The Jewish Museum (New York, NY, USA) has unveiled a new exhibit entitled An Artist Remembers: Hanukkah Lamps Selected by Maurice Sendak. Award winning children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak is best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are which brought him international acclaim and was awarded the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1964. He was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York  to Polish Jewish immigrants and most his extended family was killed in the Holocaust. When asked by the The Jewish Museum to “rummage through its collection and choose menorahs for a Hanukkah exhibit”  Sendak said he selected menorahs, all from the 18th to the 20th centuries, because their simplicity evoked the Holocaust.

Sendak’s work  is characterized by a push and pull between beauty and sorrow, light and darkness. His art is triggered by memories and is also their repository. The world he creates is both dangerous and healing, as he tries to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust, in which many members of his family perished.

When going through the museum’s collection, the sheer number and variety of lamps struck a nerve, underscoring Sendak’s deep, lifelong sense of loss at the destruction of the prewar world of his Eastern European Jewish parents. Having movingly evoked that world in his drawings for Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (1966) (image on right) and In Grandpa’s House (1985), he surprised himself by mostly avoiding its rich visual language when choosing lamps for this presentation. “I stayed away from everything elaborate. I kept looking for very plain, square ones, very severe looking,” he explained. “Their very simplicity reminded me of the Holocaust. And I thought it was inappropriate for me to be thinking of elaboration.”

The lamps Sendak finds most compelling and poignant are those that “go right to the heart,” whose “beauty is contained.” Yet his sense of humor is never far from the surface: as he made his choices he often free-associated, whimsically recalling old movies and Catskills family vacations. Above all, he is guided by his sensibility as an artist and author. He is drawn to simplicity of line, to a design “subservient to the basic idea of the piece,” and responds to the depth of emotion that emanates from a work itself or from the stories behind it. Concerned lest the past be forgotten, he hopes that young visitors to this exhibition will keep alive the memory of a vanished world.

The exhibition will take place until January 29, 2012 (more details can be found here) and the image gallery can be seen here.

I only came across The Christmas Menorahs: How a Town Fought Hate recently but this true story has lost none of its power or, sadly, its relevance since 1993, when the events it tells about took place in the town of Billings in Montana, US. Written by Janice Cohn, who spoke to many of the people involved first-hand, and beautifully illustrated by Bill Farnsworth, The Christmas Menorahs was published two years later (by Albert Whitman). It’s an inspiring book to share with older children (it’s aimed at 9-12 year olds) and is bound to provoke discussion.

It was the third night of Hannukkah and young Isaac Schnitzer was doing his homework when there was a loud crash in his bedroom: someone had thrown a rock through the window at the menorah that had been shining out into the darkness.

Isaac was stunned when he found out that rock had been thrown because he was Jewish, one incident in a spate of racist and anti-semitic attacks in the town. At this point, this crime could simply have become another statistic, with Isaac and his family picking up the pieces and carrying on. This did indeed happen: Isaac’s parents talked to him about not allowing bullies to stop them celebrating their holiday and that is what they resolved to do. However, this event was also the catalyst for a community-wide reaction to the intolerance. A town meeting was held and a woman called Margaret MacDonald, inspired by the King of Denmark and others wearing the yellow star of David during the second world war so that the Nazis would not be able to distinguish who was Jewish quite so easily, suggested that everyone put a menorah in their window. (more…)