Peter Sís and the Building of The Wall

Jennifer M. Brown -- School Library Journal, 8/23/2007

In his new children’s book, Peter Sís, twice the recipient of a Caldecott Honor Award, and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2003, reflects on his experience growing up in Prague under a repressive Communist regime. 

At its core, The Wall is a tale of a boy who loves to draw. This simple third-person narrative appears along the bottom of the pages while, above, black, white, and red cartoon panel illustrations—in the palette of propaganda posters—convey the political events unfolding on the world stage from 1945 to 1992. Three spreads of Sís’s own journal entries (framed by personal photographs and his early drawings) provide a glimpse of key moments during his childhood and youth. 

The Wall not only explores the events immediately following World War II, but it also raises important questions about how we learn and what we learn, where we get information and how we evaluate it, and emphasizes the importance of discussion, debate, and the free flow of ideas—freedoms that Sís worries are endangered in our post-9/11 world. I spoke with Sís in his New York City studio: 

What prompted you to write The Wall?

For 10 years, I was blessed because [my] children were little, and they were my inspiration. I wanted to entertain them, and I was inspired by what they did—so [I wrote and illustrated] the Madlenka books and Fire Truck. The Three Golden Keys was the first book about what I lived through—a sort of memoir or message for my children. I continued with Galileo [Starry Messenger] and Charles Darwin [The Tree of Life]. 

When they are little, you tell [your children] how wonderful the world is. Then there’s that moment [when] all of a sudden everything changes, and you say, “Careful.” I wanted to tell them about Darwin and Galileo, that they were exceptional people who didn’t follow the mainstream, but they were later proven right. This is how I [arrived at] the subject of The Wall. 

How did you begin working on the book?

It started as a very funny book, [with] funny anecdotes of [growing up] in a totalitarian country. But then I realized it was serious. As a child, when everybody else is [blindly following authority], you think that it’s the right thing to do. Only when I look at it from today’s perspective [can I say,] what right did somebody have to make me do this, or to make me sign that? So I started to compare [that way of life] with life in a free society. 

Yet, at the same time, after 9/11, there are all these things happening in this country. I’m commuting every day and I find leaflets, which would be on every seat on the train, [stating],“If you see anybody who looks suspicious, sweats too much or is dressed in a funny way, call this number.” It reminded me of what we were told [when I was growing up in Prague]. 

How did you come up with the book’s basic format, the simple story of the child wanting the freedom to draw, juxtaposed against the larger events occurring around him?

In the beginning I was trying to cover everything—to explain how the telephones were bugged, how the mail was opened, [and] I was constantly struggling between the first person and the third person [narrative]. I always felt one of the main reasons to do this book was that I started to feel really angry: How can you take a little child and brainwash [that] child? 

Did the events following 9/11 stir up those feelings in you?

One day my son came home from school and said, “I know what a terrorist looks like; they have a green bandana,” and basically described a Hamas terrorist. But I thought, “This is dangerous,” because then you start to say, “These people are dressed in green and they have a green flag, and that means they are terrorists.” As a little child [under Soviet Communist rule], you were told, “These are bad guys and these are good guys,” and you would ask your parents, and your parents were scared that they would go to prison, so they [wouldn’t] tell you anything. 

That’s something you handled so well in the book—the expression of concern on the parents’ faces when the boy comes home from school with a drawing of tanks.

There were some parents who [said too much when their children were younger]. A child would go [to school] and say, “My father said Eisenhower is the best president of all,” and [the teacher would] say, “Oh your father said that?” Depending on the teacher, [he or she might then report] the father of this boy. If the police came, the father would be gone for 10 years. The child had no clue, and then maybe at age 20 he realizes, “I did that to my father.”  

In your original version, there are no journal entries. Why did you decide to include them?

It was very hard to balance [the narrative] of the child and the message. I wanted this book to be an educational tool, [but I also] had these personal stories [to share], like [the one I included about] the Beach Boys. It was just a coincidence that Allen Ginsberg and Bill Bradley and Louis Armstrong all [came to Prague] at one time. People talked about Prague Spring, which was 1968, but this was building up from ’64. It was almost like [the United States] had a sort of propaganda department, because they were sending very impressive people. They made us realize that the world is bigger.  

I [also] wanted to talk about a time when I was an adolescent, and we wanted to play rock ’n’ roll music, [but] it was against [party] politics. I realized that the Beatles and rock music maybe brought down Communism as much as Reagan or Gorbachev. It was amazing—to get to the minds of young people—before the Internet, before we could even get the records or the tape recordings. All of a sudden everybody knew who the Beatles were. No political system could do anything about it.