“If we could see each other exactly as the other is,” Ezra Jack Keats wrote, “this would be a different world.” The son of Polish immigrants escaping anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe, the world he grew up in was Brooklyn, New York.
Ezra’s family had always been poor but during the Great Depression of the 1930s, along with many, they suffered even greater hardships. His mother was supportive of his talent, but his father worried that Ezra wouldn’t be able to earn a living. Even so he would bring home tubes of paint from his work as a waiter, pretending he had traded them with penniless artists for food.
Tragically, Ezra’s father died of a heart attack the day before his high school graduation, at which he was to be awarded the senior class medal for excellence in art. Ezra had to identify the body. Later he said: “There in his wallet were worn and tattered newspaper clippings of the notices of the awards I had won. My silent admirer and supplier, he had been torn between his dread of my leading a life of hardship and his real pride in my work.” You can read more about Ezra Jack Keats here.
After working as an illustrator for other people’s books, he launched out on his own. “Then began an experience that turned my life around,” he wrote, “working on a book with a black kid as hero. None of the manuscripts I’d been illustrating featured any black kids—except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along.” These books, published through the 1960s and 70s, show his simple warm humanity, with wise insights into family life and being a child in the city.
His writing is confident and succinct. And his illustrations were groundbreaking, using collage, rubber stamps, spattered inks and paints, it’s as if these city life books are made out of the city’s detritus. And behind it all is the assured artist conjuring up people and places we believe and know now, even if they first appeared sixty years ago.
The link here is to a treasury that brings together nine of his picture books.