<p>Orchestramom, what wonderful memories. He talked about the melancholia with Terry Gross. Both his mother and father were Polish Jews who came to America way before the war. Almost every single one of his relatives died in the Holocaust when he was young, and he said that it has been the palette that colored the rest of his life. His book Bumble-Ardy, is about him dealing with this in his Maurice Sendak way.</p>
<p>He appeared to have a very deep understanding of children. He said he stopped signing books and meeting children because many didn’t connect the old man with THEIR book, and it was terrible to watch parents take the child’s favorite book out of their hands, give it to the old man, and have him write in it, when they have always been told that they shouldn’t write in a book. It was quite a wry and funny story.</p>