Esther Hautzig meant a lot to me. Her book, The Endless Steppe, a survival story about a family exiled to Siberia during WW II, was one that I read over and over again as a child. I must have borrowed it from the synagogue library, a small room where they trusted you to take and return books on your own. I was in the middle of a run of holocaust books like When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.

Thirty years later, when I met Esther Hautzig at a celebration for Books for the Teenaged at New York Public Library, I was speechless. Then I burst into tears; that’s how real the narrator was to me.

Esther passed away on Sunday (read her obituary in the New York Times). Her funeral will be held today in New York City:

Wednesday, November 4, at 1:00
Plaza Jewish Community Chapel
Amsterdam and 91st Street

Full information is available here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Childrens and YA, Deaths. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.