From: Barbara Scotto <barbara_scotto>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 23:31:19 -0400

After I read Tomi: A Childhood Under the Nazis, I felt that I had a much greater insight into Ungerer's work. The sense of chaos below the surface of his stories and the slightly malevolent adult characters are very much in keeping with life as Ungerer experienced it. Tomi's mother was a self?ntered and manipulative woman who survived and kept her family intact by using her wits. She showered her son with affection, much of it unwanted, fostered his feelings of fragility, and thus difference from other children, by keeping him home from school at the slightest opportunity, and encouraged his subversive behavior toward anyone she considered beneath her.
        All of this occurred at a time when the world seemed to be unraveling, and Ungerer was not protected from this in any way. While he was treated as a child in certain ways, he seemed to be privy to all that was going on. The family acted as a unit; the adults did not seem to provide any kind of buffer for him against the harsh reality of the war.
        When I think of his books, what comes to mind is a child's world that is very much like the one in which Ungerer lived - brutality and horror can crop up anywhere and be barely noticed. Often it is difficult to tell in the usual way who is good and who isn't, and characters' relationships are ambivalent and tenuous.

Barbara Scotto Driscoll School Brookline, MA barbara_scotto at brookline.mec.edu
Received on Thu 12 Aug 1999 10:31:19 PM CDT