I did not grow up with the usual Uri Shulevitz books: Snow, for example, I only saw when I was older. The book I associate most strongly with Uri Shulevitz is not his beautiful, Caldecott Medal winning, The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, and it’s not the more recent How I Learned Geography. All of those books are beautiful. They showcase a range of his talents. But the one I know best, the one from my earliest memories, has no glowing colours and now beautifully rounded story arc. It’s deliberately rough and deliberately awkward. It’s drawn with attention to detail, masterful skill, and a loving respect for each figure in the book, each character, each article of clothing. And these figures are often a bit ugly, the clothing ill-fitting, everything feeling somewhat exaggerated, a bit of a caricature, the oddity capturing, underneath, a deeper truth.

The book is Hanukah Money by Sholem Aleichem, the art by Uri Shulevitz deftly leaping to catch the meaning of each word, draw it forth in sepia tones, and highlight how, in this story, this book, this scene from the Old Country is gone. It was once, perhaps, a reality, though the deliberately folktale like character of the book casts it into fiction. Once, people lived in shtetls; it was a product of injustice but it was a way of life for many Jews. That ended. It was another injustice. And, after the Shoah, through which Uri Shulevitz lived, well. The people were murdered, the way of life they led was gone.

The folktale quality, the fiction, the funniness, all carries a terrific pathos, a massive discomfort which bothered me terribly as a child, because I sensed something was wrong. If you’d asked me, I probably would have said that it wasn’t pretty.

No, it’s not pretty. Because it’s beautiful. It’s full of odd and funny uglinesses, and it’s art of the very highest register.

What a bizarre combination. How astonishingly strange, a beautiful book of awkwardly unattractive bits and bobs and people! But what comes through in this pathos, this sadness, is love and celebration. Uri Shulevitz is honouring these beautifully odd people who led such hard lives in such an unjust world which gave them so few chances. He takes that folkloric quality and with tender respect renders each person with careful humour, a delicate fineness of lines and shading. The children are handled with particular fondness, but the funny little scene when Aunt Pessl calls to deaf Uncle Moishe-Aaron captures so much in one page that I feel a little smile creep over me every time I look at it. How often has that wife yelled to that husband, barely a foot away? How often has he grumbled? How often have those kids looked on, thinking nothing of it, really, just waiting for some Hanukah money?

What comes through is a very deep sense of honesty, of artistic truth and integrity, and of dedication to giving life to this bygone world, cruelly robbed of life. When you look at Uncle Moishe-Aaron, he is wearing ripped and torn clothes, carefully patched, in a ripped and torn world, carefully restored in these pages.

The world, now, feels ripped and torn to me. There’s a gigantic, gaping hole where Uri Shulevitz was. His work is monumental, but when you look at it, so much of it feels like these moments in Hanukah Money: small moments, odd people, treated with gentleness and respect. The Fool of the World is a strange boy, and his parents barely notice his going. But Uri Shulevitz dismisses the brilliant older brothers as they walk right out of the fairy tale, and, per fairy tale tradition, we walk with the last and the least. But something struck me, in reading it to my Spriggan: the music. The Fool of the World is always singing. We sing with the Fool of the World, and the art sings, too.

The world is ripped and torn. We Fools of the World can be odd and imperfect, awkward and ill-fitting. But Uri Shulevitz taught us to honour even the uglies, even our last and least with deftness and care, with attention to detail, with loving lines and respect for each patch on a worn out coat. We may be hurt, but we should find our companions and sing together. Put a map on the wall and dream of difference, of possibility, and of each other, with singing colours and harmonized oddities.

I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking that the loss of Uri Shulevitz is a gap in the world. One more gap in a list that feels far, far too long by now: Lore Segal, Tomie De Paola, Eric Carle, Kazuo Iwamura, Ashley Bryan, Lois Ehlert, Jerry Pinkney… I am struck by how many names come to me so very quickly, each a very keen pain. But I am grateful for what Uri Shulevitz gave us through his life and his years of dedicated work: beautiful art, respect for those who were diminished, and honest love for even the last and the least. Let us not forget that he chose to create his exquisite work for children. Let’s carry on doing just that: giving only the best and the most brilliant art to our children.

