Shulevits U. How I Studied Geography

2009 Caldecott Honor

How I Learned Geography

It is not the number of toys in childhood that determines a person's character. A picture book about how a simple geographical map determined a person's fate and made them happy - during the hardest years of the war.

This is an autobiography. Yes, yes. Only it does not take up a thousand pages. And it tells of one single episode from childhood. Which determined the child's worldview for life.

Perhaps each of us carries in their soul a certain starting point of the formation of their personality. Uri Shulevitz managed to express it so that a simple memory became a work of art. A book of amazing psychological impact, emotional perception, and artistic accuracy. A picture book. In which - as in all picture books, the illustrations take a full-fledged place alongside the text.

The story is as follows: a family is saved from invaders and flees from their home in Poland to Turkestan. A foreign home, a foreign language, no money, no food. And one day the father - instead of bread - brings a geographical map into the house. And a four-year-old boy, having no other toys or books, spends days looking at the huge map hanging on the wall, which also became the only decoration in the small room where the family huddled.

This map - this gift from his father, which Uri Shulevitz will carry in his heart all his life - taught Uri to dream. The little boy is carried away in his imagination to the most unknown corners of the earth, he composes poems from the names he reads on the geographical map, he imagines how and who lives in the hot sands, cold ice, huge cities, wild forests. This map makes him forget about hunger and feel happy. This is a psychologically very accurate story about the formation of a child's soul.

Uri Shulevitz is both the author of the text and the author of the illustrations. The book is doubly autobiographical. 

This book, despite the complexity of the subject, is filled with joy.. There is no hopelessness in it. And at the same time, it is devoid of moralizing and didacticism. Discussion is invited by itself. 

It can be viewed and read even with small children.

For older children - the book will also be a great reason for conversations - about games, about endlessly purchased toys, about how and what other children play, how their parents played, how childhood was spent with grandparents.

The book received the Caldecott Honor - the highest award in the field of picture books in the world. By the way, Shulevitz was awarded three similar awards in different years, and received one Caldecott Medal.