When their children, Ariana and Alexander, were born, they stopped touring, and Mr.

Six months later, he married Donna Harris, who had hired him, and they formed the Clarion Shadow Theater, a touring company that used puppets along with overhead projectors and cinematic techniques. After one semester of college, he enrolled in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus Clown College.Īfter three years as a circus clown, he applied for a job in the puppetry department of the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission in Prince George's County. A self-taught cartoonist, he was really interested in theater. Wisniewski (pronounced wiz-NESS-key) was born in England, where his father, a master sergeant in the Air Force, was stationed, and the family moved across Europe and the United States during his childhood. He used his layered cut-paper technique to great effect in many books, including ''Golem'' (Clarion), a version of the cabalist tale about the clay creature brought to life in 16th-century Prague, which won the 1997 Caldecott Medal for illustration. 11 at a nursing home in Alexandria, Va., after a brief illness. There is menace and majesty in Wisniewski's use of color, and he finds atmosphere and terror in a scissor's stroke.Ī fact-filled final note concludes this mesmerizing book.David Wisniewski, an artist who worked as a clown and shadow puppeteer before turning to cut paper and children's books, died on Sept. The cut-paper collages are exquisitely produced and exceedingly dramatic. and bring them unharmed to the authorities.' In Wisniewski's story, the Golem turns back the rampaging masses who want to destroy the Jews of Prague and is eventually returned to the clay from which he sprang.

Loew's Golem-a sort of simple yet powerful giant made of clay with the Hebrew word emet (truth) on his forehead-is named Joseph and charged to 'guard the ghetto at night and catch those planting false evidence of the Blood Lie. Like Rogasky's book (see review, above), Wisniewski's exposes the slander that was embraced and widely promulgated during the Holocaust years.

The much honored cut-paper master (Sundiata, 1992, etc.) turns his attention to a retelling of the story of the Golem, created by a chief rabbi, Judah Loew, to defend the Jews against the 'Blood Lie' (that Jews were mixing the blood of Christian children with the flour and water of matzoh) of 16th-century Prague.

David wisniewski books