The Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner collaboration Brundibar may be the kind of book you only allow into your life if you don't know what you're getting into, as happened with me. If that's the case, I apologize, because this is a book you should be unafraid to share with your children, and I will try to explain both why this may not seem to be the case and why it is true.

Brundibar is a story of bullying set in a context of poverty, illness, and death. Its protagonists, Pepicek and Aninku, are on a mission to get milk from the market to feed to their bedridden mother, on orders from her doctor. They have no money, so they decide to follow the lead of an organ-grinder, Brundibar, and sing for money. They can't be heard over Brundibar's hurdy-gurdy, get frustrated and harass him (in the form of bears) and are expelled from the town square. In a dark alley, after a nap underneath some Hebrew newspapers, stray animals help connect them with 300 schoolchildren, who march back to the square and perform as a full chorus, singing a melancholic song about how sad parents are when their children grow up. The townspeople fill the children's milk bucket with gold coins, the children are able to buy milk, and their mother recovers.



Tony Kushner (best known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the stage cycle Angels In America) wrote the book's text and Sendak's illustrations lend new depth to his preference for drawing young children in outsized coats and shoes. In our house, the most notable feature of the book is its unflinching portrayal of Brundibar as a person who detests children; such cultural referents are few and far between in picture books. That and the book's other darker elements - the mother's mortal peril, the harsh reality of a world of adults who will not part with their money simply to save a life, and the idea of young children banding together to ultimately run an evil man out of town - are what draw our four-year-old daughter Z to it, as to certain relatively safe tales from the Brothers Grimm, and keep it near the top of our reading list.

Heavy. But that's just the start.

There is a richness of German, Czech, and Hebrew references throughout the book that make it clear there is more going on here. Brundibar seems to combine physical characteristics of Mussolini, Napoleon, and Hitler; he is clearly an imperialist, and a stand-in for a slovenly military dictator. And there is something distressing as well as heartbreaking about the "growing-up" song that is the central musical passage of the book. The surface subject is that children age quickly and leave the nest, with their mothers crying after them; a center spread in the book following the song's lyrics shows a dozen-odd children rising on the backs of ravens while mothers clutch their remaining babies and weep into handkerchiefs. The image bothered me because the children were still - well, children, and there was something about that sea of crows that felt like... a cloud. Smoke. Soot.

An inscription on one of the city's background walls that tipped me off: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. I looked it up. The phrase, I learned, was inscribed over the entrances to many of the Nazi concentration camps. That is when, finally, I looked up "Brundibar."

Brundibar's origins are as an opera, written in 1938 by Jewish Czech composer Hans Krasa and librettist Adolf Hoffmeister in Prague. In 1941 they cast the children of a Prague orphanage for a production of the opera, but by the time it was first performed in 1942, Krasa and Hoffmeister had both been transported to Theresienstadt, or Terezin, a concentration camp in then-Czechoslovakia. By 1943, almost all of the children from that orphanage had been transferred to Thereseinstadt as well, with only Hoffmeister escaping Prague in time. Reunited, Krasa reconvened his production and reconstructed the opera from memory and a partial piano score, and the opera was performed 55 times in the concentration camp. Most of the production's participants, including Krasa, were later exterminated at Auschwitz.



It is difficult to describe the feeling of reading this book to our daughter Z the first time after I had learned all of this. I can say that it is not a kind of feeling you have very often.

The meaning of this book will evolve, for Z, over time. I am ready to tell her about its history when she is, but that will be a long time from now. For now, it is a book about bullies, and about how the weak (in this case, children) can overcome even the most frightening malevolence. In short, it is a fantasy that I hope with all my heart children like mine can make into a reality.

Brundibar himself has the last word in this book, even after being chased off by snapping dogs and whooping children. Scrawled on an invitation to a special performance of his own play presented to the Red Cross during their tour of the concentration camp, Brundibar offers an epilogue that makes me confident that reading such books to children is ground we must tread - carefully, but purposefully and unflinchingly.

They believe they've won the fight,
They believe I'm gone - not quite!
Nothing ever works out neatly -
Bullies don't give up completely.
One departs, the next appears,
and we shall meet again, my dears!
Though I go, I won't go far...
I'll be back. LOVE, Brundibar

Do you or your child have a favorite children's book about standing up to bullying, or about making the world a better place in general?

Thumbnail image from Terezin concentration camp by Colm Rice.