“The Three Robbers” special exhibit at The Rabbit Hole, transforming Tomi Ungerer’s picture book, has been extended into the early months of 2026. (The Rabbit Hole)
I’ve been thinking lately about gratitude. It’s the season, of course, where we look backward and look ahead and take stock of the intertwining streams of our lives. Carrying around extra doses of gratefulness seems to help us navigate the swerves, the deep swells, the bumps, the losses and even the welcome joys that greet us along the way.
Gratitude was definitely called for as good fortune came my way in the past year — despite all the buffeting winds — on personal and professional travels and in a super-abundance of cultural experiences. Sometimes — often, that is — I can’t help myself, and the calendar groans with commitments, expectations and hopes.
Ensemble Iberica in New York? Well, why not? Bob Dylan in Tulsa? And Maine? And over the decades through my living-room speakers? Check, check and triple-check.
There were literary travels, large and small and a boundless, ceaseless influx of books, the lifelong, incurable addiction.
Close to home, the book business recently sparked much gratitude on a visit to The Rabbit Hole, our region’s astoundingly creative museum devoted to the infinite and currently precarious world of children’s literature. A two-day symposium in November celebrated the life and work of a fascinating creator, Tomi Ungerer (1931-2019). He’s not widely known beyond book and illustration circles, not nearly a household name, perhaps, as is his friend and contemporary Maurice Sendak. But there’s a museum devoted to him in his native Strasbourg, France, and his legacy is rich, filled with scores of books, subversive side trails, and a kind of literary “good trouble” throughout.
My experience with him was minimal at best before a series of talks and panel discussions brought Tomi — Jean-Thomas Ungerer, though everyone called him Tomi — to high, inspirational relief. He could be difficult, but he lived with a kind of childlike joy. He was driven by endless curiosity about everything and by his artistic strategy of embracing contradiction.
Tomi’s childhood — and certainly his art of subsequent decades — was shaped in part by the early death of his artist-and-scientist father and partly by the cruelties of the Nazi occupation of the Alsace region of France during World War II. Don’t you know that his eventual themes of contrasting power and resistance, kindness and hypocrisy, violence and balm, which can be found in both his children’s books and his art works made for adults, continue to resonate in the current American moment.
In the mid-1950s, Tomi arrived in the United States, virtually penniless but hoping to become a children’s book artist. The symposium heard from a longtime editorial superstar, Susan Hirschman, who had just stepped up to the bottom rung of the publishing ladder at Harper & Row when Tomi walked through the door for the first time with his hand-drawn draft of a proposed book.
As an envoy from the center of book publishing, Hirschman, long retired, had nothing but ecstatic praise for The Rabbit Hole, whose immersive, bigger-than-life installations drawn from the pages of great books caused her to experience them in a whole new way. She affirmed the feeling shared by others that the children’s book business today, especially among major publishers, is too much controlled by marketing committees — money, that is — and caution —fear, that is — prompted by the rise of book-banning and thin-skinned censorship from both ends of the political spectrum. The Rabbit hOle’s independent spirit — it would prefer to be known by its brand Identity, the Rabbit hOle — serves to counter both of those trends.
As co-director Pete Cowdin put it at the beginning of the symposium’s second day, “Market success should not be confused with cultural value.”
The symposium’s title, “Blunderbuss!, Exploring the Legacy of Tomi Ungerer,” would be troublesome in today’s publishing world, because the word refers to an antique weapon featured in Tomi’s “The Three Robbers.” A gun! As if children need to be “protected” from knowledge they encounter every minute of every day on video screens.
Tomi’s daughter and executor of his estate, Aria Ungerer, traveled from her longtime family home in coastal Ireland to share insights, history, images and hilarious video clips with upwards of 70 teachers, librarians, writers, artists, readers and fans in attendance.
Acknowledging Tomi’s many contradictions and his belief that “Doubt is a virtue,” Aria said he favored the “absurd, but also valued order and reason; he was an ardent pacifist but had a terrible temper.”
As her father once put it, “Since life is not explainable, life is bound to be absurd,” and thus “Absurdity was the best way of illustrating reality.”
As an example of her father’s sometimes crotchety demeanor, she told the apparently still-traumatic story of once being given a Barbie doll, which, for an artist committed to handmade objects and contrary behavior, he considered to be a plastic abomination. (A recent documentary film about Tomi, shown at the symposium, shows him dismembering Barbies he’d collected for collage purposes.) For the young Aria, he illustrated his displeasure by fashioning clothes for the doll made from a black plastic trash bag.
Tomi’s books often foreground animals as intelligent, endearing characters, including the early Crictor, about an old woman’s unlikely companion, a boa constrictor; Emile (an octopus); and Flix (a dog borne by cats in a story about getting along beyond difference).
His best-known picture book is likely “The Three Robbers,” a tale of redemption, which the Rabbit Hole spent years transforming into a special, three-dimensional exhibit, with music, in 2025. The exhibit, which takes visitors through the whole story, was scheduled to close Dec. 31, but has been extended for at least a few months more.
Also examined were Tomi’s ventures into poster art — see especially his pieces for the newly relevant “Dr. Strangelove” — and unrestrained erotica — see his collection of edgy portraits and adult satire “Babylon.” Tomi’s more provocative work once got him crosswise with the American Library Association, which supposedly blacklisted him and his books, though the spat has never been fully confirmed, according to publisher Gary Groth, whose Fantagraphics has been reissuing Tomi’s works. The dispute led Tomi to leave New York for Nova Scotia, Canada, and eventually Ireland.
Nevertheless, as the lineup of speakers emphasized, we should all remain grateful for Tomi Ungerer’s contrary nature and his thought-provoking art. And gratitude—or is it rabbitude? — for The Rabbit Hole, which shone a bright light on his legacy.
TWO THINGS
Speaking of the art of illustration, Michael Chabon’s modern classic novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (2001), recounts the story of two creators of an anti-fascist comic-book superhero. And now the tale of two Jewish cousins in the Nazi era has been transformed into an opera by composer Mason Bates. Barring a visit to New York during its run at the Metropolitan Opera, which ends in February, locals here and elsewhere get another chance to experience the show via a recorded transmission to movie theater screens on Jan. 24 and Jan. 28. Find ticket information at fathomentertainment.com.
Saxophonist Joshua Redman has been an inventive and accomplished A-lister of the jazz scene for upwards of three decades, so it’s always a pleasure to have him in our midst. He’s bringing his current top-notch quartet to the Folly Jazz Series Feb. 7 to share music from his most recent recording, the atmospheric and introspective “Words Fall Short.” follytheater.org.
