Every children’s book tells a story, but every children’s book has a story behind it. There are real people who wrote it, they went through certain circumstances to do that. And all of those, and their really publishing stories or back stories, if you will, endlessly fascinate me. I mean you give me any book title and I’m always intrigued to find out, okay, how did we get it? How did it come about? What happened in the process?
Certainly one of the most chilling stories to me, was one that I, I actually sort of worked, people I worked with firsthand. And Hans and Margaret Rey who I knew both of them and, and loved them both and worked with them for, I was fortunate to work with them for many years, were German Jews living in Paris at the time that Hitler’s army invaded France.
They had gone to Paris for a honeymoon and they had stayed a little long, they’d stayed for two years as Margaret said. They just fell in love with Paris, they, they never wanted to leave and suddenly they are in harm’s way. And if you know of course anything of that period, the German expatriates were rounded up, put in concentration camps and they were among the first people killed in, in France.
And so they knew they were in danger and they had train tickets and the train stopped running. And so Hans went around bicycle stores, all the bicycles had been sold, but he found spare parts and he put together a bicycle that they got on and put their manuscripts in and they started to peddle out of Paris, ahead of the Nazis, by 48 hours.
So they slept in fields and at one point they came up against a border guard and he was stopping them and he said, what do you do? And Hans said, well I, I write books for children. And he said, well let me see one of those books for children. And Hans pulled out a manuscript and the man read it and he laughed and he said, my kids would like this, you can go on.
And we talk about sometimes great books are, are lost by seconds and inches, but literally had he not had that manuscript, it is possible that they would never have, have gotten ahead of the Nazis.
Margaret Rey had modeled for the character in that manuscript and it was about a very curious monkey called Fifi, who had a lot of adventures. And so they got that manuscript out of the country, they came through Brazil, they had Brazilian passports, and they came to the United States of America and they were met by their British editor who knew— by the way, they have no money, they have nothing at all. And she gave them a four book contract but she said, I just don’t see Fifi working in the United States as a name for a monkey and they changed of course the monkey to Curious George. And that book was to go on and make their fame and fortune.
And when Margaret was 90, she would sit in her room at her house in Cambridge and it was a shrine to George. There were stuffed George toys and there were George puzzles and you know, there just everything George in her living room. And she would look around the room and she would say, Anita, I can’t believe that all of this came from that manuscript that we had on our bicycle in Paris so many years ago.
So to me that is one of the most dramatic of all the book stories because here we have this perfectly American, we think of Curious George as the most American of all characters. And yet he was created by German Jews in Paris, escaped the Nazis, came through Brazil and eventually comes to the United States, so he’s a true immigrant.