The wall Growing up behind the Iron Curtain

Peter Sís, 1949-

Book - 2007

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Children's Room j943.704/Sis Withdrawn
Subjects
Published
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2007.
Language
English
Main Author
Peter Sís, 1949- (-)
Edition
1st ed
Item Description
"Frances Foster books."
Physical Description
unpaged : ill., maps
ISBN
9780374347017
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

IN the spring of 1957, a Hungarian girl appeared one day in my second-grade class in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Our teacher urged us to welcome the new arrival, who spoke no English and would be staying in our class temporarily. Her family, we were told, had just come to America to escape the Russians. On the playground days later, during a game of cowboys and Indians, one of the second-grade boys picked up a stick, aimed it like a gun and "fired" at a classmate, who fell to the ground with a theatrical flourish. I was enjoying the spectacle from my perch on a nearby rock when a blood-curdling scream rang out across the schoolyard. It was the new girl. She too had been watching the game. When she saw the boy fall to the ground - I somehow knew this instantly - she thought it was because he really had been shot. The girl, I later learned, had had reason to think this, having lived through the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Children make what sense they can of the life they are given. Far from our sun-splashed suburban playground during those same years, the artist Peter Sis was a schoolboy growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia In "The Wall," he tells the story of his early years as a citizen of that Eastern bloc nation, where he learned at school to think and draw what he was told, and of his gradual rejection of Communism. (In Los Angeles in 1982 to make a film for the Czech government, Sis chose not to return to his homeland.) The story unfolds in a word-and-picture montage consisting of a spare, fable-like narrative, introductory and closing notes, a historical timeline, diary excerpts, childhood drawings, family photos and, at the center of it all, a sequence of playful but intense pen-line drawings, many of them arrayed in storyboard panels. "The People's Militia enforces the new order. ... The display of red flags on state holidays - COMPULSORY. ... Western radio is banned (and jammed)" For young readers unfamiliar with cold war-era history, timeline entries like these are a lot to absorb. As Sis writes in his afterword: "Now when my American family goes to visit my Czech family in the colorful city of Prague, it is hard to convince them it was ever a dark place full of fear, suspicion and lies." To bridge the gap, Sis presents his readers with graphic equivalents for the feel as well as the substance of the life he knew. People in the drawings are scaled down, toylike. They look as if they could be easily crushed. The predominance of black and white suggests the diminished possibilities under Communism for freedom of expression. Where touches of color do appear - on a demonstration banner, as a star shape on the side of a military tank - the color is usually red. When a full rainbow of colors makes its voluptuous appearance in the later illustrations, we too feel the rush of joy that unrestrained color came to symbolize in the lives of Sis and his friends. Because children know all about tattling and betrayal, young readers of "The Wall" will be able to imagine the atmosphere of fear implied in a passing reference to the Czech government's policy of encouraging schoolchildren to inform on their parents, and one another, for speaking out against the regime. Children in fact know a great deal about tyranny. They learn about it on the playground, as the English folklorists Iona and Peter Opie showed in "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren" (1959), a study of traditional schoolyard chants and rhymes that laid bare the cruelty implicit in much childhood group behavior. How sympathetically did my classmates and I react to our visitor's alarmed misreading of our "innocent" war game? That I have no memory of this prompts me to fear the worst. "The Wall" is a brave book for acknowledging, as Sis writes, "how easy it is to brainwash a child," and for taking on a serious subject at a time when feel-good children's books are widely assumed to be what sells. It is also a challenging book, and with its blizzard of fleeting references to everything from the Hungarian uprising to the Beach Boys, 8- and 9-year-olds will most likely need a parent or other handy font of knowledge to help them make their way to the end. COMPRESSING history into fable can confuse matters. "On November 9, 1989," Sis writes, "the wall fell." On that date, the Berlin Wall - a hugely symbolic stretch of the Iron Curtain - did come down. But when did the setting of "The Wall" shift to Germany from Czechoslovakia, where the Velvet Revolution that ended Communist rule followed days and weeks later? For Sis as for so many others, the collapse of the Eastern bloc's oppressive governments was a dream come true. In "The Wall," the ecstatic energy and big-spirited inventiveness of the artist's drawings make the once all but unimaginable realization of that dream visible for all to see. Yet history should perhaps have the last word. In "The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989," Frederick Taylor writes that notwithstanding their public protestations of outrage, Western leaders, including President John F. Kennedy, were more relieved than angered by the Soviets' sealing off of East Berlin, a move that effectively put a lid for a generation on a highly volatile situation. To ordinary people around the world, it may have seemed that freedom, justice and integrity all lay on one side of the wall, and terror, injustice and lies on the other. What if in fact the wall served the governments' purposes on both sides equally well? How dark a fable would it take to tell that tale? Leonard S. Marcus's new book is "Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children's Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon Along the Way."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In an autobiographical picture book that will remind many readers of Marjane Satrapi's memoir Persepolis (2003), Sís' latest, a powerful combination of graphic novel and picture book, is an account of his growing up in Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule. Written in several stands, the somewhat fragmented narrative never dilutes the impact of the boldly composed panels depicting scenes from Sís' infancy through young adulthood. Throughout, terrific design dramatizes the conflict between conformity and creative freedom, often through sparing use of color; in many cases, the dominant palette of black, white, and Communist red threatens to swallow up young Peter's freely doodled, riotously colored artwork. The panels heighten the emotional impact, as when Sís fleeing the secret police, emerges from one spread's claustrophobic, gridlike sequence into a borderless, double-page escape fantasy. Even as they side with Peter against fearsome forces beyond his control, younger readers may lose interest as the story moves past his childhood, and most will lack crucial historical context. But this will certainly grab teens who will grasp both the history and the passionate, youthful rebellions against authority as well as adults, many of whom will respond to the Cold War setting. Though the term picture book for older readers has been bandied about quite a bit, this memorable title is a true example.--Mattson, Jennifer Copyright 2007 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Born out of a question posed to S!s (Play, Mozart, Play!) by his children ("Are you a settler, Dad?"), the author pairs his remarkable artistry with journal entries, historical context and period photography to create a powerful account of his childhood in Cold War-era Prague. Dense, finely crosshatched black-and-white drawings of parades and red-flagged houses bear stark captions: "Public displays of loyalty-compulsory. Children are encouraged to report on their families and fellow students. Parents learn to keep their opinions to themselves." Text along the bottom margin reveals young S!s's own experience: "He didn't question what he was being told. Then he found out there were things he wasn't told." The secret police, with tidy suits and pig faces, intrude into every drawing, watching and listening. As S!s grows to manhood, Eastern Europe discovers the Beatles, and the "Prague Spring of 1968" promises liberation and freedom. Instead, Soviet tanks roll in, returning the city to its previous restrictive climate. S!s rebels when possible, and in the book's final spreads, depicts himself in a bicycle, born aloft by wings made from his artwork, flying toward America and freedom, as the Berlin Wall crumbles below. Although some of S!s's other books have their source in his family's history, this one gives the adage "write what you know" biting significance. Younger readers have not yet had a graphic memoir with the power of Maus or Persepolis to call their own, but they do now. Ages 8-up. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review

