“I Skipped My Adolescence”: Memory, Displacement, and Survival in Maurice Sendak’s American Child Dr. Golan Moskowitz (Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies) Description: This talk contextualizes the late Jewish American artist Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) within Yiddish-speaking immigrant life and American Holocaust memory through close readings of his writing, creative works, and several cultural examples from his youth in the 1930s and ’40s, including the Yiddish children’s periodical The Kinder Zhurnal. It mobilizes theory from trauma and memory studies to trace how Sendak channeled the marginalized sensibilities and emotional rhythms of a Holocaust-marked adolescence into creative battlegrounds for challenging wider American conceptions of childhood.
