal in their raw, but adaptive impulses; as human in their emotional need and capacity for fantasy and psychological negotiation; and as real in their unapologetically stumpy and ethnic appearances (after all, not all children look as sunny, innocent, and Anglican as Dick and Jane). Sendak accomplished this in part by maintaining his emotional memory of a painful childhood. His internalized boyhood alienation was at least twofold: a sense of otherness from the American mainstream (as part of an immigrant Jewish family in a tight-knit ethnic neighborhood, agonizing over their Holocaust losses), as well as shame around what would have been understood as his budding homosexuality and his queer confinement indoors, spent making art projects with his siblings and listening to his mother and grandmother tell stories in the kitchen.
Unlike the angelic, mild-mannered kids of the didactic picture books that dominated children’s publishing until the 1960s, the boy Sendak (b. 1928) was stocky and temperamental, a Jewish Brooklyn kid with fragile health whom other kids called "sissy," and the youngest in a family colored by Yiddish talk of the Old World and of the traumatic losses of relatives in the Holocaust. An unathletic, sensitive, and socially excluded child, the artist channeled himself into the sensations and emotions of his interior world, as well as steadfastly observed the behaviors and appearances of others, taking note of how resilient, wild, and human children really were, despite the depictions of the time.
He drew his own pictures at home and, as a teenager, made his own private illustrations for stories like Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince," a tale about tragic but transcendent male-male love between an unhappy statue and a swallow. Spending much of his adulthood living in Manhattan apartments, including at an address just blocks away from the 1969 Stonewall Riots at the time of their occurrence, Sendak found expression for a gay identity, which, out of shame, he never shared with his Jewish immigrant parents and which he also hid from the public until just four years before passing away.
Familiar with the multifaceted vulnerability of a young person whose desires, ethnic markings, inexperience, and physical limitations might seriously endanger him, Sendak repeatedly emphasized that his primary concern as an artist was the question of how children survive. He is a role model for channeling the alienation of a multilayered and sometimes convoluted subject position into concise, direct, and beautiful truths that continue to astound and nourish us.
Golan Moskowitz, a doctoral student in Near Eastern & Judaic Studies at Brandeis, is assistant to the executive director at the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry. He is a past winner of the HBI Student Research Award.