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I learned in this picture book biography of mime artist Marcel Marceau that he was Jewish and was a member of the French resistance during WWII, leading hundreds of Jewish children over the Alps to safety in Switzerland. Gerard DuBois‘ gorgeous vintage-style art shows how Marceau could express so much with his face and body language. #kidlit

The tradition of whiteface developed in the Italian commedia dell‘arte […]. The white face, which is put on with greasepaint, helps the audience view expressions from a distance.

His father died in the concentration camps. “The people who came back from the camps were never able to talk about it,” Marceau later said. “My name is Mangel. I am Jewish. Perhaps that, unconsciously, contributed towards my choice of silence.”

In 1947, Monsieur Marceau created his famous character, Bip, adapting the name from Pip in Charles Dickens‘s novel, Great Expectations. “Because when you are young, you have great expectations.”

"Life without father began some few weeks before he actually died, at the moment when he started encasing his head in orange plastic mesh held shut with twine."
-"Life Without Father"

"Let‘s turn out the light and—despite the soft gleam of her open eyes in the darkness, despite the sounds of her tossing and turning within her box, despite, as night deepens, her little groans of frustration—let‘s smile and, lying, tell ourselves yes, everything is all right, yes, shhh, yes, she‘s finally asleep."
-"Invisible Box"

"There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape."
-"Desire With Digressions"

"Were my inquest (assuming there is to be an inquest) to take place before a group of starved men, I might at least accrue some sympathy. But to the well-fed, necessity must surely appear barbarity. And now, again well-fed myself, I regret everything. Would I do it again? Of course not. Unless I were very hungry indeed."
-"An Accounting"

"Nevertheless, I grew to love Finger and it was for this I was sorry and even wept when later I had to eat him."
-"An Accounting"

"I named the dog Finger for reasons obscure even to myself."
-"An Accounting"