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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.”
Jane Austen ready to party for her 250th birthday at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting in Baltimore.
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In her six completed novels, Jane Austen excelled at love stories: Elinor and Edward, Lizzie and Darcy, Fanny and Edmund, Emma and Knightley, Anne and Wentworth, heck even Catherine and Tilney. As her fans celebrate the 250th anniversary of her birth, they’d like you to know it’s a mistake to simply dismiss her work as light, frothy romances. It’s full of intricate plots, class satire and biting wit, along with all the timeless drama of human foibles, frailties and resolve.
Tessa Harings (left) learns English country dance at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s 2025 Annual General Meeting
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“The basic reason why Austen is still popular today is because all of her characters are people we know in the world,” says Tessa Harings. She’s a high school teacher from Phoenix and one of the more than 900 attendees at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting, held in Baltimore this year. “We all know of someone who’s shy and aloof and needs to be brought into the crowd. We all know someone who’s quite witty, naturally. We all know someone who is a bit silly and always looking for attention.”
Colin Firth, properly memed from the 1995 BBC miniseries. His Darcy is a big favorite with the JASNA crowd.
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Shy and aloof? That could be Darcy. Naturally witty? Lizzie Bennet. Silly and looking for attention? Take your pick: baby sister Lydia or maybe the haughty Caroline Bingley or the unctuous Mr. Collins, all creations from what might be Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice.
Her characters have permeated modern pop culture, even among people who’ve never opened her books. Harings says that’s one reason her students want to read these Regency-era novels. They want to understand the jokes in all those short videos and memes, like Mr. Collins making awkward dinner conversation.
He wants a wife, he compliments the potatoes. In Mr. Collin’s head, it makes sense.
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Her students enjoy the tension between Darcy and Lizzie: he’s very rich, so besotted by her against his will that he can hardly dance, glower and talk at the same time. Lizzie initially cannot stand him and refuses his first proposal, as shown in this soggy scene from the 2005 movie adaptation.
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Harings says Lizzie is her favorite Austen character. “She has such sharp, sarcastic wit and she’s so self-confident, despite the fact that she’s constantly being put down by the people around her for her supposedly lower position in life as the slightly less pretty of the mother’s two oldest daughters.”
Milliner Dannielle Perry (right) and her assistant Mia Berg of Timely Tresses in their Regency-era togs.
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“When I was a teenager, I loved Lizzie and I wanted to be Lizzie,” says milliner Dannielle Perry of Oxford, N.C. She’s read and reread all of Jane Austen’s books and she loves how they change for her as she’s gotten older. She’s now more sympathetic toward Mrs. Bennet, Lizzie’s mom: a woman desperate to get her five daughters married, least they be penniless since they can’t inherit their father’s estate. “I feel sorry for her in a way I never did before,” Perry says. “She is sort of silly, but she’s lived with a man for 20 years who largely dismisses her and thinks she’s frivolous.”
Doctoral student Katie Yu, of Dallas, has this analysis of Mrs. Bennett and her husband, who seems mentally checked-out at best: “He’s not a great father. He’s always putting his wife down in front of his daughters, he’s putting his daughters down in front of his daughters.” Yu says Mr. Bennet married Mrs. Bennet because she was pretty, treats her as an inferior, and often ignores her. This is why Mrs. Bennet goes on about her nerves and “has the vapors” whenever she’s stressed: she’s trying to get his attention.
“But,” says Tessa Harings, “she still has a level of street smarts that she has to get her daughters married. And yes, she’s sincerely concerned about their future … she actually, of the two of them, is the more concerned and involved parent.”
Tom Tumbusch explains 19th century dance moves to JASNA members.
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Dance instructor Tom Tumbusch, of Cincinnati, says men can learn a lot from Austen. “Modern men struggle to find good role models,” he says. “Reading Austen’s works can help them see the places where men can go wrong.” Mr. Bennet, for example. Or the libertine George Wickham who lies and runs off with the flighty Bennet sister, Lydia. Or maybe Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility, who leads Marianne Dashwood on, ghosts her and is later revealed to have abandoned an unmarried woman who gave birth to his child.
Oh, Marianne, he’s so not worth it!
On the other hand, Tumbusch says Jane Austen’s heroes can show men “how to be masculine in a constructive way,” like owning mistakes, taking responsibility and treating women with respect. It’s not just Darcy, who works behind the scenes getting Wickham to marry Lydia, it’s also Captain Wentworth from Persuasion. Tombusch says Wentworth does what men of his station should: he uses his own resources to help someone less fortunate, the poor, partially disabled widow Mrs. Smith. And in Sense and Sensibility, there’s the steadfast Col. Brandon. Hoping to make Willoughby’s rejection of Marianne less devastating to her, he exposes the libertine’s behavior. He rides hours to retrieve her mother when Marianne is near death. He patiently, oh-so-patiently, waits for her young, broken heart to mend.