Gr 5 Up-In parallel stories, Sis chronicles his early years as an artist learning to draw and the rise and fall of communism in the former Czechoslovakia. Sis intersperses his developing awareness of freedom of expression with fanciful illustrations, maps, and journal entries in this picture book for older readers. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review

(Intermediate, Middle School, High School) The personal meets the political in this absorbing autobiographical picture book from Czech emigre Sis. Born in 1949, just as Czechoslovakia fell under communist rule and Soviet domination, Sis evokes the childhood of a born artist (""as long as he could remember, he had loved to draw"") in a country where restrictions on what an artist could do grew along with him, where a child's love for drawing shapes and people was channeled, at school, into drawing tanks and hammer-and-sickles. While the brief main text of each page describes Sis's own experiences (""Slowly he started to question. He painted what he wanted to -- in secret""), small captions illuminate the thumbnail pictures of conditions in the country. Strategically accented with red stars and flags, these black ink drawings, sometimes four or six to a page, are almost entirely composed of short, stuttering horizontal pen strokes. The technique is all the more effective for the contrast it allows to Sis's -- and Czechoslovakia's -- expansive forays into freedom, like the full-color double-page spread depicting the Prague Spring of 1968, which blossoms with images of John Lennon, a Yellow Submarine, and a star-dappled winged horse at the end of a rainbow. The deployment of media choices and color throughout the book is both expert and telling: bold, stark black marker for an invading Soviet tank, dreamy blue crayon for the night the Beach Boys played Prague. It's a surprisingly comprehensive portrait of an era, an artist, and the persistence of the latter in the face of the former. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

S"s has loved to draw for as long as he can remember, and this work tells the parallel stories of his early years drawing and the rise and fall of communism in Czechoslovakia. At home, he could draw what he wanted, but at school he drew what he was told, his only freedom being to dream and hope. A concise introduction fleshes out the history of the time, leaving the rest of the volume for a potent mix of narration, fanciful illustrations, maps and double-page spreads for journal entries. Made palpable is the frustration of an artist in a constrictive society, especially when "Bits and pieces of news from the West begin to slip through the Iron Curtain"--news of the Beatles, Elvis, Allen Ginsberg and the Harlem Globetrotters, depicted in full color to contrast with the grey darkness of the Eastern Bloc. As in all of S"s's works, much is going on here, and readers will want to read it through, and then pore over the illustrations. A masterpiece for readers young and old. (afterword) (Nonfiction. 8+) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

From The Wall "When my American family goes to visit my Czech family in the colorful city of Prague , it is hard to convince them it was ever a dark place full of fear, suspicion, and lies. I find it difficult to explain my childhood; it's hard to put it into words, and since I have always drawn everything, I have tried to draw my life-- before America --for them." --P.S. Excerpted from The Wall: Growing up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.