Julius lester author biography outlines

At the age of 7, he had learned that his maternal great-grandfather was a German Jew, Aldolph Altschul, who had lived in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where, every summer, Lester visited his grandmother, one of Adolph's daughters. He recounts the story of his spiritual odyssey to Judaism in his book, Lovesong. In he became lay leader of Beth El Synagogue in St.

Johnsbury, Vermont, until resigning in Since Lester has written 43 books: 8 nonfiction, 30 children's books, 1 book of poetry and photographs with David Gahrand 3 adult novels. His very first book was an instructional book on how to play the string guitar, co-authored with Pete Seeger. His books have been translated into 10 languages. His photographs have been included in an exhibit of images from the civil rights movement at the Smithsonian Institution.

Jewish listeners were furious, but Lester defended the reading, arguing that it gave listeners a window into the mood of the black community. Lester lost faith that political action could be personally fulfilling and began a search through Christian spiritual traditions. This yearning led to his conversion to Judaism in In his memoir, Lovesong: Becoming a Jewhe traced his path to his Jewish identity.

I had no idea where it came from or what it meant, but I loved it. As a child Lester learned that his maternal great-grandfather was a German Jew named Adolph Altschul who had immigrated from Germany sometime before the Civil War. Julius Lester — Julius Lester, who spent considerable time in Arkansas as a child, was an authormusicianphotographerand civil-rights activist.

Lester, Julius. Lovesong: Becoming a Jew. New York: Arcade Publishing, Last updated: June 16, Questions or corrections? Send Feedback. Nicholas Walker Aurora. Give Entry Feedback Julius Lester — This field is hidden when viewing the form. First Last. Subscribe me to the encyclopedia newsletter. Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Cancel Submit Feedback. A good writer is always humble to the craft, and humbled by it. Julius Lester has stated that he "thinks of writing as a sacred trust" and that one must "take responsibility for that place of Sacred Truth. Within this context one can perceive Lester's religious goals with works such as Sam and the Tigers, and also the pitfall of piety.

Flannery O'Connor, who was an avowed Catholic and who believed it possible to be both religiously committed and a good artist, said, "Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real" O'Connor is useful in this discussion of Julius Lester's novel because she was a religious-minded artist who had an unflinching eye for detail, an appreciation for the real lives of people, and because she was aware of the propensity of religious fervor to overtake art.

Her diagnosis of the shortcomings of many novels and stories is that the writers "are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth" Julius Lester is conscious of a problem—race.

Julius lester author biography outlines: He left radio and television in

And he believes he knows the solution. He may be growing as a soul through his own religious conversion, but he has not grown as an artist. He is finally a preacher of his own narrow creed. Even granting this much to the man, the work is dishonest. The failure of Othello is the very project it proposes—to write a "novel" in a way that excludes a search for "the mystery of our position on earth.

Julius Lester has published retellings of Harris's Uncle Remus tales; his collections remove the difficulties of dialect, making the stories more accessible to modern readers. Berry's analysis is very thorough in its review of the various approaches taken with Othello. What is clear is that the portrait of the Moor is complex and should be treated in its complexity, not stripped down to essentials or blurred by the language of universals.

Brooks, Gwendolyn. Cantor, Paul A. Cullen, Countee. Gerald Early. New York: Doubleday, And All Our Wounds Forgiven. New York: Arcade Pub. Lovesong: Becoming a Jew. New York: Dial Press, Publishers Weekly 20 Mar. O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. Pingel, Carol Jean. Book Report : The Village Voice 17 Sep.

Samuels, Wilfred D. African American Review : Shakespeare, William. New York: Random House, Our ideas about children, says writer Julius Lester, are strongly influenced by our own childhoods. Writing for children is an odd vocation. We write for an audience that, for the most julius lester author biography outlines, does not buy books.

So we must write books that first appeal to the adults who decide what books children will be given the opportunity to read-the editors and publishers, the buyers at bookstores, the librarians and parents. We are all engaged in the creation and distribution of literature to people who are decades younger than we are. On what basis does a writer know that a particular book he or she is writing should be offered to children?

How do others involved with children's literature decide which books to make available for children? Many have taken courses in child development and children's literature, while others educate themselves by familiarizing themselves with children's literature, and staying current by reading as many books as they can and reading reviews of the works they can't.

These activities are important and legitimate. However, there is something else that is also important, something that we may not even be aware of. I wonder if our primary ideas about children are not based on who we were as children and, if we have children, who we are as parents. Since1 have published 34 books, 24 of which have been for children.

In all those years, I have never had a conversation with publishers, editors, librarians, or teachers about who they were as children. And yet, I've had conversations with people in each of those categories who have told me that such-and-such in a book of mine—and sometimes entire books—were not appropriate for the age group for whom the book was being marketed.

