Uri Shulevitz, a Polish-born kids’s e-book creator and illustrator who survived a harrowing childhood traversing Europe to flee the Nazis and wove these experiences into arresting works like “How I Realized Geography” and the graphic novel “Probability: Escape from the Holocaust,” died on Feb. 15 in Manhattan. He was 89.
His loss of life, in a hospital, was from problems of the flu and pneumonia, mentioned his spouse, Paula S. Brown, his solely survivor.
Mr. Shulevitz, who had settled in New York Metropolis, printed greater than 40 books, a few of them collaborations with different authors. In 1969, he received a Caldecott Medal, the annual award recognizing probably the most distinguished kids’s image e-book printed in america, for his Bruegel-esque illustrations for Arthur Ransome’s “The Idiot of the World and the Flying Ship,” a retelling of an Japanese European people story.
He earned Caldecott Honors, designating runner-up standing, for 3 of his personal books, together with “The Treasure” (1979), about an outdated man’s seek for a hidden treasure, with illustrations that “glow with what would possibly properly be taken for celestial gentle,” Kirkus Evaluations famous, and “Snow” (1998), the story of a boy who seemingly wills a snowstorm into existence to the shock of skeptical adults.
His different Honors designation got here for “How I Realized Geography” (2008), which drew from his experiences as a boy fleeing his household’s house in Warsaw after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. “I vividly bear in mind the streets caving in, the buildings burning, and a bomb falling into the stairwell of our house constructing sooner or later once I was house,” he recalled in a 1971 interview.
A grueling journey led the household to what’s now Kazakhstan, then a Soviet republic. “Night time after night time, I went to mattress hungry,” he mentioned in a 2020 interview with Kirkus. “And once I say hungry, I don’t imply that there was type of a meager supper — there was nothing, completely nothing.”
The younger protagonist in “Geography” embarks on the same odyssey, discovering security from battle, if little else, within the “far, far east.” The boy is outraged when his father returns from a bazaar with an enormous, brilliantly coloured map as an alternative of bread. However quickly he’s transfixed, imagining journey to far-flung locations of magnificence and abundance as a technique to escape his dirt-floor dwelling.
“Probability” (2020), meant 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 mom’s tales to distract himself from the hardships he knew. The title, he mentioned, referred to the concept dwelling or dying within the battle usually amounted purely to likelihood, he informed Publishers Weekly in 2020: “Nobody knew what would occur.”
Regardless of 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 both within the ghetto or within the focus camps,” he informed Kirkus.
However “none of our household in Poland survived,” he added. And if his rapid household hadn’t escaped, he mentioned, “we’d have been simply as they have been.”
Uri Shulevitz, an solely little one, was born on Feb. 27, 1935, in Warsaw. His father painted indicators and designed theatrical units and costumes; his mom loved quite a few creative hobbies. Uri was drawing by the point he was 3, earlier than the conflagration of World Struggle II.
After the battle ended, the household returned west, touchdown in a displaced individuals camp in Germany earlier than settling in Paris in 1947. Two years later, they moved to Israel throughout its second 12 months as a nation. At 15, Uri grew to become the youngest artist represented in a bunch drawing exhibition on the Tel Aviv Museum of Artwork. He continued working towards an artwork profession as a pupil on the Institute for Israeli Artwork and by finding out privately with the modernist painter Yehezkel Streichman.
At 24, after a compulsory stint within the Israeli navy and a 12 months toiling on a kibbutz close to the Useless Sea, he moved to New York. There, he studied portray on the Brooklyn Museum Artwork College and made ends meet by doing illustrations for Hebrew kids’s books.
He printed his first kids’s e-book, “The Moon in My Room,” in 1963, telling the story of a boy who imagines a whole world — full with solar, moon, stars and flowers — in his bed room. It was successful, and set the course for his profession.
After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Mr. Shulevitz printed “The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela: Via Three Continents within the Twelfth Century” (2005), a few medieval Jewish traveler who embarks on a 14-year journey from his hometown in Spain to see the distant lands of the Bible.
Whereas a lot of Mr. Shulevitz’s books have been brief, with minimal textual content, he pushed again in opposition to the concept a 30-something-page e-book was simple to churn out. “Probability,” he as soon as mentioned, took 4 years to complete.
“Everyone knows how tough it’s to say one thing concisely, whereas to make use of many phrases is far simpler,” he mentioned in a 1986 interview with The Horn Guide Journal, which is dedicated to kids’s and younger grownup literature. “There have been some well-known authors who’ve written some very profitable books for adults,” he added, “after which after they tried writing one thing which they thought was an image e-book, they didn’t succeed.”
A painter in addition to an illustrator, he exhibited his work in quite a few galleries and museums, together with the Artwork Institute of Chicago and the Jewish Museum in New York.
The New York Instances Guide Overview ranked “Probability” among the many 25 finest kids’s books of 2020, and it cited Mr. Shulevitz in its lists of the ten best-illustrated kids’s books of the 12 months in 1978, 1979 and 1997.
Mr. Shulevitz’s ultimate e-book, “The Sky Was My Blanket: A Younger Man’s Journey Throughout Wartime Europe,” is to be printed in August. It’s based mostly on the story of his uncle Yehiel Szulewicz, who fought the fascists within the Spanish Civil Struggle and, later, the Nazis as a member of the French resistance.
All through his profession, Mr. Shulevitz strove to search out that means within the agonizing experiences of his youth. In “Probability,” he recalled how he was pressured to go away his momentary house within the East earlier than a pal might end studying him the L. Frank Baum novel “The Wizard of Oz.”
“I didn’t notice on the time, once I was listening to ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ how our journey again to the West would resemble in some methods the hardships of Dorothy in attempting to get again to Kansas,” he informed Kirkus Evaluations. “It truly has very deep echoes.”
He added: “It wasn’t all a painful expertise to work on the e-book. It was additionally a journey of discovery.”
