![]() Personally, I prefer Night Kitchen to Wild Things because it’s a sweeter book and when read aloud, is more playful and lyrical to the ear. Perhaps best known for his book, Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak was one of the first to tackle many long-held taboos of children’s literature, in this case, the dark side of kids’ emotions. ![]() He also admits that much of his work is autobiographical. Oh yeah, I missed the oven reference too.īorn in Brooklyn in 1928 to Polish Jewish immigrant parents, Sendak describes his American childhood as one very much shaped by the Holocaust. Its cheery bakers wear Hitleresque mustaches and try to stuff a young boy named Mickey into an oven.” ![]() ![]() Instead, I found out while reading an essay in The New York Times Book Review this weekend that said the “dream world Sendak concocted in ‘In the Night Kitchen’ (1970) was inspired by the Holocaust of all ghoulish things. If Maurice Sendak hadn’t drawn the bakers three in his book, In the Night Kitchen, as Oliver Hardy-esque characters with bulbous noses and rotund bellies, I might not have missed his Holocaust reference in the Hitlerstaches they’re sporting. ![]()
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