Children's book author and illustrator Uri Shulevitz, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, and "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 February 15 at age 89, the New York Times reported.
Shulevitz published more than 40 books, some in collaboration with other authors. He won a Caldecott Medal in 1969, for his illustrations in Arthur Ransome's The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, a retelling of an Eastern European folk tale. He also earned Caldecott Honors for three of his own books: The Treasure (1979), Snow (1998), and How I Learned Geography (2008).
"Despite the Nazi shadow looming over his childhood, Shulevitz made it clear that he was a wartime refugee, not a Holocaust survivor," the Times noted. He told Kirkus: "We weren't either in the ghetto or in the concentration camps," but "none of our family in Poland survived," adding that if his immediate family hadn't escaped, "we would have been just as they were."
After the war ended, the family lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany before moving to Paris in 1947. Two years later, they relocated to Israel. At 15, Shulevitz became the youngest artist represented in a group drawing exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Times wrote, adding that 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."
He moved to New York City when he was 24 and studied painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School while also illustrating Hebrew children's books.
Shulevitz published his first children's book, The Moon in My Room, in 1963. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, he published The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela: Through Three Continents in the Twelfth Century (2005). His other works include The Secret Room (1993), When I Wore My Sailor Suit (2009), Dusk (2013), and Troto and the Trucks (2015). His final book, The Sky Was My Blanket: A Young Man's Journey Across Wartime Europe, will be published in August.
Throughout his career, Shulevitz "strove to find meaning in the agonizing experiences of his youth," the Times noted. In Chance, he recalled how he was forced to leave a temporary home before a friend could finish reading him the L. Frank Baum novel The Wizard of Oz.
He told Kirkus: "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. It actually has very deep echoes.... It wasn't all a painful experience to work on the book. It was also a journey of discovery."
