If you think there’s nothing new to say about World War II, these two works by children’s literature giants — and immigrants to America — will prove you wrong.
The Caldecott medalist Uri Shulevitz’s final book, following his death at age 89 in February, is a riveting companion to his award-winning memoir “Chance: Escape From the Holocaust” (2020), and a story that stands on its own.
“When I was little,” begins THE SKY WAS MY BLANKET: A Young Man’s Journey Across Wartime Europe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 160 pp., $19.99, ages 10 and up), “I couldn’t fall asleep unless I had a piece of bread under my pillow. Why? you may ask. Because I was born in 1915.”
Yehiel Szulewicz, the youngest of four boys growing up in a time of hunger in a devoutly religious Jewish home in Żyrardów, Poland, chafes at his father’s strictness. “When you’ve got nothing,” he thinks, “use what you’ve got.” Wit and deception get him free entry to the local cinema and even a trip to Warsaw. But he longs to see more of the world — and so, at age 15, he leaves home, not realizing he will never see his parents again.
Yehiel shaves his sidelocks but still embraces his Jewish identity. As he crosses Europe by foot and train, he finds food, work and mentors in Jewish communities in Czechoslovakia, Vienna and Italy. When the Nazis gain power, he moves to Paris, then Spain, where he joins a Polish brigade fighting Franco’s fascism. From there he ends up imprisoned in a work camp in France. World War II has begun. Yehiel escapes and joins a Jewish branch of the French Resistance.
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The post Two Children’s Literature Giants on World War II Rites of Passage appeared first on New York Times.
