As 2016 winds down to a close, it’s time to say “Happy 100th birthday” to Ezra Jack Keats, celebrated author of the classic children’s book “The Snowy Day.”
Published over 50 years ago, it is a tender story of a young African-American boy — clad in a now iconic red-hooded snowsuit — as he experiences the wonder of freshly fallen snow in the streets of his city neighborhood.
Even today, many are surprised to learn that Keats, born Ezra Jack Katz, was the New York City-born son of poor Jewish immigrants from Poland.
Keats grew up in East New York, a largely Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Keats’ art drew upon the people and urbanscapes of his childhood, according to Martin Pope, his lifelong friend and president of the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, a nonprofit that supports educational programs for children and schools.
To mark the centennial of Keats’ birth, the award-winning children’s book writer Andrea Davis Pinkney has penned “A Poem for Peter,” an enchanting, lyrical narrative that traces Keats’ life from the hardships faced by his immigrant parents, to his school days earning money painting street signs, to the discrimination he encountered as a Jew looking for work as an illustrator.
By pursuing his unlikely dream to become an artist, Keats left his mark on the art world and world of children’s books.
From the opening page in “A Poem for Peter,” Pinkney weaves in the character of Peter, Keats’ beloved young fictional boy who continues to warm the hearts of young readers around the world.
“A Poem for Peter” comes to life with illustrations and collages by Lou Fancher and Steve Johnson that are inspired by Keats’ art, and also incorporate some of Keats’ original artwork. The result is a masterful marriage of story and art.
When “The Snowy Day” was published in 1962, the seemingly innocent tale transformed the landscape of American children’s literature. Arriving at the height of the country’s civil rights movement, its young hero, Peter, was the first black child to take center stage in an illustrated book in the mainstream children’s market. The book became an instant bestseller and earned the prestigous Randolph Caldecott Medal in 1963.
The book was also remarkable for its urban setting, and set a new artistic bar for Keats’ bold blocks of color and imaginative use of collage. His art and life were the subject of a national touring exhibit that began at New York’s Jewish Museum in 2011, the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, and showed at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum in 2012.
During the years Keats spent illustrating the books of other writers, he was struck by the absence of African-American children. “My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along,” he wrote in an article referenced in the exhibit’s catalog.
Pinkney — born the year “The Snowy Day” won the Caldecott — is among newer generations of writers and artists who credit Keats as a major influence in their lives.
“My parents read it over and over and over,” Pinkney said. “During happy and not-so-happy times, there was ‘The Snowy Day.’ ”