I think most of those who read my words here are Canadian or American, and I wonder… Have you heard of Kazuo Iwamura? The two countries where I met his books were not on this continent; I met him in France and in Israel. I fell in love with the kind of precipitousness one associates with romantic comedies, but to me evokes the openheartedness of children. He caught me right in the raw heart of my childhood delight in watching squirrels and mice. Beatrix Potter, Jill Barklem, Leo Lionni all understand this, and so did Kazuo Iwamura.

So when I saw an announcement through Librairie nordest, one of my favourite book shops in Paris, that Kazuo Iwamura had died on December 19, 2024, I cried, and then I looked around and was astonished to see that few people on my continent seemed to have noticed. And I thought for a second and realized that I’d gathered his books in French for my French storytime (I read to little kids at my local public library once a month and it is my absolute favourite time I spend do anything for kids who aren’t mine), but getting them in English had always been a little harder. (Many of his books, but not all, have been produced in English by NorthSouth, distributed by Simon and Schuster.)

So I feel like it rests with me to share a bit about the wonders of his books and try to encourage you to find a few, in French or English or Japanese or any language at all, really, to read to yourself or with a child. I like the English and French translations, both, though the French voice comes through with a particular pep and vigour, so I think he must have had a particularly excellent translator there. Truly, though, the engagement of the art, which is of such a breathtakingly beautiful quality, is so high, that the words serve as a guide to the art, like one of the rope ladders or pulleys that his little mice use to climb up to the treetops for a lunar picnic one night of the year. You can reach that lovely meal in the moonlight regardless, but it’s very nice to have the words to guide you there.

What is a Kazuo Iwamura book like? One of the ones I’ve read most often, both to the children at the library and to my own little Spriggan at home (he doesn’t know French but loves being read to in French), is L’Hiver de la famille souris (The Mouse Family in Winter). Has it been translated into English, too? I actually haven’t checked. I wonder if a British publisher may have done these. But the first view of the mouse family is not outside, and not in the snow. They’re cozy at home, making things. Some are cooking, others are woodworking, the little ones are playing or helping in those ways that small children play or help in the “getting under everyone else’s feet” method. It’s delightfully real. And after everyone enjoys a snack and a game they go outside. They play in the snow, the adults as well as the children. Then they go home.

That is it.

The environment, the atmosphere, the full family involvement and engagement, are all exquisite. There’s a sense of tranquility and a sense of mischief. There’s a bit of bickering. There are mishaps. They’re all in the context of generally good-natured interactions, and they aren’t reported immersively. That is: you certainly get dialogue, but the effect is at a distance, like watching a slowly developing fresco on a long passageway, as the mice go along from moment to moment and you’re walking along the mural, watching their day unfold before your eyes. The immersiveness isn’t in the characters but in the entire scenario, the landscape and the world.

This is how his forest resembles Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge or the Lake District in Beatrix Potter’s stories.

I find enormous comfort and huge joy in flipping through his scenes, and thinking that there was a man in this world who threw himself into art this beautiful and of such a high level for the sake of children. He built a museum for children and picture book art, too, the Kazuo Iwamura Picture Book Museum of the Hill in Nasu-Karasuyama. I can only imagine its beauty, because anyone who spent his time putting such tender care into the art he made for children must have created a museum with equivalent dedication and attention. I want to leave you with a quote from a recent interview he had with NorthSouth Books: “I’m convinced that it’s really essential for children not only to have top class picture books but also to become familiar with the real world of nature.” Thank you, Kazuo Iwamura, for giving children the top of the top class in picture books, and ones that are a window onto nature, and surely make them wish to go out and see it and feel it with all their senses. I will visit you in your books.

