Louise Borden, The Journey that Saved Curious George (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005)
Folks around the Green Man offices know that I am working on an omnibus of novels that take place in Europe during or in the years leading up to World War II -- so I wasn't terribly surprised to find this book sitting on my desk one morning. In fact, the brownie who delivered it to my office took the Curious George toy off my bookcase and sat him on top of the book, just to make sure I didn't miss the connection!
The Journey that Saved Curious George looks like a children's book -- it has the dimensions of a standard U.S. sheet of paper and is about 75 pages long, with large type and lots of cute and funny illustrations by Allan Drummond. Well, most of the type is large -- except for the footnotes, which are anything but large. And many of the illustrations are cute and funny -- but quite a lot of them are reproductions of archival documents, like passports and diary pages and typewritten letters from book publishers. And others are reproductions of archival photographs of Paris scenes and of soldiers marching and of Adolf Hitler saluting. These are neither cute nor funny.
This is the story of how Margret and Hans Reyersbach escaped from Paris literally hours before the Nazi troops marched into town. The Reyersbachs, who were married in Brazil in 1935, became a creative team, writing and illustrating children's books. They changed their last name to Rey, which was easier to write and to pronounce. Both Jews born in Hamburg, Germany, the Reys were Brazilian citizens when they came to Paris on their honeymoon. Although they traveled around France, they made Paris their home base for the next several years. Like many creative people, they were so focused on their work that they didn't pay as much attention to world events as they might have, and so they returned to Paris from a seaside holiday just as many other people were trying to escape. Even though they were citizens of another country, they finally realized that their Jewishness would put them in great danger when the Nazis entered Paris.
The project that was on the drawing board when they left Paris was a book about a mischievous little monkey named Fifi. Although they were not able to take very many of their possessions with them on the long journey that began on June 12, 1940, Hans managed to pack and carry with him the manuscript for this book. They got out of France and crossed Spain into Portugal. From there, they took one steamship to Rio de Janeiro and another one to New York, finally arriving in Manhattan on October 14. About a year later, Fifi's story was published in America under the new title, Curious George. The Reys were very lucky, and so were all the people who got to know Curious George through all his subsequent adventures!
I mentioned at the start of this review that the book contains footnotes and reproductions of archival documents. Louise Borden has also included a one-page essay that explains how she did the research that led to the story. I am very appreciative of meticulous historical research, and I am very impressed at the way Ms. Borden approached this work. She visited libraries and archives, read notes and letters and newspaper articles, conducted interviews with people who knew the Reys intimately, and even visited some of the places they traveled through on their escape route. I learned that the University of Southern Mississippi, lately battered by Hurricane Katrina, is the site of the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection, which made me both delighted and sad.
This is a story for parents or other caring adults to share with children who are emotionally ready to understand the terrible danger that the Reys and many other people in Europe faced during those years.
