King Winter’s Birthday ……….

At 75 I know I have never really grown up.

Or perhaps after doing the business of working for 40 years, bringing up kids, and being serious I can revert to that other time.

But that would be to ignore that I have always enjoyed reading the comics of my childhood along with the books that took me far from Peckham, Eltham, and later Manchester.

So, with that out of the way it’s the book King Winter’s Birthday which captivated me on Christmas Day.

The publisher’s review described as “An achingly beautiful, timeless picture book by bestselling author Jonathan Freedland and illustrated by Emily Sutton, inspired by a story from Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, author of The Passenger

It's King Winter's birthday, and he wants his party to be really special. He asks all of his brothers and sisters to be there: Queen Spring, King Summer and Queen Autumn.

But the wind and the trees whisper a warning, and as the four play magical games, something strange begins to happen outside.

Inspired by a story from Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, written while he was interned on the Isle of Man during the Second World War, this timeless fairy tale is a celebration of nature's rhythms, and of a chaotic world restored to balance”.

And it is wonderfully retold by Jonatham Freedland and accompanied by a magical set of illustrations by Emily Sutton which are in the style of pictures I remember from the 1950s and 60s.

And it ends with a short biography of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz who was German and Jewish and who wrote the powerful novel The Paasenger which is to my knowledge the first fictional account of the events which led up to Kristallnacht.*

Alexander Boschwitz, wrote the book in 1939, and it details the experiences of Otto Silbermann a German Jew caught up in the growing nightmare of  state sponsored antisemitism just before the Night of Broken Glass in 1938.

In an effort to evade arrest, Otto takes a series of train journeys from his home in Berlin across Germany. 

In the course of which he encounters a cross section of the population, from rabid Nazi antisemites, to “regular” Germans getting on with their life, and minding their own business.

But there is no doubting the danger he is in, which at one point involves an attempt by an acquittance to cheat him out of the true value of his home, and by the actual appropriation of his business by his partner and long time friend.

Much of the book revolves around his own internal debate about whether he should have left Germany earlier, and the contradiction between those he meets who appear “decent” and those who at best are indifferent and those who are hostile.

And while he flips from despair to optimism that things can’t get any worse, there is also a sense of incredulity that in his own words “in the middle of Europe in the twentieth century” this could be happening.

Along with that observation is the chilling fact that he is trapped, because Germany  won’t let him out  and other countries won’t let him in. "For a Jew, the entire Reich has become one big concentration camp".

Which just leaves me to return to King Winter's Birthday which stands as a reminder of the imagination of Alexander Boschwitz.

King Winter’s Birthday, Johnathan Freedland and Emily Sutton, Pushkin Children's Books.

Pictures; courtesty of the publishers

*The Passenger, Alexander Boschwitz, 1939, published by Pushkin Press 2021