I was about to begin this post “I think that you’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard of Jon Klassen’s new board book series,” and then I paused. I reflected. I think that sentence says everything you need to know about me. If I’ve learned one thing in my years on this planet, it’s that, inexplicably, people don’t pay attention to children, and to things pertaining to children. I find this infuriating. So, while I was thinking, “Oh, everyone out there knows that Jon Klassen has made a board book series, I’m sure,” it turns out that, as a matter of fact, that assumption was incorrect. I am here to correct this problem. Please meet: Your Farm, Your Island, and Your Forest. The very titles, to me, gently but very definitively orient the books and the read-aloud scenario around the child.

I do not normally think of Jon Klassen and “inexorable” in the same sentence (I have not met him, alas, but he seems gentle and lovely), but he inexorably leads the reader to put the child first, and allows the child to play in these worlds as the prime mover of their own space. It seems (based on, I want to say, if I remember correctly, some Instagram posts on the Candlewick account, but you’ll have to dig it up yourself) that he was inspired in making these by felt books where you could arrange shapes to create scenes and stories. Not only did he have these growing up, but his mother has these sets (designed by him, made by her, I believe) for sale, because an insanely talented creator like that clearly gets his skills from somewhere! Jon Klassen’s mother seems amazing, I’m just saying.

You can easily imagine, looking at those simple, cleanly designed shapes, moved around and organized neatly on the page (each shape is introduced on the right side of each spread, then tidily placed on the left), a child picking up a tree or a rock and placing it somewhere. As an adult, you beam inside thinking how nicely behaved that child is. Then, reflecting for a minute, you probably acknowledge that at the end of the game it’s all going to get thrown in the air and the pieces will be scattered. A cat might chew on one of the felt shapes. But this? This is a board book. It stays put. It is calm, it is organized. And the gentle amusement, the chuckles we get from those shifting eyes, all come to a close with the beautiful rising moon, making these ideal sleepy-time books.

The loveliness of the atmosphere calls to mind Taro Gomi’s gorgeously balanced, occasionally mischievous board books. One of my favourites is Little Chicks in which the chicks run and move and– whoops, there’s someone to avoid!– until they’re safely all the way home. There’s a quietness, an atmosphere that rounds out the “start, middle, end” structure rather than relying on an overly engineered plot or a scene squashed helter-skelter into cardboard pages. Well, that comparison is clearly not by happenstance because in the NYT piece I linked above, but am linking to again because it’s better worth reading than this but not as well worth reading as the board books themselves, Jon Klassen cites two board book influences: Taro Gomi and Sandra Boynton. (Sandra Boynton: if you’re reading this, send me a note, because I have so many questions for you about The Going to Bed Book, a work of literary genius.)

If you’re a board book connoisseur, you will instantly be intrigued because those two are very different one from the other. You will also be impressed, because they are, simply and bluntly put, the best creators at this format.

Board books are hard. I will up and say right now that even Jon Klassen (and I love Jon Klassen and am angry he’s not yet received the Nobel Prize for Literature) did not get himself added to Sandra Boynton and Taro Gomi as “the best at this format” in my personal pantheon. He’s pretty damned close, though, because his method in this series and his approach to the format as a whole are both brilliant. He centres the child and forces the reader to accord the child the attention and agency of building a world. The feeling of reading these with a child on your lap is perfect love. Further, he gives a span to the book not by cramming a plot that’s too big and unwieldy for a board book (a common error) into the cardboard pages, but by giving each the natural arc of a day. Simple, natural. The absolute best of the trio, to my mind, is Your Forest because of the ghost. My co-reader adored that ghost and was so satisfied the ghost came out at night as promised. Every book creator should keep promises with the attention of Jon Klassen.

And why does he do that? Because Jon Klassen respects his readers, these small ones as well as the older child. I love these books, and I think he even has room to grow as a board book creator if he has a mind to. And one thing that satisfies me in my deepest heart, the soul of my soul, is that I know that if he doesn’t think he’s got another board book to share, Jon Klassen will not squeeze one out. Like that felt book above, like the places he hands to the smallest children for them, like the bear seeking his hat– Jon Klassen takes the quality of what he produces seriously.

He admires the witchery of Sandra Boynton; I admire the craftsmanship of Jon Klassen. And both of those creators admire and attend to the genuine readership of their non-reader audiences. They respect babies, toddlers, and children. I think we all should.