Philip Sendak

Philip Sendak (born September 15, 1894 in Zambrów , † June 1970 in Englishtown , Monmouth County , New Jersey ) was an American businessman. He became known as a children's book author through the posthumous book In Grandpa's House , which was illustrated by his son Maurice Sendak .

Life

Philip Sendak was born in a shtetl in Tsarist Russia (now Poland ) to a Jewish family. Sendak's father was a timber trader who owned a shop. By the humble standards of the Jewish community, his family was considered wealthy. Philip had a love affair with a girl who was sent to America by her parents . Philip followed her, also emigrating to New York in 1913 . When he arrived she was already married to another man. In 1915 he married Sarah (Sadie) Schindler, who came from a Jewish family in Poland and recently immigrated. Sendak worked as a tailor in New York. In 1919 they had their first child, Natalie (Stacie Nettie), followed by Jack in 1923 and their third child Maurice in 1928 . Philip Sendak was a tailor and, together with three partners, ran a small tailoring business that had to close in the late 1920s as a result of the economic depression . Philip Sendak loved to tell stories. Both Maurice and Jack, who both became well-known children's book authors, attributed part of their talents to this early formation.

Philip Sendak's Polish homeland fell to the Soviet Union as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact . After the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Sendak's father and all other relatives who did not emigrate in time were murdered by Germans and their helpers in the Holocaust . Sendak received this news in a letter in late 1941.

Sendak's wife Sadie died in 1968. To cheer up the grieving widower and capture his stories, Maurice Sendak got his 75-year-old father to write down his stories the following year. Philip Sendak did this in Yiddish . He died in 1970. Fifteen years later, his stories appeared under the title In Grandpa's House, with illustrations by his son Maurice. The work, which is partly autobiographical and partly depicts the adventures of a child protagonist named David, was received largely positively by the critics. The New York Times reviewer saw the stories as a message from an "enchanted past." Anyone reading the works of Philip and Maurice Sendak side by side will witness a “loving dialogue” with each other and with the reader. In Publishers Weekly , the Autobiography and the David Stories are seen as two stories that “fit seamlessly into a parable” that are full of meaning for Jews and non-Jews as well as children and adults. The reviewer in the School Library Journal thought the book was a “thought-provoking piece of shtetl philosophy,” but it was more suitable for adults with a connection to the “ Old World ” than for modern American children. At Grandpa's House was translated into German and was awarded the IRA / CBC Children's Choice Book Award from the Children's Book Council / International Reading Association.

plant

• At Grandpa's House , with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, translated from Yiddish by Seymour Barofsky. Harper & Row, New York 1985.
  • In grandfather's house , with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, translated from the American by Barbara Henninges . Diogenes, Zurich 1987, ISBN 3-257-00686-1 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Selma G. Lanes : The Art of Maurice Sendak. Abrams, New York 1993, pp. 9-16.
2. ^ Natalie Nesselbaum, née Sendak (1919-2004) In: New York Times, December 8, 2004, Deaths Department .
3. ↑ Jack Sendak (1923–1995), see Wolfgang Saxon: Jack Sendak, 71, a Writer Of Surrealist Books for Children . In: New York Times, February 4, 1995.
4. ^ Jill P. May: Envisioning the Jewish Community in Children's Literature: Maurice Sendak and Isaac Singer . In: "The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association", Vol. 33, No. 3 / Vol. 34, No. 1 (Autumn 2000 - Winter 2001), pp. 137-151.
5. ^ Paul Cowan: Where the Wild Things Came From . In: "New York Times" November 10, 1985.
6. ↑ Maurice Sendak: In Grandpa's House . Review in “Publishers Weekly”, 1985.
7. ↑ Susan Scheps: Maurice Sendak: In Grandpa's House . Review in "School Library Journal".
8. ↑ In Grandpa's House  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   on the Harper Collins website. (Retrieved September 20, 2010.)