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Uri Shulevitz, 89, Acclaimed Children’s Book Author and Illustrator, Dies
Uri Shulevitz, a Polish-born children’s book author and illustrator who survived a harrowing childhood traversing Europe to escape the Nazis and wove those experiences into arresting works like “How I Learned Geography” and the graphic novel “Chance: Escape from the Holocaust,” died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. He was 89.
His death, in a hospital, was from complications of the flu and pneumonia, said his wife, Paula S. Brown, his only survivor.
Mr. Shulevitz, who had settled in New York City, published more than 40 books, some of them collaborations with other authors. In 1969, he won a Caldecott Medal, the annual award recognizing the most distinguished children’s picture book published in the United States, for his Bruegel-esque illustrations for Arthur Ransome’s “The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship,” a retelling of an Eastern European folk tale.
He earned Caldecott Honors, designating runner-up status, for three of his own books, including “The Treasure” (1979), about an old man’s search for a hidden treasure, with illustrations that “glow with what might well be taken for celestial light,” Kirkus Reviews noted, and “Snow” (1998), the story of a boy who seemingly wills a snowstorm into existence to the surprise of skeptical adults.
His other Honors designation came for “How I Learned Geography” (2008), which drew from his experiences as a boy fleeing his family’s home in Warsaw after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. “I vividly remember the streets caving in, the buildings burning, and a bomb falling into the stairwell of our apartment building one day when I was home,” he recalled in a 1971 interview.
A grueling journey led the family to what is now Kazakhstan, then a Soviet republic. “Night after night, I went to bed hungry,” he said in a 2020 interview with Kirkus. “And when I say hungry, I don’t mean that there was kind of a meager supper — there was nothing, absolutely nothing.”
The young protagonist in “Geography” embarks on a similar odyssey, finding safety from war, if little else, in the “far, far east.” The boy is outraged when his father returns from a bazaar with a giant, brilliantly colored map instead of bread. But soon he is transfixed, imagining travel to far-flung places of beauty and abundance as a way to escape his dirt-floor dwelling.
“Chance” (2020), intended for middle-school readers, chronicles Mr. Shulevitz’s peripatetic years between the ages of 4 and 14, when he sought solace in drawing and his mother’s stories to distract himself from the hardships he knew. The title, he said, referred to the idea that living or dying in the war often amounted purely to chance, he told Publishers Weekly in 2020: “No one knew what would happen.”
Despite the Nazi shadow looming over his childhood, Mr. Shulevitz made it clear that he was a wartime refugee, not a Holocaust survivor. “We weren’t either in the ghetto or in the concentration camps,” he told Kirkus.
But “none of our family in Poland survived,” he added. And if his immediate family hadn’t escaped, he said, “we would have been just as they were.”
Uri Shulevitz, an only child, was born on Feb. 27, 1935, in Warsaw. His father painted signs and designed theatrical sets and costumes; his mother enjoyed numerous artistic hobbies. Uri was drawing by the time he was 3, before the conflagration of World War II.
After the war ended, the family returned west, landing in a displaced persons camp in Germany before settling in Paris in 1947. Two years later, they moved to Israel during its second year as a nation. At 15, Uri became the youngest artist represented in a group drawing exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He continued working toward an art career as a student at the Institute for Israeli Art and by studying privately with the modernist painter Yehezkel Streichman.
At 24, after a mandatory stint in the Israeli military and a year toiling on a kibbutz near the Dead Sea, he moved to New York. There, he studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and made ends meet by doing illustrations for Hebrew children’s books.
He published his first children’s book, “The Moon in My Room,” in 1963, telling the story of a boy who imagines an entire world — complete with sun, moon, stars and flowers — in his bedroom. It was a success, and set the course for his career.
After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Mr. Shulevitz published “The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela: Through Three Continents in the Twelfth Century” (2005), about a medieval Jewish traveler who embarks on a 14-year journey from his hometown in Spain to see the distant lands of the Bible.
While many of Mr. Shulevitz’s books were short, with minimal text, he pushed back against the idea that a 30-something-page book was easy to churn out. “Chance,” he once said, took four years to finish.
