Erika's Story
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
It is the winter of 1944. In Nazi-occupied Europe, a Jewish couple realizes their fate is sealed and make a heart-rending decision so that their infant daughter might live. Ruth Vander Zee’s elegant narration and Roberto Innocenti’s searingly beautiful illustrations combine to capture the fear, love, and sadness of a Holocaust survivor’s story. Based on a brief encounter the author had in 1995 with a woman in Germany, the tale weaves first-person fact with Vander Zee’s empathetic imaginings of what must have prompted the greatest act of sacrifice and hope that any parent could make.
Ruth Vander Zee‘s career as a children’s book author began in 2003 with the original publication of Erika’s Story, which prompted her to write three other titles that feature characters who respond to tragedy with courage and hope. Vander Zee lives with her husband in Miami, Florida.
Roberto Innocenti is a self-taught artist who has earned worldwide acclaim with such illustrated books as Erika’s Story, Rose Blanche, and The Adventures of Pinocchio. In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for his contributions to children’s literature. He lives in Florence, Italy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This picture book may raise more questions than it answers, starting with the five-pointed die-cut star on the cover, a window to the yellow page beneath. Is this supposed to be a reference to the Star of David, like the one worn by Erika, whom the author (in an author's note) claims to have met in a German village in 1995 and whose story she purports to tell here? Erika believes she was a few months old when she was thrown from a train bound for Dachau and saved by a kind and courageous woman. Her Erika is caught in lengthy conjecture about her parents and their tragic plight. Of her rescuer and of her own life Erika says little, other than the critical news that she has children and grandchildren, and that her star "still shines." (Perhaps this is what's meant by the cover?) Vander Zee has more the beginnings of a story than a nuanced work, but Innocenti (Rose Blanche) lives up to his admirers' expectations with his haunting, even harrowing drawings. Grim black-and-white illustrations show adults and children entering cattle cars, their faces blocked by headscarves or by the barrier reading "Verboten"; the German soldiers present only their impervious backs to readers. As the train pulls out, Innocenti imagines a snow-white baby carriage left by the track, its emptiness speaking volumes. With other images, both real and nightmarish, the art conveys a measure of the anguish of the Nazi victims' vulnerability. Ages 10-up.
