Lifestyle
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.”
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
A federal judge has blocked President Trump from adding his name to the Kennedy Center, saying that the Washington, D.C. arts complex was named for the late president John F. Kennedy. In a ruling on Friday, the judge also temporarily blocked the administration from closing the Kennedy Center for a planned two-year renovation that was slated to begin in July.
U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his ruling that: “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
A Kennedy Center spokesperson told NPR in an email Friday afternoon that it will appeal the decision. Roma Daravi, vice president of public relations for the complex, wrote: “We will review the decision carefully though the reality remains — the Center requires an urgent and significant restoration – a truth that even the plaintiff acknowledges. With $257 million secured by President Trump and approved by Congress, the resources are in place and we remain committed to pursuing every lawful avenue to ensure the Trump Kennedy Center is restored as a national cultural landmark for all Americans to enjoy.”
NPR has requested comment from the White House, but did not receive an immediate reply.
As part of his ruling, Judge Cooper ordered that all signage and online materials referring to the “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” the “Trump Kennedy Center,” or anything similar must be removed within 14 days.
The judge also blocked, for now, plans to close the Kennedy Center for two years of renovations. Trump and the center’s current voting board members – all of whom were selected by the president, who also became chairman of the center last year – had planned to start the renovations in early July, just after the 250th anniversary celebrations. In his 94-page ruling, Judge Cooper called the renovation plans “murky,” and wrote: “None of the board members had sufficient information in advance of the March 16 meeting to make a well-considered decision to close the center.” The center has been winding down its programming and has already dismissed most of its programming staff.
Referring to a Truth Social post written by President Trump in February, the judge also wrote: “There was no ‘one year review of the Trump Kennedy Center, that has taken place with Contractors, Musical Experts, Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants, deciding between’ complete and partial closure, as President Trump claimed.”
Cooper’s ruling resulted from a lawsuit filed in March by Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center board whose voting rights there were stripped last year.
The ruling does not prevent the Kennedy Center’s board from a future closure, but the judge said that it should do so only after the board has “sufficient information to make a considered, independent decision, taking account of its obligation to both maintain and operate a premiere arts venue and its solemn duty to memorialize a fallen President.”
Three years after my second divorce, with the help of a dating app, I went on 53 first dates in one summer. Fifty-three times, I put on my first-date uniform (nice but not trying too hard), flat-ironed my hair and texted my date itinerary to my friend Karen to make it easier for the FBI to track my whereabouts just in case this was the internet date that finally went wrong.
I had a system. The system involved a spreadsheet. I kept track of what I wore and what stories we shared to avoid repeating myself in case there was a second or third date. There were exploratory follow-up dates, but it usually only took one to know.
The coffees and lunches and dinners of that season flicker in my mind like a rom-com video montage. There were some average dates, plenty of nice-guy, zero-chemistry dates, but a few stand out.
Here are the notables.
There was the extremely tall, minor league baseball player I met at BJ’s in Burbank. He said no more than four words to me the entire meal, but managed to chat up our waitress. I believe he walked me to my car and went back for her number.
The quiet and irritable TV editor I met at Guelaguetza on Olympic Boulevard. We ordered the chicken mole and chapulines. During the meal, he had a panic attack and excused himself to call his therapist. He actually told me this.
The experimental-video director with the white faux hawk I met at Go Get Em Tiger in East Hollywood. He spent the date in an hourlong monologue about his ex-wife Julia, stopping only to show me many, many photos of Julia.
A young man, originally from Phoenix, asked to meet at Soot Bull Jip on 8th Street. A struggling writer-actor-production assistant, he confided that he had looked up my name on Internet Movie Database and noticed that I was a producer. He then proceeded to pitch me an animated children’s show about singing giraffes. He also asked for a ride to Vons. I declined both.
The screenwriter I met at République who, based on his startling non-resemblance to his photo, had obviously posted a picture of someone else on his profile. He brought me three mixed CDs of music based on what he “knew” I would like. It was all Radiohead and Elliott Smith. I adjusted my dating profile because I was apparently coming off as depressed.
There was the nervous and uptight English tutor, with a script in turn-around and a famous roommate, that I met at a Starbucks in Koreatown. This guy corrected my grammar within the first five minutes of our introduction. Then, he proceeded to inform me that rather than be put off by this, I should be grateful for the new information so I could fix my error and not appear to be uneducated.
The trendy, bearded sports photographer I met for a late-night dinner at Fred 62 in Los Feliz. I had high hopes for this guy, and we made plans for a second date. But then things started unraveling once we realized I had already dated his younger brother.
There was also the suave (Hand kiss? Really?) and extremely tan French tennis pro I crossed La Cienega Boulevard for and met for lunch at Thai Vegan in Santa Monica. He was on a nonstop series of calls on his cellphone during the entire meal and then asked for a second date. I said, “Non, merci.”
When describing these guys to Karen, I used their identifying traits to label them. (Stalker Creep. Dude Looks Like a Lady. Mom Jeans Guy.) Like an FNG in Vietnam, it was better not to learn their names.
Due to a story he had shared with me via email, date No. 53 was identified as Naked Drummer. I tried to reserve judgment. Before Naked Drummer came to meet me for our first date, he called at the last minute and said the following:
“I want to recap. I just turned 30. I am currently living with my mother. I play guitar in an alternative folk band. I have a semi-crappy temp job at Disney with no benefits. I drive a green ’97 Plymouth Grand Voyager minivan that smells like weed. If you would like to change your mind about this whole dinner thing, now is your chance.” He described himself as tall, dark and tall.
For some reason, I broke many of my first date “safety rules” with Naked Drummer. I gave him my address. I let him pick me up. When he came to get me, I let him into my apartment. We went for dinner at Noshi Sushi on Beverly Boulevard. None of that is prudent behavior, and I do not recommend any of it except the chu toro.
Naked Drummer was a funny, smart, nice Jewish boy who had been touring in bands in that Grand Voyager since college graduation. On the first date, we bonded over takuwan rolls and our histories as teenage goths. My goth uniform included black Maybelline eyeliner I used a lighter to heat the tip with before application. His goth uniform included an olive-green trench coat he borrowed from his mom. We were a match made in Joy Division heaven. He confided he was an Insane Clown Posse Juggalo, I intimated I was in the Kiss Army. (We were both lying about those last two.)
Reader, I married him.
The author is a former writer, director and producer for television. She and Mr. Rosenberg live in South Pasadena. She’s on Instagram: @smacksy.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Lifestyle
Poppy Liu wants to remind you how revolutionary I Love Boosters is : Bullseye with Jesse Thorn
I Love Boosters starts like a fun heist movie. There’s a gang of cool ladies from the Bay Area who steal clothes from high-end designers and sell them at a steep discount to their friends and neighbors. But I Love Boosters is also a Boots Riley movie. The film is surreal and bombastic, branching out in a thousand directions and traversing a dozen genres. So it can’t really stay a heist movie.
Poppy Liu drives that change more than pretty much any other character in the film. She plays Jianhu, a garment worker in China who joins the gang and brings with her a bonkers new wrinkle to the story. It’s a role Poppy was made for. She’s made her career playing confident, somewhat unhinged weirdos. She was cast in a lead role in the 2019 sitcom Sunnyside, had other parts on Better Call Saul, The After Party, and Hacks.
Liu joins us to talk about starring in I Love Boosters and the message that she hopes audiences take away from the film. She also chats with us about her upbringing in Minnesota, how she got into comedy acting, her role on Hacks, and much more.
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