“We all know how difficult it is to say something concisely, whereas to use many words is much easier,” he said in a 1986 interview with The Horn Book Magazine, which is devoted to children’s and young adult literature. “There were some well-known authors who have written some very successful books for adults,” he added, “and then when they tried writing something which they thought was a picture book, they did not succeed.”
A painter as well as an illustrator, he exhibited his work in numerous galleries and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Jewish Museum in New York.
The New York Times Book Review ranked “Chance” among the 25 best children’s books of 2020, and it cited Mr. Shulevitz in its lists of the 10 best-illustrated children’s books of the year in 1978, 1979 and 1997.
Mr. Shulevitz’s final book, “The Sky Was My Blanket: A Young Man’s Journey Across Wartime Europe,” is to be published in August. It is based on the story of his uncle Yehiel Szulewicz, who fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and, later, the Nazis as a member of the French resistance.
Throughout his career, Mr. Shulevitz strove to find meaning in the agonizing experiences of his youth. In “Chance,” he recalled how he was forced to leave his temporary home in the East before a friend could finish reading him the L. Frank Baum novel “The Wizard of Oz.”
“I didn’t realize at the time, when I was listening to ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ how our trip back to the West would resemble in some ways the hardships of Dorothy in trying to get back to Kansas,” he told Kirkus Reviews. “It actually has very deep echoes.”
He added: “It wasn’t all a painful experience to work on the book. It was also a journey of discovery.”
Neve Campbell in Scream 7.
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The OG Scream Queen Neve Campbell returns. Scream 7 re-centers the franchise back on Sidney Prescott. She has a new life, a family, and lots of baggage. You know the drill: Someone dressing up as the masked slasher Ghostface comes for her, her family and friends. There’s lots of stabbing and murder and so many red herrings it’s practically a smorgasbord.
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Abriana Vicioso is the host of the Flower Hour, which takes place monthly.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Each flower carries a personal history. For Abriana Vicioso, the calla lily was her parents’ wedding flower — a symbol of her mother’s beauty. “She had this big, beautiful white calla lily in her hair,” Vicioso says. “I love my parents. They’re the reason I’m here. I’ll never forget where I came from.”
The Flower Hour begins with Vicioso announcing, with a warm smile: “Today is about touching grass.” The florist-by-trade gestures behind her to hundreds of flowers contained in buckets — blue thistles, ivory anemones and calla lilies painted silver — all twisted and unfurling into the air. “Tonight is going to be so sweet and intimate,” Vicioso says, eyeing the beautiful chaos at her feet. A grin buds across her face.
Moments before the workshop, participants sit at candlelit tables exchanging horoscopes and comparing their favorite flowers. A mention of the illustrious bird-of-paradise flower elicits coos and awe from the women. Izamar Vazquez, who is from Jalisco, Mexico, reveals her fondness for roses, which make her feel connected to her Mexican roots.
Vicioso hosts her flower-themed wellness workshop near the iconic Original Los Angeles Flower Market in downtown L.A. In January, the first Flower Hour event sold out, prompting her to make it a monthly series. Vicioso describes the event as a “three-part journey” where participants are invited to drink herbal tea, smoke rose-petal-rolled cannabis joints and create a floral arrangement. “The guide is to connect with the medicine of flowers,” Vicioso says.
Rose petal joints, tea and flower arranging are all part of The Flower Hour event’s offerings.
The event is hosted at the Art Club, a membership-based co-working space. “The Flower Hour is really beautiful. Everyone gets to explore their creativity while meeting new people,” says Lindsay Williams, the co-owner of the Art Club.
The idea for Flower Hour came to Vicioso during a conversation with her mother. “We joke all the time that flowers were destined to make their way into my life,” she says. She works as a florist and models on the side, even appearing in the pages of Vogue. Vicioso grew up in a Caribbean household, where flowers and offerings were part of daily life. “In my culture and religion, a lot of my family practices — an Afro-Caribbean religion — we build altars.”
Like many cultures, flowers carry sentimental value in her religion. “I’m Caribbean, so a lot of my family practices a Yoruba religion, which comes from Africa. In the Caribbean, it’s well known as Santería.”
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After a difficult year and a breakup, Vicioso wanted to marry her love of flowers with community building. Because Vicioso uses cannabis medicinally, the workshop naturally includes a smoking component. “My family has smoked cannabis for a lot of reasons for a long time. It’s a really healing plant,” she explains.
