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Key points:
George's parents, Hans and Margret Rey, were German Jews who barely managed to escape Hitler as the Nazi army marched into Paris.
- During their escape the couple had two close calls, but it was George who saved their lives.
- The authors' new life in America.
- George becomes famous.
- George's Jewish nature is in his character and his life story.
- Authors also wrote other books advocating for ethnic harmony.
- George was their only 'child'. A very young reader once told them he was disappointed because he expected them to be monkeys too.
By Saul Jay Singer
Who were Curious George's parents?
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| H.A. REY reading to children in the early 1970s. |
Born into a traditional Jewish family, Hans Augusto (“H.A.”) Reyersbach
(1898–1977) was a self-taught artist who at a young age developed a love for
animals and began sketching them at the famous Hagenbeck Zoo near his Hamburg
home.
After serving in the German army during World War I, he returned to
Hamburg and worked as a commercial artist, designing and lithographing circus
posters.
Facing difficult economic times in Germany, however, he traveled to
Brazil where, while selling goods along the Amazon River, he observed and
sketched monkeys in their natural habitat. Hans later worked on decorative maps
for the Brazilian Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair (1937).
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| Margaret Waldstein (or Margret Rey) with her husband H.A. Rey in 1951 |
Margarete Waldstein (1906-1996) was the granddaughter of a prominent Hamburg
rabbi and the daughter of a Jewish member of the Reichstag, the German
parliament, in the 1920s.
She studied art and photography at the renowned
Bauhaus School and at the Dusseldorf Art Academy and, in the late 1920s, had a
solo exhibit of her watercolors in Berlin.
Sensitive to the rapidly changing political climate and having the foresight
to leave Germany as Hitler began his rise to power, she worked as a photographer
in London before traveling in 1935 to Rio de Janeiro where she ran into an old
family friend: Hans, who had first met her when she was ten years old and
sliding down a banister.
The two artists began working together, founded the
first advertising agency in Rio, married in August 1935, and changed the name
Reyersbach to the easier to pronounce “Rey.”
After honeymooning in Paris, the couple decided to remain there and settled
in Montmartre, a well-known French artists’ neighborhood, where they began
writing and illustrating books for children.
As Margret later explained, “We
loved monkeys…. Hans was the artist, a genius and a dreamer who loved animals. I
was the midwife. I’d write the text and supervise the drawings.”
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