I’ve been meaning to give Brundibar a good look since it was published. A new Maurice Sendak book is an event, and a reason for hope for the world, and this book being a collaboration with Tony Kushner to retell the story from the opera from Terezin promised to be deeply beautiful and disturbing. I nearly shelled out hardcover price to buy the thing when it came out, but didn’t, and then (unsurprisingly) didn’t come across it in the library. Well, I did come across it in a library at last, and it’s ... disappointing. It’s good, but it doesn’t have the power that We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy has.
Perhaps, though, the problem is the expectations as much as the thing itself. This book is the same size as a children’s book, and it has brightly colored pictures, and all that, but I never thought of it as a children’s book by any means, and so I was ready to be shocked as an adult, not as a child. And it’s harder to shock me as an adult. I don’t know if I would have had such a response to Jack and Guy if I hadn’t read it as a children’s book. I was ... what, receptive? susceptible? I don’t know. I mean, I was an adult when I read it, but I got it from the children’s book shelf, and looked at it with the thought that I would read it to my Perfect Non-Reader (I didn’t). After two years of thinking about Brundibar as a book for Me, rather than for my Perfect Non-Reader, my frame of mind was very different. I wonder if, as we become more familiar with comics for adults, things like Brundibar and Maus lose a little of their power to get under our skin.
The best thing in the book, though, is the last page (not the endpapers, which are nice enough, but the last page before that). After a triumphant and richly colored double-page of the children celebrating their bravery, their triumph, and the eventual triumph of the good over the wicked everywhere, the next page is a dirt-colored palimpsest, with Brundibar’s mocking I’ll-be-back verses scrawled in black crayon over what on examination proves to be an invitation from the “Council of Elders” to a performance of the opera Brundibar in the West Building 3 auditorium of Terezin, 7:15 pm 15th July 1944, followed by a swing orchestra in the terrace room. Admission only with ticket.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.