In the workshop, even the cannabis gets the floral treatment. Vicioso presents her rose-petal-wrapped joints on a silver platter at each table. She rolled each by hand. “If you’ve never smoked a rose-petal-rolled joint, the difference with this is it’s going to have roses that have a slight tobacco effect,” she announces.
During the workshop, Vicioso stresses the importance of buying cannabis from local vendors. The cannabis provided was purchased from a Northern Californian vendor. The wellness workshop aims to reclaim the healing ritual of smoking cannabis. “This is a plant that has been commercialized,” Vicioso says. “There’s a lot of Black and Brown people who are in jail for this plant.”
The resulting workshop is what Vicioso describes as “an immersive wellness experience that is the intersection of wellness, creativity, community and an appreciation of flowers.” The workshop serves as a reminder to enjoy Earth’s innate beauty in the form of flowers — including cannabis. “It’s this gift that the universe gave us for free and that I have this deep connection with,” Vicioso says.
Conversation cards to generate discussion among participants (top, letf). The workshop serves as a “third space” for Angelenos to engage in tactile creativity and community building outside of traditional nightlife settings.
After enjoying lavender chamomile tea and smoking a joint, Vicioso introduces the flowers to the group before inviting them to pick their own. She emphasizes each flower’s personality traits, describing green dianthus as a “Dr. Seuss” plant. Then, there are calla lilies with their “main character moment.” It gets personal. “Start thinking of a flower in your life that you can discover,” she says. “If you’re feeling like you need inspiration, you can always remember that these flowers have stories.”
Vicioso infuses wisdom into her instruction on floral arrangements: There are no mistakes. Let the flowers tell you where they want to go, she urges. Intuition will be your guide — the wilder, the better.
“Hecho in Mexico” reads a sticker on a bunch of green stems. “Like me,” says Vazquez with a laugh. “They’re all doing their own thing. Like a family,” she says later, arranging stems.
The Flower Hour participants and Vicioso, center, chat as they build their own floral arrangements at the sold-out event.
Two participants — Vazquez and Rebeca Alvarado — are friends who run a floral design company together called Izza Rose. Like Vicioso, the friends have a connection to flowers through their Latin American culture. They met Vicioso in the floral industry and were overjoyed to discover her workshop.
“This is a great way to connect with other people,” says Vazquez.
Alvarado agrees, adding: “You’re getting to know people outside of going to bars. You can connect in different ways when there’s an activity.”
Vazquez uses flowers to stay connected to her Mexican heritage, adding that she prefers to support Mexican vendors. In recent months, the downtown L.A. flower market has struggled to recover from ongoing ICE raids. “Some are scared to come back,” says Vazquez.
Hand-rolled cannabis joints wrapped in rose petals are presented on a silver platter at The ArtClub (top, right). The Flower Hour aims to reclaim the healing rituals of cannabis and flowers.
Another participant, Barbara Rios, was attracted to the workshop for stress relief. “You can hang out with your friends, but it’s nice to do things with your hands,” she says. “I work a stressful job, and it’s nice to have that third space that we’re all craving.”
On this February night, the participants were predominantly women, save for one man. In the future, Vicioso hopes that more men learn to engage with flowers. “There’s a statistic about men receiving flowers for the first time at their funerals, and I think we have changed that,” she says.
To conclude the workshop, Vicioso encourages participants to build lasting friendships and incorporate flower arranging into their daily practice — even if it’s just with a small, inexpensive bouquet.
“Get some flowers together, go to the park, hang out with each other and hang out with me,” she says. Participants leave with flower arrangements in hand. In the darkness of the night air, it briefly looks as though the women carry silver calla lilies that are blooming from their palms.
An underwater view shows US’ Lilly King competing in a heat of the women’s 200m breaststroke swimming event during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Paris La Defense Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris, on July 31, 2024. (Photo by François-Xavier MARIT / AFP) (Photo by FRANCOIS-XAVIER MARIT/AFP via Getty Images)
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This week’s show was recorded in Bloomington, Indiana with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Bill Kurtis, Not My Job guest Lilly King and panelists Alonzo Bodden, Josh Gondelman, and Faith Salie. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
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All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else
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