So what I would like to do is share with you something of what my childhood was like and its relationship to my work. My hope is that in doing so you will be encouraged and perhaps even inspired to reflect on your childhood and its role in the important decisions you make about children's literature. I will end with some reflections on the events of September 11 and how, after such events, we might tend our souls and those of the children we seek to serve.

On January 27, I will be 63, and I am more childlike now than I ever was as a child. There are several reasons for this. My parents were in their 40s when I was born. They were born in and grew up in the South. My father's parents were both dead by the time he was 15 and he was left on the farm to raise his two younger brothers. My mother's father died when she was three, and she and her three siblings were raised by their mother at a time when single mothers were rare.

Because my parents never had true childhoods, they had no idea I was supposed to have one. But there was another factor against my having a childhood. That was race. I grew up during a time when racial segregation and discrimination in the North and South were as common as dandelion fluff in the spring. It was a time when my life was in danger if I raised my eyes and they accidentally met those of a white girl or woman.

Black men and boys were lynched for this during my growing-up years. In such a world, childhood was a luxury my parents could not have afforded for me even if they had known how. Their task was two-fold: to insure that I survived to adulthood without being killed or put in jail; and to prepare me to succeed in a society that would actively do all it could to keep me from succeeding.

A survival technique employed by blacks during those years was humor. My father was a Methodist minister, and black ministers, at least the ones around whom I grew up, were born storytellers. My father loved to laugh and one of my joys as a child was finding a joke or a story to tell him and hearing him laugh. So I grew up listening to my father and other ministers tell stories, especially trickster tales of how blacks survived by using their wits to escape the wrath of racism.

In the tales, and especially in the sermons I heard every Sunday, my ear became attuned to the cadences and rhythms of southern black speech, its idioms and patterns. What I could not have known was that those two books would lead to a conversation between the late Augusta Baker, the venerable and venerated coordinator of children's services of the New York Public Library, and Phyllis Fogelman, my editor at what was then Dial Books.

Baker asked Phyllis if I would consider retelling the tales of Uncle Remus. When Phyllis presented the idea to me, it was obvious that this was a project my childhood had prepared me to undertake. Another book with its inception in my childhood was To Be a Slave Dial In the introduction to the 30th-anniversary julius lester author biography outlines, I wrote the following: It was the late forties.

I was not yet 10 years old. One day there came in the mail a letter addressed to my father in which a company promised—in big and bold letters—to research the Lester family tree and send us a copy of our family coat-of-arms. I was excited, but when I saw my father fold the letter as if to discard it, I asked anxiously, "Don't you want to know our family history?

He laughed dryly. Our family tree ends in a bill of sale. Lester is the name of the family that owned us…. One of the many mysteries of existence is why an offhand comment of a parent would imprint itself on the soul of a child, would haunt the child, nag at the child like some illness that lingers though it does not interfere with daily living.

I was not angry that my family tree ended in a bill of sale. Anger was not a safe emotion for blacks in the '40s. Rather, I was overwhelmed by a sense of loss. There was an emptiness within me that could not be filled, and I grieved, though I did not know that then. I needed to be able to follow the trail of my existence back through time, to hear stories about those whose existence had made mine possible.

Julius lester author biography outlines: Julius Lester was.

But I did not even know my real name. That moment from my childhood was one of the defining moments of my life. So much of my writing has been dedicated to putting faces to the bills of sale. But in that experience of hearing my father say that our family tree could be traced to a bill of sale, I was also introduced to the ex- perience of wondering, an experience which would be reinforced in several ways.

To wonder is to venture outside of oneself; it is to ask: What is it like to be someone else? Here is where I encountered the mystery of what it is to be human. I want you to imagine the front porch of an unpainted house on a wide expanse of land outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It is a time when the poles and wire that brought electricity to white neighborhoods have not been extended to black ones.

So the darkness of the night has never been diluted by the luminescence of light bulbs. This is a darkness which is not threatened by the feeble light given off by the coal oil lamps, which I can see in the windows of houses scattered over the countryside. This is a darkness so thick that though I am sitting in the swing next to my mother, I cannot see her.

Nor can I see my grandmother on the other side of the porch, where she sits near her brother, Rudolph. Then, suddenly, into this darkness comes my grandmother's gruff voice: "Beatrice? Do you remember Ruth Rollings? There is silence and though I cannot see her, I can hear my mother thinking. Finally, she says, "Did she have a brother, a tall ugly boy, believe his name was Gerald?

Perhaps imagining myself into the lives of others was a consequence of a childhood, and subsequently, a life lived in solitude. Though I played with other children, they were never that important to me. I found books vastly more invigorating than people or play, However, I did not read children's books. Though my mother took me to the library several times a week because I read so voraciously, my interests were books of biography, history, and geography.

Julius lester author biography outlines: Julius Bernard Lester was born in

I found the usual children's books to be uninteresting. This had nothing to do with there being no books depicting blacks, and a lot to do with the fact that the children's books I looked at in the library did not reflect the world of violence in which I was growing up. I refer not only to the psychological violence of racism, which was profound, but also the physical violence and deaths in my community.

