MOG JUDITH KERR SERIES

It also recounts her experience of the Blitz and of her brother’s sudden internment on the Isle of Man, as an enemy alien, two weeks before he was set to take his finals at Cambridge University. It tells of her family’s move to London to escape German advances into France, depicting life among the international refugee population of the hotels in Bloomsbury, with her parents in severely reduced circumstances and her father struggling to cope in a foreign language or to find paid writing jobs. The second speaks to her earliest experiences of living in England. The first and most well-known is a memoir of leaving Germany and living in exile in Switzerland and France, told through her eyes as a nine-year-old child. Her father, Alfred Kerr, a well-established and respected German-Jewish theatre critic was a vocal opponent of the Nazis (his books were burned by them after he fled Germany in 1933). WikipediaĬollectively called Out of the Hitler Time, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971), Bombs on Auntie Dainty (1975) and A Small Person Far Away (1978), the trilogy loosely followed her own experiences as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit: first edition cover. She sometimes “passed” as English because of her command of the language, but left school at 16 out of desperation to earn money to help her parents survive in London lodgings. Visibly different, she was poorly dressed in hand-me-down clothes from the two daughters of a London friend. Her books describing these years show she was conscious of being an outsider - a “clever refugee girl” as the fellow pupils in her school dismissively referred to her. But her own childhood was marked by constant movement and upheaval, as well as a need to learn new languages, fleeing Germany for Switzerland, France and finally England, where her family lived in impoverished conditions for a number of years in cheap London hotels, often relying on the kindness of friends and connections to survive from week to week. Her London settings can seem quintessentially British, offering an intimate portrait of 1960s London. This history speaks to her place in the children’s literary canon as one of its most loved writers but also part of a transnational group of writers who bore witness to the Holocaust and contributed to a distinctive and significant migrant vision and storying of London and Britain.īoth Kerr and her brother made their homes in Britain and all her family took British citizenship after the end of the war. The loving depiction of a safe and stable childhood that Kerr created in her books for stands in sharp contrast to her experience of childhood as one involving a sudden cataclysmic destruction of the life she knew in Berlin under the Nazis.

MOG JUDITH KERR SERIES

Her illustrated books such as the Mog series and her first book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968) have endured as children’s classics, with illustrations that bear witness to the domestic spaces of the 1960s suburban British home, carrying a focus on children and their pets and the security of a loving family life.

Judith Kerr’s death at the age of 95 was met with an avalanche of tributes from readers, writers and publishers alike.

Mog judith kerr