Chance
Escape from the Holocaust: Memories of a Refugee Childhood

Name: Chance
Brand: Macmillan Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Uri Shulevitz
ISBN: 9781250759931

Author: Uri Shulevitz

Narrator: Fred Berman

Unabridged: 3 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Macmillan Young Listeners

Published: 10/13/2020

Categories: Children's Nonfiction, History, Holocaust, Biographical

Synopsis

From a beloved voice in children’s literature comes this landmark memoir of hope amid harrowing times and an engaging and unusual Holocaust story.

With backlist sales of over 2.3 million copies, Uri Shulevitz, one of FSG BYR’s most acclaimed picture-book creators, details the eight-year odyssey of how he and his Jewish family escaped the terrors of the Nazis by fleeing Warsaw for the Soviet Union in Chance.

It was during those years, with threats at every turn, that the young Uri experienced his awakening as an artist, an experience that played a key role during this difficult time. By turns dreamlike and nightmarish, this heavily illustrated account of determination, courage, family loyalty, and the luck of coincidence is a true publishing event.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About Uri Shulevitz

Uri Shulevitz (1935-2025) was a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator and author. He was born in Warsaw, Poland, on February 27, 1935. He began drawing at the age of three and, unlike many children, never stopped. The Warsaw blitz occurred when he was four years old, and the Shulevitz family fled, as chronicled in his acclaimed memoir Chance: Escape from the Holocaust. For eight years they were wanderers, arriving, eventually, in Paris in 1947. There Shulevitz developed an enthusiasm for French comic books, and soon he and a friend started making their own. At thirteen, Shulevitz won first prize in an all-elementary-school drawing competition in Paris's 20th district. In 1949, the family moved to Israel, where Shulevitz worked a variety of jobs: an apprentice at a rubber-stamp shop, a carpenter, and a dog-license clerk at Tel Aviv City Hall. He studied at the Teachers' Institute in Tel Aviv, where he took courses in literature, anatomy, and biology, and also studied at the Art Institute of Tel Aviv. At fifteen, he was the youngest to exhibit in a group drawing show at the Tel Aviv Museum. At 24 he moved to New York City, where he studied painting at Brooklyn Museum Art School and drew illustrations for a publisher of Hebrew books. One day while talking on the telephone, he noticed that his doodles had a fresh and spontaneous look—different from his previous illustrations. This discovery was the beginning of Uri's new approach to his illustrations for The Moon in My Room, his first book, published in 1963. Since then he has written and illustrated many celebrated children’s books. He won the Caldecott Medal for The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, written by Arthur Ransome. He has also earned three Caldecott Honors, for The Treasure, Snow and How I Learned Geography. His other books include One Monday Morning, Dawn, So Sleepy Story and many others. He also wrote the instructional guide Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children’s Books. Shulevitz’s final book, completed shortly before his death in New York City at age eighty-nine, is The Sky Was My Blanket: A Young Man’s Journey Across Wartime Europe, a narrative nonfiction account of the adventures of his father’s brother Yehiel, who ran away from home at age fifteen, journeyed through prewar Europe for a decade, and ended up a member of the Spanish Republican Army and then the Jewish Resistance in Vichy France.

About Fred Berman

Fred Berman is a five-time winner of the AudioFile Earphone Award for Audiobook Narration and the recipient of the 2013 Audie Award for narration in Spy the Lie. He has read a number of audiobooks for young listeners, including Judy Blume’s Soupy Saturdays with The Pain & The Great One and Andrew Clements’s The Last Holiday Concert. He has also narrated the audiobooks for Robert Kirkman’s popular series, The Walking Dead.Berman is an accomplished actor of both the stage and screen as well, performing on Broadway as Timon in The Lion King and off-Broadway in Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and King Lear. On television, Berman has had roles on NBC’s hit series Smash as well as All My Children and Law and Order. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Hope on August 23, 2020

I have long been a fan of Uri Shulvevitz's stunning picture books, and the opportunity to read his own story made me love him even more. This autobiography is Uri's recollections of growing up in WWII Poland and his family's immigration to various other countries to avoid imprisonment or worse by Na......more

Goodreads review by Richie on November 13, 2020

Richie’s Picks: CHANCE: ESCAPE FROM THE HOLOCAUST by Uri Shulevitz, Farrar, Straus Giroux, October 2020, 336p., ISBN: 978-0-374-31371-5 “Now we see everything that’s going wrong With the world and those who lead it We just feel like we don’t have the means To rise above and beat it So we keep waiting Wait......more

Goodreads review by Edward on April 17, 2021

In an illustrated memoir, Shulevitz tells the remarkable, harrowing story of his childhood from age four to fourteen during which his family endured years of near-starvation, brutal labor camps, and terrible illnesses as they fled east from Poland to escape the Nazi invasion, trekking from Belarus t......more

Goodreads review by Rania on January 01, 2023

The cover and illustrations should not deceive you. The audience for this book is a more mature reader as some scenes described may be traumatic for a younger person. But overall an interesting account of escaping Nazi occupied Poland and surviving in the far depths of Turkestan and with a hostile w......more

Awards

Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year
NYTBR Notable Children's BOTY