Author Esther Hautzig Dies at 79
By SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 11/3/2009
Esther Hautzig, author of The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia (Ty Crowell, 1968), a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book, as well as other award-winning books, died November 1. She was 79.
The Endless Steppe is an autobiographical account of Hautzig’s (born Rudomin) life from the ages of 10 to 15, which were spent as a child in exile with her family in Siberia.
The Endless Steppe was a National Book Award finalist and American Library Association Notable Book in 1969. It won the Jane Addams Book Award in 1970 and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1971 and has been continually in print since 1968. Classrooms continue to read the book an example of courage and strength in the face of difficulty and prejudice.
"Haunting and spellbinding" is how School Library Journal critic Carol Fazioli summed up The Endless Steppe, a book that made Hautzig's name in literary circles. "After six weeks in cattle cars, we were deposited in Rubtsovsk, a tiny village in the Altai region of Siberia," Hautzig wrote in her introduction to Remember Who You Are: Stories about Being Jewish (Crown, 1990).
Most of Hautzig’s relatives who were not sent to Siberia were killed by the Nazis "in street actions," she stated in Remember Who You Are, "or slaughtered in Ponar," the killing ground outside Vilna where people were taken to dig their own graves and then shot into them.
"Except for two of my mother's cousins, an aunt, and the child of a cousin in Kovno, none survived the Holocaust.”
Under her maiden and married names, Esther Rudomin Hautzig wrote a variety of books, many related directly or indirectly to her childhood experiences or influences. Many of her early books were on home economics for children, giving detailed instructions on making crafts and food with little money or experience.
She actively promoted her Jewish heritage in Remember Who You Are, Riches (HarperCollins,1992), and she translated several stories from Yiddish. Her concern that children be exposed to other languages resulted in a "Four Languages" series, books all containing text in English, Spanish, French, and Russian.
Born in Vilna, Poland in 1930 (now Vilnius, Lithuania), Hautzig came from a prosperous Jewish family that owned a jewelry store in Vilna. But her childhood coincided with the beginning of World War II. In 1941, Soviet Union occupied that portion of Poland and arrested her family for being capitalists, or "enemies of the state." Forced from their home and friends, Hautzig and her family were deported Siberia.
Hautzig was lucky enough to live to tell her story about persecution by the Soviets. At the end of the war, at the age of 15, she and her family moved back to Poland. In May 1947, the Rudomins sent their daughter off alone to New York, an uncle having arranged a student visa. While en route Esther met Walter Hautzig, an Austrian-born American concert pianist, whom she married in 1950 and had two children, David and Deborah.
Naturally, Hautzig brought to the U.S. memories of two divergent childhoods: one of a "lovely world" in Poland, the other of cold and deprivation in the Siberian steppes.
Hautzig took classes at Hunter College (now Hunter College of the City University of New York), but she always knew she wanted to write. In order to be around books and people who wrote them, she took a job as secretary in a publishing house, eventually becoming publicity assistant for the Children's Book Council and later director of children's book promotion for Thomas Y. Crowell Company. “I entered publishing in 1951," she once stated, "and have been working at it ever since."
In Hautzig’s many appearances at conferences and classrooms, she encouraged people of all ages, especially young people, to keep a journal and record their stories. She believed that all stories were unique to the individuals writing them and each life story important in its own way.
Hautzig leaves behind a wealth of information about her life and work, the Esther Hautzig Papers, which contain research notes, typescripts, dummies, galleys, page proofs, blues, and correspondence related to On the Air: Behind the Scenes at a TV Newscast (Macmillan, 1991). The papers are organized into four series: book, fan mail, conference materials, and letters sent—and also include 23 boxes of fan mail from children around the world, mostly related to The Endless Steppe.
The material in the book series is arranged chronologically by order of creation when known. It includes research notes and clippings, books and taped interviews used for research, teleprompter scripts, weather maps, typescripts, galleys, page proofs, and blues. Among the typescripts is an alternate version of the book written by photographer and son, David..
Items in the conference materials series were gathered for Hautzig's presentation at the Children's Literacy Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, in June 1994. The items include correspondence with conference organizers and printed material that the author collected at the conference. The letters sent series includes a letter sent by the author to an unidentified teacher and letters sent to the de Grummond Collection.
