Should Our Children Be Told?

Roberto Innocenti’s “Rose Blanche” isn’t quite the kind of picture book you’re used to finding in the kids’ section of your local bookstore. In it, a sweet young German girl--Rose Blanche--wanders into the woods one day and discovers a concentration camp full of shivering, wraithlike people.

Rose Blanche begins smuggling food off the family dinner table and disappearing into the woods regularly. Then foreign soldiers arrive and Rose Blanche’s neighbors begin to flee. The little girl goes back into the woods with her pocketfuls of food, but now the woods are dark and smoky and full of the foreign soldiers, and in the confusion, a shot rings out.

Rose Blanche’s mother never finds her daughter. That spring, bright wildflowers reclaim the spot where the concentration camp had been.

Innocenti’s grim plot and stark, realistic illustrations might not sound commercially promising, and the publisher acknowledges that some parents may find the book “inappropriate” for the 7-and-up age group it is going to be marketed to. But Stewart, Tabori & Chang, well known for its visually lavish books, also says “Rose Blanche” is the fastest-advancing book on its spring list. Editor Ann Campbell says its realism--and its “strong anti-war message”--are what make the book worthwhile and serve as a balance to “other books out there.” And, Campbell adds, “there are parents and booksellers who are going to be thrilled and grateful to have the alternative.”

But, as Stewart, Tabori & Chang launches “Rose Blanche” in bookstores this month, it has more than its own hunches to back its enthusiasm. Versions of the book actually have been available since 1985 and have sold 75,000 copies in various languages around the world. Originally published in America only for the school and library market, the book garnered a series of awards--including the American Library Assn.’s Mildred Batchelder Award--that usually sway librarians, educators, booksellers and parents to buy.

“Rose Blanche’s” original American publisher was a small, family-owned company with three full-time employees called Creative Education, Inc. Located in the tiny town of Mankato, Minn., the company has been carving out its school-and-library niche for 45 years.

According to Tom Peterson, the current publisher and grandson of the company’s founder, in the early 1980s, Creative Education put together a series of 20 fairy tales based on traditional texts but visually reinterpreted by 20 different illustrators.

That series led to Roberto Innocenti. As yet unpublished, the Italian artist was recommended to Creative Education by illustrator Etienne Delessert, who also was working on the series and whose wife, Rita Marshall, designs all the company’s books. Innocenti was given “Cinderella,” which he set in the 1920s. And Innocenti wondered whether Delessert might like to look at some pictures he’d been working on for the past five years.

The pictures were the germ of “Rose Blanche,” based on Innocenti’s childhood experience of World War II, though not strictly autobiographical. Innocenti recalled his family hiding German deserters in their basement, and watching a truck drive off with a neighboring family, “the mother holding a tiny baby wrapped in a pink blanket.” His parents wouldn’t answer his questions about what was happening.

This childish bewilderment is very much an element of “Rose Blanche”--perhaps one of its most disturbing elements. No explanations are offered for the presence of the soldiers or the concentration camp, much less the death of the little girl. Innocence and evil are juxtaposed matter-of-factly, as in the book’s first spread, where Rose Blanche stands, pink and beribboned, shyly waving goodbye to the village soldiers, a miniature swastika flag clutched in one of her hands.

Delessert took one look at the pictures and announced: “This book has to be published.” Creative Education agreed.

The book’s potential wasn’t obvious to everyone. Peterson says Creative Education offered rights to “Rose Blanche” to large publishers all over the world and was turned down everywhere; the small publishers who bit all started with tiny quantities. The one exception was Jonathan Cape in England, which took the book but asked British novelist Ian McEwan to rewrite the text. Where the American version tends to be vague and dreamlike, switching midway through from first to third person, the British text is straightforwardly narrative, slightly more explanatory and perhaps a tad more uplifting. For example, whereas spring merely arrives in the American ending, in the Britsh version it “triumphs.”

Peterson wasn’t sure what to expect from the American library market, but, he says, it “went over wonderfully,” beginning with the Batchelder Award. Some bookstores also carried it, including The Children’s Bookstore in Chicago, whose owner, Andy Laties, says, “It sold quite well--a great deal faster than the average children’s book.” Laties recalls that his biggest problem was getting copies from the publisher, which simply isn’t set up to cope with the business practices of stores.

Creative Education was well aware of the unexploited potential for many of its titles in the bookstore market, but was happy staying small and maintaining its school-and-library niche. The obvious solution was to hook up with a commercial publisher. Stewart, Tabori & Chang came highly recommended by Delessert. ST&C;, in turn, was extremely interested in Innocenti, particularly his “Rose Blanche,” which was, Ann Campbell recalls, “one of the first titles we wanted to co-publish with them.”

So last year, Stewart, Tabori & Chang brought out four Creative Education titles for the bookstore market. One was a lavish Innocenti version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” which was taken by the Literary Guild as a selection. At $25, it sold out its first printing of 42,000 copies in its first Christmas season and, rather unusually, the publisher says, still is being reordered out-of-season.

As for “Rose Blanche,” time will tell. Laties recalls that there were parents who were “unnerved” by the book’s ending and balked at the idea of showing it to a young child.

Ginny Moore Kruse, director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a collection of children’s literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says that’s a valid concern. Though she greatly admires “Rose Blanche,” she says it only makes sense as a sophisticated allegory about the “White Rose” resistance movement, a group of anti-Nazi students who protested openly and were all executed. (Innocenti himself connects the book’s title with this movement.)

Kruse equates the book’s value more with a visit to an art gallery than with a coherent narrative reading experience. She points to a series of visual allusions, including a scene that echoes a well-known World War II photograph of a small terrified boy with his arms upraised in surrender, and the final spread, which may or may not contain a cross as a symbol of resurrection. “As with any allegory,” she says, “the more you know, the more you can read into it, the more you get out of it.” Thus, she says, the book probably is more appropriate to a junior high schooler who’s already read “The Diary of Anne Frank” than to the 7- and 8-year-olds targeted by the publishers.

But Laties says he doesn’t see why a child would find the book any more terrifying than a version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which the grandmother gets gobbled up by the wolf. Americans clean up fairy tales, he says. “In Europe, concepts about what a child can understand and handle are different.”

He admits that if you polled parents about the ending of “Rose Blanche,” they’d probably prefer something more positive. But he still plans on ordering a bundle, he says, because, as he recalls it, “This isn’t a book whose controversy impeded its sales.”