Tomi Ungerer: "Otto"

Tomi Ungerer enjoyed "the extraordinary journey," and here are two examples:

(1) Rufus, a little bat, stumbles on a technicolor drive-in movie, and decides to will himself to give up his own nocturnal ways.

(2) The Man in the Moon grabs the tail of a comet so that he may travel to Earth.

Maybe the strangest journey Ungerer invented came about in the late nineties. Ungerer was reflecting on his childhood, a brutal period during World War II, when he would sometimes sleep on piles of coal. How do you describe WWII to kids? You use the perspective of a talking teddy bear.

The book contains one of my favorite opening lines:

"I knew I was old when I found myself in the window of an antique shop."

From there, Otto the bear flashes backward. He recalls his early years in the possession of a German boy; all lives are upended when the Nazis seize power. The boy is sent to a concentration camp; his friend takes Otto, but must abandon Otto during a bombing (Dresden?) .....

An American soldier rescues Otto, but events conspire to send Otto to an antique shop. It's here that Otto's original owner--now an old man--makes a crucial discovery. Otto goes off to live with the old man (perhaps in an Upper West Side apartment?) .....and the resulting news story leads the Dresden survivor to reach out. ("You're still alive?") The two old men move in together and care for Otto--and this seems to me to be a depiction of marriage equality, before marriage equality existed in the United States.

No treacle, no moralizing, no condescension -- and not one wasted word. Here are some pictures that go with the text.

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