All this while wearing a flannel waistcoat because he’s on the “wrong side of five and thirty” and needs to keep those ancient bones warm.
Before he rocked worlds as Snape, Alan Rickman made the earth move for viewers of the 1995 movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
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JASNA president Mary Mintz, of McLean, Va., says though Jane Austen is largely known for her marriage plots, it’s really the human need for connection that grounds her stories. “She writes about the relationships between parents and children, between siblings or among siblings, she writes about relationships with friends. And she is really insightful. When you combine that with her knowledge of human psychology, it’s a great formula for success.”
Mintz is fascinated by Emma’s pivotal character, Miss Bates. She’s a spinster and member of the gentry class who lives with her elderly mother on an extremely limited income. She’s also a nervous chatterbox, “someone who can’t stop talking,” says Mintz. “I’ve known a lot of Misses Bates in my lifetime… people who seem insecure and feel as though they have to fill up silence, but are really good-hearted people.”
When Emma is rude to Miss Bates, she’s firmly chastised by her neighbor, Mr. Knightley. It becomes a turn-around moment in the story. Humbled, Emma apologizes. She also sees how she’s been wrong to meddle in the love life of Harriet Smith, a pretty teenager whose parents are unknown.
Mintz says there’s an interesting link between Bates and Harriet, if you put two and two together.
“In Jane Austen’s actual life, mothers and daughters often share the same name,” she explains. That pattern can be seen in many of her novels. “We don’t know who Harriet Smith’s natural mother is, but at one point Miss Bates is referred to as ‘Hetty,’ which could be a diminutive for ‘Harriet.’ “
That’s the first clue. The second clue occurs during that scene where Knightley sets Emma right. He says of Miss Bates, “she has sunk from the comforts she was born to.” He then draws a contrast between the spinster’s current station and her former one: “You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour…”
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Emma’s father is quite wealthy, so why would Miss Bates’ notice have once been so esteemed? Mary Mintz asks, “Is because she had a child out of wedlock?”
And could that child be… Harriet Smith?
The mind: it boggles! A Jane Austen Easter egg! It’s just one example of how multi-dimensional her novels are and why so many people will continue loving, analyzing and discussing her work well into the next 250 years.
Jacob Fenston and Danny Hensel edited and produced this report.
Rob Reiner And Wife Michele
Throats Slit By Family Member
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Updated
Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had their throats slit by a family member, possibly after an argument inside their Los Angeles home, leading to their tragic deaths … TMZ has learned
It’s unclear what exactly triggered the violence, which went down Sunday afternoon in Brentwood … but we’re told one of Rob’s daughters found her parents dead and told police a family member had killed them. PEOPLE reports the couple’s son, Nick, is being questioned in connection with the murders.
Our sources also say the daughter told police the family member “should be a suspect” because they’re “dangerous.”
TMZ broke the story … Rob and Michele suffered lacerations consistent with knife wounds and LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division is investigating the case.
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Dispatch audio captures a firefighter calling for backup to the Brentwood mansion around 3:30 PM … though it doesn’t provide any further information about the circumstances in the abode.
Rob was 78. Michele was 68.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
I’m going to read you some sentences. Each sentence conceals the name of a major U.S. city in consecutive letters. As a hint, the answer’s state also appears in the sentence. Every answer has at least six letters. (Ex. The Kentucky bodybuilders will be flexing tonight. –> LEXINGTON)
1. Space enthusiasts in Oregon support landing on Mars.
2. Contact your insurance branch or agent in Alaska.
3. The Ohio company has a sale from today to next Sunday.
4. The Colorado trial ended in a sudden verdict.
5. Fans voted the Virginia tennis matches a peak experience.
6. I bought a shamrock for decorating my house in Illinois.
7. All the Connecticut things they knew have now changed.
8. Can you help a software developer in Texas?
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Mike Reiss, who’s a showrunner, writer, and producer for “The Simpsons.” Think of a famous living singer. The last two letters of his first name and the first two letters of his last name spell a bird. Change the first letter of the singer’s first name. Then the first three letters of that first name and the last five letters of his last name together spell another bird. What singer is this?
Challenge answer
Placido Domingo
Winner
Brock Hammill of Corvallis, Montana.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Robert Flood, of Allen, Texas. Name a famous female singer of the past (five letters in the first name, seven letters in the last name). Remove the last letter of her first name and you can rearrange all the remaining letters to name the capital of a country (six letters) and a food product that its nation is famous for (five letters).
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, December 18 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
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