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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.”
Phil Pritchard of the Hockey Hall of Fame works the 2019 NHL Awards at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 19, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
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Paul W. Downs can’t help it that even on the weekends, his life intersects with “Hacks,” the HBO comedy he co-created and co-showruns with his wife, Lucia Aniello, and their friend Jen Statsky. (He also appears on the show as Jimmy LuSaque Jr., the besieged manager of its two stars, played by Emmy winners Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder.) The fifth and final season of “Hacks” premiered last week, but on Downs’ days off, he often finds himself at its previous filming locations or hanging out with cast members who have become like family.
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Downs moved to Los Angeles in 2011, but soon after, he and Aniello were hired to write (and for him to act) on the über-New York show “Broad City,” keeping them away from the West Coast for years. Now the couple live in Los Feliz, which they enjoy with their young son.
“I love Los Feliz because it’s a real neighborhood with restaurants and bars, but also feels close to nature with Griffith Park,” Downs says. “Also it’s very central to my Eastside friends and Westside agents.”
And if he had to live at a local mall, like the character Ava Daniels did in the third season of “Hacks,” which would he choose?
“It would be the Americana, obviously.”
Here’s how he’d spend a perfect day in L.A.
10 a.m.: A late rise and a li’l barista
I’m sleeping in if I can, which I can’t because I have a toddler, but let’s say I can sleep ’til 10. That would be insane.
Then I’m making coffee at home. I’m making it with my 4-year-old because he likes to make my coffee now. He always wanted to help, now he really wants to do it on his own. I’m still there to supervise, but he does do a lot of it.
I do batch brew. I’m doing Verve Coffee that I’m grinding there, and then I’m brewing four cups because I need my coffee. I had a Moccamaster for a long time, but I recently got a Simply Good Coffee. There’s no plastic — it’s all glass and metal.
11 a.m.: Chocolate croissants for everyone
We’re driving to Pasadena and we’re going to [Artisanal Goods by] CAR, which is the place to get the best chocolate croissant, I think, in the world. I don’t just think in L.A., I think they’re better than Paris. I’m going there with my wife and my kid and I’m having another coffee and some pastry. We’re ordering three [chocolate croissants]. We’re not doubling up.
11:45 a.m.: The family business
We’re driving to Fair Oaks in Pasadena. There’s a place called T.L. Gurley. We shot “Hacks” there, actually. Not only in Season 1, but also full circle in Season 5. We’re going to shmay around and look at antiques. My kid is going to want to play a vintage pinball machine. We’re going to find a little piece of art for the house or what have you. It’s not necessarily that I’m on the hunt. It’s to pass the time and to have some fun. If I could do anything and have a leisurely day and take my mind off work, that’s what I’m doing.
People love to interact with my kid when he’s there. We’re really training him to appraise things at a young age. My parents are part-time dealers of antiques. My grandmother bought and sold antiques. It’s kind of a family business.
1:30 pm.: Baguettes and books
We’re driving to Larchmont and we’re getting a sandwich at Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese. I’m doing prosciutto-mozzarella-basil on a baguette.
Then we’re going to Chevalier’s Books. What’s sad is that I’m often not looking for leisure material. I’m looking for something that I’m interested in learning more about or writing about, or that they’re turning into a show I want to audition for. But we’re also doing Little Golden Books for my son. He’s obsessed. We’re not huge on screen time, so we really encourage the book-buying.
2:30 p.m.: Cast pool party
We’re having some family fun in the pool and we’re doing that until evening. We invite people over all the time. My sister-in-law is a New Yorker, but she actually wrote last season on “The Rooster” and she’s often writing on shows in L.A., so she’s often here and she’ll have a couple friends come over. I know this sounds like a piece of PR or something, but we’ll really literally have Hannah [Einbinder] and maybe Mark Indelicato from “Hacks” come over to swim. Jen, our co-creator of “Hacks,” will come over.
6:00 p.m.: Family dinner
Sometimes we’ll order Grá to the house, which is a pizza place in Echo Park — excellent sourdough crust pizza. But if we don’t do that, an ideal evening is an early dinner at All Time on Hillhurst in Los Feliz. We’re ordering the ceviche and my son is having all of it and not sharing with anybody at the table.
8:45 p.m.: A thrilling ending to the day
After putting my kid to bed, my wife and I, in an ideal world (full disclosure: we haven’t done this in two years), we’ll watch something together that we’ve been meaning to watch. We have a long list of movies and we either want to revisit or that we haven’t seen that we need to watch.
We don’t watch a lot of comedies. It’s a dream to watch a “Black Bag” or a little espionage thriller. We really like that because it’s so different than the stuff that we’re working on in the day.
Often the things we watch are things that we admire. We like deconstructing it as fans of film and television. We do like talking about the making of it, but it’s less of a critique and more of a listing of the things we appreciated about it.
10:30 p.m.: No work tomorrow
And then it’s lovemaking ’til morning on a perfect Sunday. If it’s a perfect Sunday, there’s also a Monday that’s off.
Jay (not pictured) found himself alone and hopeless in a jail cell when a fellow inmate’s unexpected words of comfort changed his life.
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When Jay was 22 years old, he was a self-described loner. In this story, he is being identified by his nickname to allow himself to speak candidly about the following experience and his mental health. He says the few people he did hang out with at the time had questionable morals.
”I chose my friends poorly, and your friends have a tendency to rub off on you. And so I started making poor decisions,” Jay said.
One evening, when he and his friends were out drinking, someone suggested they should try to break into the chemistry building on his college campus. Most of the group shrugged the suggestion off, deeming it impossible, but Jay was convinced he could pull it off.
“The next night I made a plan of how to do it, and I did it,” Jay remembered. “And I didn’t get caught doing it, [but] I got caught afterwards.”
At around 1 that morning, Jay was placed in the county detention center. Sitting alone in his cell, reality began to sink in.
“I pretty much thought that my life as I knew it was going to be over, and I had decided that the world would be better off without me in it.”
Jay made a plan to end his life. As he prepared himself, he began to cry.
“But just in that moment when I was ready to do it, I heard a voice coming from the top left corner of my cell, from a little vent. And someone called out to me and said, ‘Hey, is this your first time?’”
The man who called out was an inmate in the cell next door.
“I collected myself a little bit, and I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Can I pray for you?’”
Jay had grown up religious, but had stopped going to church years before. In that moment, though, he knew he needed support. He said yes, and listened as the man began to pray.
“I wish I could tell you that I remember the [exact] words that he said to me, but what I remember is that his words landed with me, and instead of wanting my life to be over, suddenly I saw hope,” Jay said.
The interaction happened nearly ten years ago, but it was a pivotal moment in Jay’s life, and one he thinks about all the time.
“[Now], I have a good job. I have a girlfriend who loves me. I have a life. But I have a life because somebody who was in the same situation I was in had the courage to talk to a fellow inmate and be kind.”
Jay says that he wishes he could meet that man again and express his appreciation.
“[I would] shake that guy’s hand, give him a hug, and tell him what his small gesture meant for me, how he changed the course of my life.”
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.
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