Memorialize Maurice Sendak’s Life at Congregation Beth Elohim

Maurice Sendak, the author and illustrator of “Where the Wild Things Are” died due to complications from a stroke on Tuesday. He was 83.

The New York Times has more information on his life and work.  

Click here to listen to NPR’s Fresh Air, where they are rebroadcasting Sendak’s final interview. 

Like Max, the main character of “Where the Wild Things Are” which was published in 1963, it is appropriate to say that Sendak has now “…sailed off through night and day…to where the wild things are.”

Sendak was born in 1928 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. To honor his life, a life that bent the genre of children’s books with his raw, even at times grotesque, yet beautiful illustrations, on Eighth Avenue and Garfield Place is holding an event in his memory.

Wild Rumpus: Remembering Maurice Sendak, is taking place at 11 p.m., or “bedtime” as Senior Rabbi Andy Bachman put it, to celebrate the life and work of Sendak, a children’s book artist “with a dark side.”

CBE asks people who want to honor Sendak, who won the Caldecott Medal in 1964 by the American Library Association for “Where the Wild Things Are,” to bring books, food, drinks, instruments and, “if desired, a can of ‘chicken soup with rice’” to donate to City Harvest. 

Bachman told Patch that he is honoring a great man on Tuesday night:

"Maurice Sendak, a great son of Brooklyn, reminded us all that as children it was perfectly normal to fear the dark and allow our imaginations to provide light and comfort as we moved to other states of mind,” Bachman said. “His wicked sense of humor and honesty are already greatly missed and since we now live in a world where one can literally see books disappearing, we could not think of a more fitting celebration of his heroic career than to read his words into the first dark night of our grief without him."