Throughout my childhood, death was probably more my companion than other children. I remember the funerals at Daddy's church of people I had known. I remember sneaking into church before funerals and staring at the body of someone, a child or adult, whom I had known. The person looked somewhat like themselves, but something was missing, and I didn't know what.

I would close my eyes and concentrate hard and try and put back in the person whatever had been taken out. And I suppose that is what I've been trying to do as a writer-breathe life into the dead. The dead have no one to speak for them. When I look at my work, the books for adults and children, I see it, in part, as an homage to the dead. My adult novel Do Lord Remember Me Holt, Rinehart and Winston, is based on my father's life and takes place on the last day of his life.

In my latest adult novel, The Autobiography of God which will be out next fall if I get the revisions done in timea community of Jews killed during the Holocaust come to live with a young female rabbi. John Henry Dial, was the first children's book in which I addressed death directly. But in another sense, much of my work for children has been concerned with either giving life to the dead or giving life to stories that were certainly on their deathbeds, but didn't deserve to die—the Uncle Remus Tales Dutton, ; Dial, and Sam and the Tigers Dial, especially.

Times change and stories can, too. In Ackamarackus: Julius Lester's Sumptuously Silly Fabulously Funny Fables Scholastic,I created original stories drawing on my childhood as the class clown whose ambition was to be a comedian. Yet, my obsession with death continues. When Dad Killed Mom Silver Whistle,my first young adult novel with a contemporary setting, is explicitly about death-the murder of a woman by her husband and how their two children live with this loss.

I am haunted by the dead. I wonder if the living will haunt me when I'm dead. Since September 11, we all feel haunted by the dead. I hear through the grapevine that some children's book writers and illustrators are saying that they don't know how to write anymore, that they aren't sure they can julius lester author biography outlines any longer.

And I understand. After what we witnessed on that clear and beautiful and dreadful morning, it is difficult for any of us to make sense of our lives or of life itself. But make sense of it we must, just as it has fallen to us to make sense of slavery and the Holocaust, to name but two of the many horrors of civilization. I do not mean make sense in that we understand.

I mean that we learn how to live with the pain in our hearts. In From Slaveship to Freedom Road, I ask readers to allow the suffering of slaves to become part of their lives. In doing so, it was and is my hope that the reader's understanding of what it means to be human is expanded. So it is with the events of September To the extent that I am able to make the sufferings of others part of my daily living, to that extent do I learn not to cause others to suffer.

So I make the pain of the people killed that day, the pain of their survivors, a part of the rhythm of my heart. Perhaps that is why it is julius lester author biography outlines that those of us who write and illustrate books for children must commit ourselves anew to our vocation. Children live in closer relationship to that place where all is eternally well.

In saying that, I am not being sentimental or romanticizing children. Instead, I am remembering a child growing up in the '40s and '50s who could not understand why there were white people who might kill him if he did not say "yessir" and "yes ma'am" to them, who could not understand why he had to give his seat on a bus to a white person, who did not understand why he was hated.

But that child did not grow up angry at whites. His parents and teachers taught him how to live so only his social identity was defined by the values of white people. His soul belonged to him and was his to define as he desired. This is obviously a time when the souls of children need tending. And it is a time when the writers and illustrators of children's literature are needed.

Of all people, the creators of literature for children cannot give into despair or hopelessness. We must tend our own souls as well and remember what Elie Wiesel was told by another Jew at Auschwitz: "Hang onto your soul at all costs. That is what I learned in my childhood. It is the matrix around which my life continues its dance. Hanging onto our souls means learning to hold within ourselves the inevitable tension that comes from living with paradoxes.

Hanging onto our souls is a way of being in which the heart learns to weep and exult at the same moment, a way of being that holds as one the beauty and the horror of the morning of September Hanging onto our souls means finding ways to remind ourselves that we are participants in the eternal even as we feel paralyzed by the painful rigors of the finite.

Connolly, Paula T. Jackson, Millie, and Gary Schmidt. Lion and the Unicorn 29, no. Discusses Woodson and Lester as writers who believe in the power of storytelling to break down boundaries along such lines as race, heritage, religious views, and social status. Meyer, Adam. Explains why Lovesong should be regarded as a Jewish American autobiography rather than an African American autobiography.

Nikola-Lisa, W. African American Review 31, no. Mixed assessment of And All Our Wounds Forgiven, which the reviewer calls "Lester's acute dramatization and penetrating and, in some cases, most disturbing examination of the personal histories of his four emotionally disabled major characters. Tsemo, Bridget Harris. Describes the characterization of God in the tale "How God Made Butterflies," and recounts the tale's discussion of the original creation of the term "butterflies.

Additional coverage of Lester's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. James Guide to Young Adult Writers. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

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