Books for World Refugee Day: Arvo Pärt and Uri Shulevitz

June 20 was designated World Refugee Day (WRD) in 2001, in recognition of the fiftieth anniversary of a United Nations convention on refugees organized in 1951. The intent of the original conference was to define who qualifies as a refugee and to delineate the rights of asylum seekers. WRD is an opportunity to raise awareness of the needs of displaced person both worldwide and in our communities.

Few people leave their homes, extended families, and the place that represents their cultural and linguistic heritage unless compelled by poverty or persecution. As citizens of an essentially prosperous country, we have the opportunity to touch the world by assisting its representatives who live among us. A number of well-established organizations in the U.S. coordinate services to refugees and opportunities for volunteers. Here in Eugene, Oregon, the Refugee Resettlement Coalition of Lane County partners with Catholic Community Services to support refugees and immigrants. (Click here for more information.)

The two books below represent the stories of two gifted European artists forced by twentieth-century geopolitics to leave their homes. Coincidentally, both were born in 1935. Uri Shulevitz, renowned children’s book author and illustrator, passed away in New York in February of this year. Composer Arvo Part returned to his homeland of Estonia in 2020, thirty years to the day after his departure as an exile of the communist government.

Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language, by Joonas Sildre, trans. Adam Cullen (Plough, 2024, 230 pp.)

This remarkable graphic novel chronicles Pärt’s Estonian childhood, the terrors of World War II, and his eventual exile to Western Europe in 1980. Interwoven with the events of Pärt’s life are the stages of his spiritual and musical journey toward the classical-contemporary musical style for which he is known. His compositions are heavily influenced by early Christian music and his devout Eastern Orthodox faith. 

Sildre’s black and taupe palette is appropriate to Pärt’s minimalist style. Extensive research has produced a narrative that creatively illustrates significant elements in Pärt’s story without miring the reader in detail. The book engages on spiritual, artistic, personal, and historical levels, right up to the family’s nearly miraculous 1980 departure from Soviet Estonia, with the survival of Pärt’s priceless tapes and manuscripts hanging in the balance.

Chance: Escape from the Holocaust, by Uri Shulevitz (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2020, 336pp)

The publisher recommends this for grades four to six, but I believe anyone interested in art, literature, or the major events of the twentieth century will find it as engrossing as I did. Shulevitz draws on his memories as well his father’s personal memoir to recount his parents’ flight from Nazi-occupied Poland, their years in “Turkestan,” and the itinerant existence that followed.

My own experience in Central Asia made Shulevitz’s childhood sojourn in Kazakhstan of particular interest. Shulevitz’s accounts of hunger, hardship, and his father’s ill-fated efforts to generate income make for somber but riveting reading. Eventually his family made their way back to Poland. Finding it an unfriendly place for returning Jews, they moved on, wending their way to Germany, Paris, and, later, Israel. After ten years Shulevitz moved to New York as a young man to pursue his career in art.

A multitude of narrow escapes and near misses make for breath-taking suspense. Shulevitz’s black and white drawings punctuate the text, including comic-style sequences and some of his early art. Shulevitz’sCentral Asia experiences are recounted briefly in the picture book, How I Learned Geography,(Farrar Strauss, 2008, 32pp, ages 5–8), reviewed here: World Refugee Day 2024.