This month is Jewish American Heritage Month in the USA. (It’s also Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, so I think everyone has to be extra special celebratory about Richard Ho’s Two New Years, just saying.) Now, there’s a big whomping chunk of Jewish American Heritage that a huge number of Americans, and folks across the world, experience and continue to enjoy, but have no idea is Jewish, and while I rather enjoy that it’s so universally relevant and beloved, one thing bothers me. It doesn’t bother me that people read and love Where the Wild Things Are without knowing that Maurice Sendak was Jewish, or that people continue to adore Frog and Toad without knowing that Arnold Lobel was Jewish. I don’t much mind that people have no idea that the author of The Snowy Day was Jewish. I had no idea about any of them for a long, long time myself, and it was a pleasant surprise to learn that, “Oh, hey! They’re like me!” But I wish more people knew about A Poem for Peter, by Andrea Davis Pinkney with art by Lou Fancher and Steve Johnson. Because she completes that story with beauty and vivacity and I want to tell you how. So read on.
I rather regret never writing about this book before; I never knew where to begin. But then another JAHM came and I didn’t see it on any lists, and the book was published in 2016, which, in the fast-moving world of publishers, may as well be 1916, so I was sad about that. I realized I want the staggering influence of Jews– trailblazing, vividly revolutionary, subversive, progressive, and forward-thinking Jews– in picture books to be recognized, and I want to give a huge round of applause to Andrea Davis Pinkney, who is herself part of a revolutionary and trailblazing family of picture book creators (she often collaborates with her husband, Brian Pinkney, an author and illustrator, and Brian’s father, Jerry Pinkney, won the Caldecott Medal for The Lion & the Mouse), for this beautiful book.
I’ll never forget reading The Snowy Day to a class of elementary school Jewish kids. “I know that book,” one kid announced, and the rest murmured that, yeah, they knew it, “it was for babies, though,” one obnoxious kid I particularly loved muttered. (He always started out being a brat and always ended up loving the books I read, and did I preen? Yes, I became an obnoxious brat in my own right, muttering, “Gotcha!” in my own quiet mind.) Not one kid knew the author was Jewish. “His last name was really Katz? But that’s my last name!” And then, as I read and showed the pictures, the room became quiet except for the good kind of interruption: “Crunch, crunch, crunch…” a few kids murmured along with me, remembering the words from years ago. Or: “Oooh that will melt,” a sympathetic kid exclaimed when Peter brought the snowball inside.
Do I need to tell you I got a bit choked up? And that my heart swelled a bit? These kids thought they were too old for a book like that. And they were rapt, attentive, remembering, feeling and noticing new details. And when I picked up A Poem for Peter and said, “Do you know who’s holding Peter’s hand?” they were curious. That’s the author and illustrator, I told them, and his name was Jacob Ezra Katz. And I read them the opening of Andrea Davis Pinkney’s book: “Brown-sugar boy in a blanket of white. Bright as the day you came onto the page. From the hand of a man who saw you for you.” I couldn’t afford the time to read them the whole thing, which pained me, but I gave a summary, and every kid left with a new bit of knowledge and a new bit of pride and a new dose of gratitude to Andrea Davis Pinkney.
Ezra Jack Keats’s family, the Katz’s, came over from Warsaw “a land,” Andrea Davis Pinkney calls it, “filled with impossible odds.” And she doesn’t sugar-coat the situation in America, either. No. It was hard. Jobs scarce, discrimination plentiful.
“But when it snowed,
oh, when it snowed!
Nature’s glittery hand
painted the world’s walls a brighter shade.”
If you’re an east coast kid and remember back when we had seasons– you know that feeling, you know it well. And as you read that, I hope you’re also noticing the lovely cadence and alliteration of her poetry. Her free and lyrical style leans on accent rather than syllable count or rhyme, and the poem is replete with twists of rhetoric and style which add layered richness to the poem. She writes of Benjamin Katz, Ezra’s father, that he’s a waiter “his apron stained with fry-grease / and the longing for something better / than his battered flat on Vermont Street.” Each line break has a twist: first that sensory fry-grease right then and there; twist with an and: yes, it’s a connection, this longing, but also the eyes turn outward, to that “something better”…; twist: plump back to reality, that battered flat, another dash of realism. This is exquisite poetry.
