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.”