Module 12: The Wall by Peter Sis

Book Summary: The Wall is the illustrated memoir of a boy who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in Communist Czechoslovakia. It is told in different drawings that bring the story to life, reading as a comic book would.

APA Citatioin: Sis, P. (2007). The wall: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain. New York, NY: Farrar, Strous and Giroux Books for Young Readers.

Impressions: I had seen this book around at different libraries before and am kicking myself for not picking it up sooner. I loved Peter Sis' use of drawings to tell his life story. The drawings, like well done children's illustrated books, brought the story more to life and added to the feeling of what he was writing about. As a fan of comics, I really enjoyed how it was formatted as if it were a comic book with panels and unique layouts. He used words in the artwork to make the artwork more of a statement.

I haven't read a lot about the Cold War and the Iron Curtain but this book did a spark an interest in me to read more about it. It's incredible to think how this is recent history and lives have had to change so drastically in such a short span of time.

It's one of those books that I'm already wanting to reread so I can discover new parts of the story in how he chose to put the story together with the artwork and text. It's definitely a must read.

Professional Review: In the spring of 1957, a Hungarian girl appeared one day in my second-grade class in Mount Vernon, N.Y. Our teacher urged us to welcome the new arrival, who spoke no English and would be staying in our class temporarily. Her family, we were told, had just come to America to escape the Russians.
On the playground days later, during a game of cowboys and Indians, one of the second-grade boys picked up a stick, aimed it like a gun and “fired” at a classmate, who fell to the ground with a theatrical flourish. I was enjoying the spectacle from my perch on a nearby rock when a blood-curdling scream rang out across the schoolyard. It was the new girl. She too had been watching the game. When she saw the boy fall to the ground — I somehow knew this instantly — she thought it was because he really had been shot. The girl, I later learned, had had reason to think this, having lived through the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
Children make what sense they can of the life they are given. Far from our sun-splashed suburban playground during those same years, the artist Peter Sis was a schoolboy growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia. In “The Wall,” he tells the story of his early years as a citizen of that Eastern bloc nation, where he learned at school to think and draw what he was told, and of his gradual rejection of Communism. (In Los Angeles in 1982 to make a film for the Czech government, Sis chose not to return to his homeland.)
The story unfolds in a word-and-picture montage consisting of a spare, fable-like narrative, introductory and closing notes, a historical timeline, diary excerpts, childhood drawings, family photos and, at the center of it all, a sequence of playful but intense pen-line drawings, many of them arrayed in storyboard panels.
“The People’s Militia enforces the new order. ... The display of red flags on state holidays — COMPULSORY. ... Western radio is banned (and jammed).” For young readers unfamiliar with cold war-era history, timeline entries like these are a lot to absorb. As Sis writes in his afterword: “Now when my American family goes to visit my Czech family in the colorful city of Prague, it is hard to convince them it was ever a dark place full of fear, suspicion and lies.”
To bridge the gap, Sis presents his readers with graphic equivalents for the feel as well as the substance of the life he knew. People in the drawings are scaled down, toylike. They look as if they could be easily crushed. The predominance of black and white suggests the diminished possibilities under Communism for freedom of expression. Where touches of color do appear — on a demonstration banner, as a star shape on the side of a military tank — the color is usually red. When a full rainbow of colors makes its voluptuous appearance in the later illustrations, we too feel the rush of joy that unrestrained color came to symbolize in the lives of Sis and his friends.
Because children know all about tattling and betrayal, young readers of “The Wall” will be able to imagine the atmosphere of fear implied in a passing reference to the Czech government’s policy of encouraging schoolchildren to inform on their parents, and one another, for speaking out against the regime. Children in fact know a great deal about tyranny. They learn about it on the playground, as the English folklorists Iona and Peter Opie showed in “The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren” (1959), a study of traditional schoolyard chants and rhymes that laid bare the cruelty implicit in much childhood group behavior. How sympathetically did my classmates and I react to our visitor’s alarmed misreading of our “innocent” war game? That I have no memory of this prompts me to fear the worst.
“The Wall” is a brave book for acknowledging, as Sis writes, “how easy it is to brainwash a child,” and for taking on a serious subject at a time when feel-good children’s books are widely assumed to be what sells. It is also a challenging book, and with its blizzard of fleeting references to everything from the Hungarian uprising to the Beach Boys, 8- and 9-year-olds will most likely need a parent or other handy font of knowledge to help them make their way to the end.
Compressing history into fable can confuse matters. “On November 9, 1989,” Sis writes, “the wall fell.” On that date, the Berlin Wall — a hugely symbolic stretch of the Iron Curtain — did come down. But when did the setting of “The Wall” shift to Germany from Czechoslovakia, where the Velvet Revolution that ended Communist rule followed days and weeks later?
For Sis as for so many others, the collapse of the Eastern bloc’s oppressive governments was a dream come true. In “The Wall,” the ecstatic energy and big-spirited inventiveness of the artist’s drawings make the once all but unimaginable realization of that dream visible for all to see.
Yet history should perhaps have the last word. In “The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989,” Frederick Taylor writes that notwithstanding their public protestations of outrage, Western leaders, including President John F. Kennedy, were more relieved than angered by the Soviets’ sealing off of East Berlin, a move that effectively put a lid for a generation on a highly volatile situation. To ordinary people around the world, it may have seemed that freedom, justice and integrity all lay on one side of the wall, and terror, injustice and lies on the other. What if in fact the wall served the governments’ purposes on both sides equally well? How dark a fable would it take to tell that tale?

Marcus, L.S. (2007). The Cold War kid [Review of the book The wall: growing up behind the Iron Curtain by P. Sis]. The New York Times. Retrieved April 19, 2015 from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/review/Marcus-t.html?_r=0.


Library Uses: I would use this book in either a class on comic drawing or memoir writing to show a different way to tell a story. If a speaker could come in to discuss the history of what living behind the Iron Curtain was like, it could also be put out on display as a reading recommendation for those who would like to learn more about that time period and history.