But where is Peter? Peter is yet to come. Young Ezra is growing. The family has moved to America, and they’re struggling to get by, but through the bustle and hardship, Ezra grows and dreams. His dream is to be an artist. His father worries, but still brings half-used tubes of paint home from the artists who hang around Pete’s Coffee Pot, where he works– pinching pennies from his meagre wages to pay for them, but lying, unable to admit that he’s “supporting a pipe-dream / that might never come true.” But Ezra works. And works. Until the day before his graduation with scholarships to art school, his father dies of a heart attack. Grieving, and his mother plunged in depression, he has to turn on all of those dreams and hopes and give up the scholarships, and here is some of the most stunning poetry in the book:
“How to know
which way to turn
when every avenue
is a dead-end street.”
The heart of it all. The heart of being beaten down by circumstance– and onward to rising above. Ezra did what odd work he could to get by, and learned as he went, with the Art Students League giving him a chance to experiment, learn, and play, until finally, when President Roosevelt’s New Deal came along, the WPA gave him a job painting murals. Finally! And onward to drawing comics.
“And that, little child, brought you
one step closer.
Yes, Peter, you.”
After the punch in the gut of those sharp, short lines of pain, the diffuseness and warmth of this direct address opens up so much, and they open us up to Ezra’s mind, wondering why all those heroes in the comics he had to draw were always so white, and, as he caught sight of a series of photos in Life magazine, we see his eventual model for Peter, the sweet-cheeked chubby child.
And this is all true, this is history. This is picture book history that Andrea Davis Pinkney, in her vivid, lyrical poem, opening fact to the warmth and pain and gentleness of her voice in a way no one else could, brings forward to us, to, I hope, kids who might be returning to The Snowy Day with questions as they grow. She shows us the Warsaw-born child struggling through discrimination, losing his dad who couldn’t ever admit to supporting him (though he did), while his mother is bitter and depressed, losing his chance at art school, working and striving, and seeing, with sharp eyes, that discrimination goes to more than just him– and he sees these photos and sees a person, a real person, and he cuts out those pictures and tacks them on his wall for twenty years…
And then he’s drafted.
And, again, Andrea Davis Pinkney minces no words in this book. She describes the war, thus:
“War rose throughout the world.
Hitler, and evil beast of a man,
was on a mission
to rid every crevice and country
of all Jews,
and anyone else born with even a drop
of difference.”
Well. That does just about sum it up.
And off Ezra goes to draw and paint posters and booklets and charts and maps and pictures to support the war effort. And then, coming back from the war, where he had served his country and combatted that “evil beast of a man” who wanted to “rid every crevice and country of all Jews,” Ezra has to find a way to get a job in a country full of want ads that say “No Jews Need Apply.” So he changes his name from Jacob (Jack) Ezra Katz to Ezra Jack Keats. “It was a name that only hinted at his heritage,” Andrea Davis Pinkney drily notes.
Soon, Ezra is asked to illustrate children’s books for others, and is good at it, but the art is all white. “The books on the shelves / made Ezra call out / like a daddy looking for his lost child: / Where are you?” Until he’s invited to write and illustrate his own story.
And then comes Peter. “And yet, you were there all along.” And he was. For twenty years, Ezra had kept those pictures, knowing that child had a story to tell– many, in fact, since Peter turns up again and again. And Peter tells Ezra who he is, with his red snowsuit and sweet-cheeked face, making snow angels and climbing mountains. Peter was eager, as Andrea Davis Pinkney tells it, to race along and have adventures, and Ezra was ready to yank up the shades of the picture book world and reveal “the brilliance of a brown-bright day.” (That alliteration, those firm accents!)
Andrea Davis Pinkney shows gleeful enjoyment in reading the story: Peter cheerfully smacks the trees with his stick, knocking down the ice-packed intolerance from narrow-minded branches. I laugh along, enjoying her reading, but I more love to look at the illustration of tall, hatted Ezra Jack Keats, looking warmly down at the little mite in the red snowsuit he’s holding by the hand. His darling, his child, who wanted to be there and sprang into the world with his love and support. The two go together, the tall Jewish man and the radiant, curious brown-sugar boy.
Ezra Jack Keats quietly and firmly opened that door, putting a Black child in picture books, front and centre, where he had always belonged. But it’s Andrea Davis Pinkney, vividly brilliant Black woman with the lovely, lyrical voice, who gave us a book about this Jewish man who faced discrimination but didn’t let it embitter him. Instead he handed the voice and the page to Peter, seeing that Peter had no voice. And Andrea Davis Pinkney tells that story, right back to us.
There need be no competition, no discrimination Olympics, readers and friends! There is only the story, and the need to tell it. And if you tell the story that needs to be told, and you tell it beautifully, with cadence and rhythm and bright red snowsuits sliding over that packed snow– everyone, yes, everyone will be better for it.
This JAMH month I want to thank Andrea Davis Pinkney for giving us Ezra Jack Keats, who gave the world Peter’s place.