Continuing our Authors Remember Their Grandparents series, today we welcome Elisa Kleven to the PaperTigers blog with a beautiful piece about her grandmother.
Elisa has illustrated two picture books that are about a little girl Rosalba and her grandmother – Abuela and Isla, both written by Arthur Dorros (Dutton Juvenile 1991 and 1995). These are magical stories in which Rosalba and Abuela fly hand-in-hand over New York (Abuela) and over the Caribbean island where Abuela grew up (Isla), powered, as it were, by the flights their imaginations take thanks to the stories that Abuela tells and Rosalba loves.
And, as Elisa pointed out to me, “Two other of my own stories that mention grandmas are The Apple Doll, when Lizzy’s mom tells her that her own mom taught her how to make an apple doll, and my very early book, Ernst, which features a kind, loving crocodilian grandmother.”
Elisa has two books due out later this year, her own The Friendship Wish (Dutton Juvenile, due October 2011), and One Little Chicken written by Elka Weber (Tricycle Press, due August 2011), which she says, “takes place in a little Jewish village, probably something like a prettified, peaceful version of my grandma’s.” Her grandmother’s influence on her work becomes very clear in her piece below, and once you’ve read it, I’m sure you’ll be as glad as I am to know that Elisa is now working on a new picture book about her Grandma Eva, for she sounds a very remarkable person.
To find out more about Elisa’s work, visit our Gallery and read her interview with PaperTigers – and visit her website.
My Grandma Eva (and what she found in clay)
My mother’s mother, the aptly named Eva Art, was a sculptor whose magical ability to conjure vivid people and animals from clay has colored my own world view. Delicate, quick to laugh, sensitive as a bird, Grandma Eva could also be deeply melancholy. She didn’t like to talk about her past. When I would beg her to tell me stories about her childhood in a little Jewish village in Ukraine her mouth would tighten into a sad, tense line.
This much I knew: she was sent at age fourteen with her sixteen-year-old sister to work with relatives in a tailor shop in America, and she never again saw her parents or seven brothers – all lost to anti-Semitic violence.
Her sculptures, however, tell many stories. She discovered her gift almost by accident: as a fourth grader, my mom received the assignment given to all California public school children, then and now, which was to make a miniature model of a California Spanish Mission. Excited by the challenge, Grandma helped my mother carve a tiny mission from a bar of Ivory Soap – and hooray! – her passion for sculpting was born.
Grandma quickly moved from mission-making in soap to shaping figures with clay. As she worked her fingers through the oozy, cool cl
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