Ages 10 to 14
From a legendary Caldecott Medalist and Honoree comes the gripping and revealing true story of a young Polish exile fighting to survive in war-torn Europe.
Born in the tumult of World War I, a young Jewish boy named Yehiel Szulewicz (the author's real-life uncle) feels stifled by the limits of his small Polish hometown, and at the rules set in place by his restrictive parents. Brimming with a desire for adventure, he leaves home before age sixteen to seek his future elsewhere. Little does he know, he’ll never see his parents again.
Yehiel's extraordinary fifteen-year journey takes him to Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, and far beyond. Often, he sleeps under the stars, with only the sky as his blanket. Often, he is indebted to the kindness of strangers. But he can’t outpace the evil spreading across Europe in the years leading up to World War II. As the fascists and Nazis rise to power, Yehiel finds himself a member of the Spanish Republican Army and then the Jewish Resistance in Vichy France, fighting for freedom, his friends, and his very life.
Inspired by the true story of Uri Shulevitz’s uncle and with stunning black-and-white illustrations from the author throughout, The Sky Was My Blanket is a sparkling and disarmingly simple account of a young person’s courage and resilience amid a dark period in global history.
About the Author
Uri Shulevitz (1935-2025) was a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator and author. He was born in Warsaw, Poland, on February 27, 1935. He began drawing at the age of three and, unlike many children, never stopped. The Warsaw blitz occurred when he was four years old, and the Shulevitz family fled, as chronicled in his acclaimed memoir Chance: Escape from the Holocaust. For eight years they were wanderers, arriving, eventually, in Paris in 1947. There Shulevitz developed an enthusiasm for French comic books, and soon he and a friend started making their own. At thirteen, Shulevitz won first prize in an all-elementary-school drawing competition in Paris's 20th district. In 1949, the family moved to Israel, where Shulevitz worked a variety of jobs: an apprentice at a rubber-stamp shop, a carpenter, and a dog-license clerk at Tel Aviv City Hall. He studied at the Teachers' Institute in Tel Aviv, where he took courses in literature, anatomy, and biology, and also studied at the Art Institute of Tel Aviv. At fifteen, he was the youngest to exhibit in a group drawing show at the Tel Aviv Museum. At 24 he moved to New York City, where he studied painting at Brooklyn Museum Art School and drew illustrations for a publisher of Hebrew books. One day while talking on the telephone, he noticed that his doodles had a fresh and spontaneous look—different from his previous illustrations. This discovery was the beginning of Uri's new approach to his illustrations for The Moon in My Room, his first book, published in 1963. Since then he has written and illustrated many celebrated children’s books. He won the Caldecott Medal for The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, written by Arthur Ransome. He has also earned three Caldecott Honors, for The Treasure, Snow and How I Learned Geography. His other books include One Monday Morning, Dawn, So Sleepy Story and many others. He also wrote the instructional guide Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children’s Books. Shulevitz’s final book, completed shortly before his death in New York City at age eighty-nine, is The Sky Was My Blanket: A Young Man’s Journey Across Wartime Europe, a narrative nonfiction account of the adventures of his father’s brother Yehiel, who ran away from home at age fifteen, journeyed through prewar Europe for a decade, and ended up a member of the Spanish Republican Army and then the Jewish Resistance in Vichy France.
