Beating Up The Bully.(Maurice Sendak's new children's book based on Jewish opera)

Czech composer Hans Krasa and librettist Adolf Hoffmeister had just completed a children's opera when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 and declared "Jewish music" unperformable. But their opera, "Brundibar," survived: four years later it was performed in a Jewish orphanage in Prague's ghetto. Then, after Krasa was transported to the "model" concentration camp at Terezin, he staged 55 performances with the camp's children. Eventually, almost everyone connected with the opera--including Krasa--died in Auschwitz. "Brundibar" was forgotten.

Until now. Award-winning children's-book illustrator Maurice Sendak, 75, known for his unvarnished treatment of controversial subjects, has just produced a children's book of the same name. (He also designed the sets for a one-time revival of the opera in Chicago.) Sendak's unlikely collaborator on both projects is his playwright-friend Tony Kushner, 47, who won the Pulitzer for his searing AIDS drama "Angels in America" and has been an ardent admirer of Sendak's since he was 4. Kushner was drawn to the project, he writes in his recent book "The Art of Maurice Sendak," because "I was immediately moved by ['Brundibar's'] beauty as a parable of collective action against injustice."

The appeal for Sendak was more personal. A Brooklyn-born child of Jewish immigrants who left Europe during World War I, Sendak grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. His mother constantly reminded him of how lucky he was to be alive; "Brundibar" is an attempt to put that guilt to rest. Sendak is making "his own elegy for the children who perished in the camps who were the same age he was," says Kushner.

Still, "Brundibar" is not a bleak Holocaust tale, and it bears only passing resemblance to Sendak's dark, beloved works like "Where the Wild Things Are" and "In the Night Kitchen." A sweet fable in which good triumphs over evil, ...