THE SKY WAS MY BLANKET

In his final, posthumously published work, the late Caldecott Medalist tells the true story of his uncle’s travails in World War II–era Europe.

Several years before war broke out, 15-year-old Yehiel Szulewicz left his strict, devoutly Jewish home in Poland in search of adventure. Blown like a tumbleweed through much of Europe, often barely half a step ahead of Nazis and Blackshirts, he survived by relying on quick thinking, the kindness of strangers, and sheer luck. He trained as a leathersmith, took part in the Spanish Civil War against Franco, joined the Jewish resistance in France, changed his name to Henri Sulewic, and married a woman named Ida Winograd. Though he never reunited with his family, he learned of their tragic fates and spent his later years painting pictures of the obliterated Jewish community of his childhood. The matter-of-fact voice of the narrative, told from Yehiel’s first-person perspective, contrasts sharply with the underlying horrors shaping his life; his accounts of his family’s murders and the brutality of battles are related in much the same tone as descriptions of buying a secondhand pair of shoes, with the banal and the terrible often just a few sentences apart. That juxtaposition embodies the true power of the story, making the subject matter a bit easier to stomach yet all the more heartrending. Shulevitz’s ominous black-and-white sketches are interspersed throughout.

Quietly potent and intensely empathetic.