Polish-born children's book author and illustrator Uli Schlewitz survived a tragic childhood across Europe, fled the Nazis and weaved those experiences into arrests such as “How I Learned Geography” and the graphic novel “Chan: Escape from the Holocaust.” He was 89 years old.
His death in the hospital was due to complications of influenza and pneumonia, said Paula S. Brown, his sole survivor.
Schlevitz, who settled in New York City, has published over 40 books. In 1969 he won the Caldecott Medal. This was the annual award to recognize the most prominent children's picture book published in the United States for his Bruegel-style illustrations of Arthur Ransom's Bruegel-style illustrations of “The Fools of the World and the Flying Ship.”
He earned Caldecott Honors for three books of his own, including The Treasure (1979), and achieved runner-up status, appearing in his quest for hidden treasures like “Snow” (1998) in “What might be filmed for the Light of Heaven” and “Snow” (1998).
His other designation of honor reached “How to Learn Geography” (2008), drawn from his experience as a boy who fled from his family's home in Warsaw after Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939.
A rigorous journey led the family to what is now Kazakhstan and the Soviet Republic. “Every night I slept hungry,” he said in a 2020 interview with Kirkus. “And when I say I'm hungry, I don't mean there was some kind of slight dinner. There was nothing, absolutely nothing.”
The young protagonist of “geography” embarks on a similar Odyssey, finding security from war in “The Far East.” The boy gets furious when his father returns from the bazaar with a huge, beautifully colored map instead of bread. But soon he is fixed and imagines a trip to the beauty and richness that lies far away as a way to escape his dirty floor dwelling.
Chance for Middle School Students (2020) recorded the cyclical years of Schlewitz's patients between the ages of four and 14. He said the title referred to the idea that life in war and death often represents pure opportunity, he told the publisher in 2020 that “no one knows what will happen.”
Despite the shadows of the Nazis approaching their childhood, Schlevitz revealed that he was not a Holocaust survivor, but a wartime refugee. “We were neither a ghetto or a concentration camp,” he told Kalks.
However, “none of our family in Poland survived,” he added. And if his close relatives had not escaped, he said, “We would have been.”
The only child, Uli Schlevitz, was born in Warsaw on February 27, 1935. His father drew the signs and designed theatrical sets and costumes. His mother enjoyed many artistic hobbies. Uri had painted him by the time he was three years old before the great fire of World War II.
After the war ended, the family returned west and landed in a German refugee camp before settling in Paris in 1947. Two years later, they moved to Israel in their second year as a country. At the age of 15, URI became the youngest artist at a group drawing exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. He continued to work towards his art career as a student at the Institute of Arts in Israel, studying personally with modernist painter Yehezkel Streichman.
At age 24, he moved to New York after a year of hardships at Kibbutz near the Dead Sea after a forced mission in the Israeli army. There he met by studying painting at the art school at the Brooklyn Museum and creating illustrations for children's books in Hebrew.
He published his first children's book, The Moon in My Room, in 1963, telling the story of a boy who imagines a perfect world with the sun, moon, stars and flowers in his bedroom. It was a success and set the course for his career.
After receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship, Schlewitz published “Tudera's Benjamin Travel: Passing Three Continents of the 12th Century” (2005).
Although many of Shulevitz's books were short, with minimal text, he opposed the idea that a 30-page book could be easily fired. “Challenge,” he once said, but it took four years to finish.
“We all know how difficult it is to say something concisely, but it's much easier to use many words,” he said in an interview with Horn Book Magazine in 1986, dedicated to literature for children and young adults. “There were several well-known authors who wrote very successful books for adults,” he added.
The painter and illustrator exhibited his work in many galleries and museums, including the Chicago Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York.
The New York Times book review ranked “Challenge” among the 25 children's books in 2020, citing Schlevitz in a list of the 10 best children's books in 1978, 1979 and 1997.
Schlewitz's final book, “The Sky Was My Blanket: A Young Man's Journey Through Wartime Europe,” will be published in August. It is based on the story of his uncle Yechel Slewitz, who fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and later fought the Nazis as a member of French resistance.
Throughout his career, Schlevitz worked to find the meaning of his youth's painful experiences. In “Chance,” he recalled how he was forced to leave his temporary home east before his friend finished reading L. Frank Baum's novel The Wizard of Oz.
“At the time, when I was listening to The Wizard of Oz, I didn't realize that a trip to the west was somehow similar to Dorothy's hardships as he tried to return to Kansas,” he told Kirks' review. “There's actually a very deep echo.”
He added: “Working on a book was not a painful experience. It was also a journey of discovery.”
