Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Die endlose Steppe by Esther Hautzig Die endlose Steppe by Esther Hautzig. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 658872a11f35cafc • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Die endlose Steppe by Esther Hautzig. Esther Rudomin was ten years old when, in 1941, she and her family were arrested by the Russians for being ‘capitalists’ and transported to the endless steppe of Siberia. This is the very moving true story of the next five years spent in exile, of how the Rudomins kept their courage high, though they went barefoot and hungry. Esther Hautzig was born in Eastern Poland (in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania) in October, 1930. When the region was conquered by Soviet troops in 1941, Esther, her parents and her grandparents were uprooted and exiled to Siberia where they spent the next five years in forced labour camps. The family returned home after the war and in 1947 Esther left to go to the USA as a student. Her acclaimed novel The Endless Steppe was inspired by her gruelling wartime experiences. She was married to a concert pianist and had two children. Esther died in 2009. This story would not have been told. without the help of many, many people. It is gratefully dedicated to all of them. The morning it happened – the end of my lovely world – I did not water the lilac bush outside my father’s study. The time was June 1941 and the place was Vilna, a city in the north-eastern corner of Poland. And I was ten years old and took it quite for granted that all over the globe people tended their gardens on such a morning as this. Wars and bombs stopped at the garden gates, happened on the far side of garden walls. Our garden was the centre of my world, the place above all others where I wished to remain forever. The house we lived in was built around this garden, its red-tiled roof slanting towards it. It was a very large and dignified house with a white plaster façade. The people who lived in it were my people, my parents, my paternal grandparents, my aunts and my uncles and my cousins. My grandfather owned the house, my grandmother ruled the house; they lived rather majestically in their own apartment, and the rest of us lived in six separate apartments. Separate, but not exactly private. There were no locked doors; people were always rushing in and out of each other’s apartments to borrow things, to gossip, to boast a bit or complain a bit, or to tell the latest family joke. It was a great, exuberant, busy, loving family, and heaven for an only child. Behind the windows looking out on our garden there were no strangers, no enemies, no hidden danger. Beyond the garden, beginning with the tree-lined avenue we lived on, was Vilna, my city. For the best view of Vilna one went to the top of Castle Hill, and I was always asking Miss Rachel, my governess, to take me there. Built along the banks of the river Wilja in a basin of green hills, Vilna has been called a woodland capital. It was a university town, a city of parks and white churches with gold and red towers built by Italian architects in an opulent baroque style, a city of lovely old houses hugging the hills and each other. It was a spirited and gay city for a child to grow up in. From this hilltop I could make out the place where my family’s business took up half a block, the synagogue we attended, the road that led to the idyllic lake country where we had our summer house. When I stood on this hilltop everything was just as it should be in this best of all possible worlds, my world. And, down to the smallest detail, I would not have had any of it changed. What I ate for breakfast on school mornings was one buttered roll – a soft roll, not a hard roll – and one cup of cocoa; any attempt to alter this menu I regarded as a plot to poison me. I would sit down to this breakfast at a round table in the dining room with my young parents or my beloved Miss Rachel. My Father – called Tata, the Polish for papa – was my most favourite person in the world, a secret I thought I ought to keep from Mama. Tata was gay and fun-loving and not only made jokes himself, but laughed at mine – whether mine were funny or not. Mama was gay, too, with an engaging talent for laughing over spilled milk, but at an early age I found out that she was a strong-minded lady who thought that one indulgent parent was quite enough for an only child. When I was four years old, she and I first locked horns. I had just begun to attend a progressive nursery school, and one morning, when I and a dozen or so other little girls were doing calisthenics on the floor, I made a shattering discovery. All legs had been swung back over heads, all toes were touching the floor, when, rolling my eyes from side to side, I saw that all the panties thus displayed were silk – white, pink, blue, yellow silk, a gorgeous rainbow of silk panties, some even edged with lace – except mine. Mine were white cotton, severely unadorned. I told Mama that this situation must be corrected immediately. She thought not. I said that if I could not wear silk panties I would not go to nursery school at all. Mama said: ‘Very well. Don’t go.’ I didn’t go; I stayed home until it was time for me to go to grade school when I was seven. And when it came to choosing the school, Mama decided it was character-building for a rich child to go to a school where there were children from all economic brackets. I went to the Sophia Markovna Gurewitz School, where I learned Yiddish and was introduced to the literature and culture of my people. I loved school and I loved the order of my life. My days were planned with the precision of a railway timetable. On Mondays after school there were piano lessons; Tuesdays, dancing class; Wednesdays I went to the library and invariably argued with the librarian, who recommended children’s books when I wanted grown-up books, particularly mysteries and the more blood-curdling the better. On Thursdays my cousins and I had calisthenics with a muscular lady who drilled us as if we were candidates for the Prussian Army, which made us explode into giggles. And on Fridays I was allowed to help Mama and the cook prepare the Sabbath meals – braid the challah, the ritual bread, and chop the noodles. On Fridays, the seven kitchens of our house would send forth the marvellous smells of seven Sabbath meals all alike – the same breads, sponge cakes, chickens, and chicken soup. But in 1939 Hitler’s armies marched on Poland. When the first bombs fell over Vilna I was terrified, of course. But we were lucky; no bombs fell in our garden. Our garden was invulnerable. To be sure, there were changes. Tata was drafted into the Polish Army to fight the German invaders. But Mama assured me that he would come back. She continued to do so in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. And since I had great faith in Mama, I believed her. I was the only one who did. Shortly after Tata left, word came that his entire battalion had been wiped out. Our family was stricken with a deep and inconsolable grief. Everyone, that is, except Mama and me. Mama told them to stop their weeping, that Tata was alive. They looked up from their grief and begged her to come to her senses and accept the dreadful reality. They understood that this aberration came from her great love for her husband, but when she went so far as to have a fight with the rabbi about it, they were beside themselves. On a Monday morning, Mama woke up and announced to anyone who would listen to her that Tata would be back in Vilna on Thursday. She advised everyone to stop weeping and prepare for his ret. urn. ‘Be sure to get me some farmer’s cheese, the kind he adores,’ she said to her poor mother, who now wept not only for the lost son-in-law, but for the daughter gone crazy. Mama herself had our house shined up from top to bottom and our larder stocked with Tata’s favourite foods. On Thursday, Tata returned, just as Mama had predicted. But by way of preparing everyone for the surprise, he stopped at his mother-in-law’s house first. My grandmother opened the door, took one look at this ‘ghost’ and screamed: ‘Oh, dear Lord, I didn’t get the cheese.’ At eight, I took Mama’s psychic powers for granted. Over and over Tata told us how he had walked from village to village, after his battalion was disbanded. The few men who had survived were told to make their way home as best they could. Dressed in a blanket and with a beret on his head, pretending he was mad, Tata had had many narrow escapes before he came back to us. He was home, but in the next two years there would be other changes. In 1940 the Russians, who were allies of Germany from 1939 until July 1941, occupied Vilna. The communist authorities confiscated the family business and our property, but did not evict us from our house, our garden. The servants left and Miss Rachel got married. One didn’t always have small luxuries, but I didn’t miss them. My world was still intact and I had not the slightest premonition that it was about to end. The morning it happened I awakened very early for a reason. Since school was over I was allowed to sleep late. Naturally, in order to enjoy such a special privilege one had to be awake. The minute I opened my eyes and saw my pink and white curtains fluttering in the soft breeze blowing off the Wilja, I knew it was going to be a beautiful day, a perfect June day. Heeding our family tradition, I was careful to slip out of bed with my right foot forward. Right foot forward, good luck for the day; left foot forward, bad luck. In Poland, one listened to one’s family if one wanted good luck. I went to the window to see if Grandfather was in the garden. This garden was the pride and joy of his life. It was he who gave the gardeners their orders, scolded when a tree had not been properly pruned, was lavish with his praise when an ailing plant was saved. ‘Remember, children,’ he would say to my cousins and me, ‘remember that there is always some good in people who love flowers.’ That morning, Grandfather was not in the garden. But I leaned out of the window for a minute to admire the roses and the peonies and the lilac bush which I would water in an hour or two I thought. It must have been about six o’clock. I picked up the mystery I had been saving for just such a morning, and went back to bed with it. From the opening sentence, I was lost to the rest of the world. Hence, I heard nothing. I was well into the book when my mother burst into the room. ‘You must get up immediately,’ she said, stripping the bedclothes off me. ‘But why? Mama –’ I was outraged. ‘Esther, for once do as you’re told without asking questions. Quickly!’ I jumped out of bed. ‘Mama – what is it?’ ‘Questions, always questions. Keep your voice down.’ She had dropped hers to a whisper. ‘Esther – something is happening. Uncle David called. He said – he said that Russian soldiers were swarming all over Grandfather’s apartment. Your father rushed there. He didn’t even stop to dress. He’s still in his pyjamas. And he isn’t back yet. Please get dressed as fast as you can and come right to my room.’ Russian soldiers! I didn’t argue; I did as I was told, braiding my hair as I went. I found my mother sitting on her bed with a large kitchen matchbox on her lap. What on earth was Mama planning to do with matches in her bedroom? And why was she looking at me so oddly? Could she be frightened? ‘You are to take this box to my mother’s house, Esther, to your Grandmother Sara. Immediately.’ ‘A matchbox? To Grandmother Sara? Whatever for?’ ‘Esther!’ Her voice was trembling. ‘Stop asking questions! Just do as you’re told. Take this box to your grandmother. I have a feeling we won’t be needing what I’ve put inside. I want Grandmother to have it. You are to leave by way of the garden gate. Don’t go out on the street. Go through the alleys. Go quickly and come back as quickly as you can. Do you hear me? You are not to linger at your grandmother’s, not for one extra minute.’ I almost dropped the box. ‘Esther –’ Mama’s voice became gentle ‘– Esther, I’m sorry that I was cross but – oh, do hurry, for God’s sake, hurry!’ I was scared. More scared than I had been when Vilna was being bombed. Even a child soon learns what bombing is all about, learns to know what might happen, and to be relieved when it doesn’t. But now I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know how to say my prayer, how to bargain with God. One needed to be explicit, I thought as a child – ‘Dear God, please do not let the bomb fall on the Rudomin house on Great Pogulanka Avenue in Vilna. If you will be kind enough to see that this doesn’t happen, I promise that I will try not to talk back to my mother tomorrow …’ I had tried to bargain fairly during the German bombings in 1939. But now I couldn’t pray. There was no dark bomb shelter, no lap in which to bury my face when the bomb was too close, no soothing words from Mama to ease the terror of glass breaking and bricks falling. I ran through my father’s study into the garden. The minute I crossed the door, I knew I had made a mistake. I had put my left foot forward. I wanted to go back and start over again with the right foot, but was afraid to waste time. As I ran, I touched the lilacs and inhaled their fragrance. I would water them later. The garden had not changed; my garden was just as beautiful, just as safe as always. As if there were nothing to threaten my life in it, it would be waiting for me when I returned from this bewildering errand. I went to the back gate and out into the alley. I flew through the alley. Mercifully, it was deserted that morning. Running as fast as I could, within ten minutes I was at the apartment house where my grandmother lived. But once there, I did have to stop to catch my breath before I could climb the stairs two at a time. There was no answer to my first ring, nor to my second. I pounded on the door with the heel of my shoe. Finally my grandmother’s sleepy voice called out, ‘Who is it?’ ‘Me, Grandmother. Let me in.’ She opened the door and began firing questions at me: Why was I visiting so early? Why was I out of breath? What was in the box? I wanted to shout at her the way my mother had: No questions! I don’t have the answers! Instead, I told her what I knew, that soldiers were in Grandfather Solomon’s house, that Tata went there in his pyjamas. ‘In his pyjamas?’ she asked, as if this were the most terrifying fact of all. Yes, in his pyjamas, I repeated, beginning to react to this with terror myself. I handed her the box and when she opened it we both gaped. My mother’s emeralds and other jewels were lying there in that kitchen matchbox – her necklace, earrings, and all her rings. They looked so strange lying there out of their velvet boxes, like play jewellery. My grandmother closed the box. She shut her eyes and her lips moved in prayer. ‘Grandmother. I must go, Grandmother. Mama said I must come back quickly. Grandmother –? I guess Mama had a reason for sending you her jewellery –?’ She went on with her praying. I stood on tiptoe and kissed her on the cheek. I hugged her and rested my cheek against her arm. I longed to tell her how much I loved her, how much she meant to me, how well I remembered all the days she spent with me when I was little, cutting out paper dolls and building cardboard houses. But there was no time. I could only manage to say, ‘I love you, Grandmother, I love you so much.’ ‘Oh, my child – tell your mother –’ She broke off and kissed the top of my head. ‘I will see you soon, Grandmother,’ I said as I ran out of the door. As I ran down the stairs, a terrible thought came to me; I would never see my gra. ndmother again. Oh, God, please don’t let me have such terrible thoughts, I prayed. I ran all the way home. When I reached the garden door, I could hear the front-doorbell ringing and ringing. Where was Mama? My mother was sitting in the dining room, at the empty dining table, resting her chin in her hand. ‘Mama, the doorbell is ringing. Don’t you hear it? Shall I open the door?’ ‘No. I shall open it myself.’ But she still didn’t move. ‘Sit down, Esther. You’re out of breath. Did you give the box to Grandmother?’ ‘Of course I did. Mama – the doorbell –’ ‘Yes, the doorbell.’ She rose slowly and, taking a long time to get there, she opened the door. My father was on the doorstep, his hands behind his back. Next to him stood two Russian soldiers with fixed bayonets. Not one word was spoken. Father and Mother exchanged a guarded look, but Father kept his eyes away from me, as if he was ashamed to have me see him in pyjamas with bayonets at his back. Slowly and silently, Father walked through the hall, past the umbrella stand with his walking sticks, into the dining room. The soldiers walked heavily beside him. When they reached the centre of the room, the silence was broken. One of the soldiers shouted: ‘Down on the floor! All of you! You’re under arrest!’ Clearly, before we would do such a silly thing, my father would explain everything and the soldiers would go away. He had not done anything wrong – neither stolen, nor killed anyone, nor committed any other crime – they could not arrest him. He would insist that they apologize. But he remained silent. We sat on the floor – first my father, then me. For a second, I thought my mother would refuse to. My father must have thought so too because he murmured her name softly: ‘Raya –’ Very awkwardly, but determined to keep her back straight, my mother sat down on the floor too. How could we be arrested without having done anything wrong? I decided to find out. THE ENDLESS STEPPE. To Esther Rudomin at eleven Siberia meant the metaphor: isolation, criminals and cruel punishment, snow and wolves; but even in Siberia there is satisfaction from making a friend of a prickly classmate, from seeing a Deanna Durbin movie four times, from earning and studying and eventually belonging. Especially in Siberia, where not wolves but hunger and dirt and cold are endemic, where shabbiness and overcrowding are taken for granted, where unselfishness is exceptional. At the heart of Mrs. Hautzig's memoir of four years as a Polish deportee in Russia during World War II is not only hardihood and adaptability but uniquely a girl like any other. Abruptly seized in their comfortable home in Vilna, Esther and her family, are shipped in cattle cars to Rubtsovsk in the Altai Territory, work as slave laborers in a gypsum mine until amnesty, then are "permitted" lobs and lodging in the village--if someone will take them in. After sleeping on the floor, a wooden platform is very welcome; after sharing a room with two other families, a separate dung hut seems a homestead. Then Esther goes to school, the greatest boon, and, to her mother's horror, wants to be like the Siberians. Deprivation does not make Esther grim: the saddest day of her life is her father's departure for a labor brigade at the front, her sharpest bitterness is for the bland viciousness of individuals. Involving from "the end of my lovely world" to the end of exile (when the Rudomins, as Jews, were jeered in Poland), this is a beautiful book with no bar to wide acceptance (and a rich non-juvenile jacket by Nonny Hogrogian). (Memoir. 8-12) Pub Date: April 15, 1968. ISBN: 978-0-06-447027-8. Page Count: 256. Publisher: T.Y. Crowell. Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2020. Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1968. Share your opinion of this book. Did you like this book? More by Esther Hautzig. The car gets shortchanged, but comparing the divergent career paths of its (putative) two riders may give readers food for. TWO MEN AND A CAR. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, AL CAPONE, AND A CADILLAC V-8. by Michael Garland ; illustrated by Michael Garland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019. A custom-built, bulletproof limo links two historical figures who were pre-eminent in more or less different spheres. Garland admits that a claim that FDR was driven to Congress to deliver his “Day of Infamy” speech in a car that once belonged to Capone rests on shaky evidence. He nonetheless uses the anecdote as a launchpad for twin portraits of contemporaries who occupy unique niches in this country’s history but had little in common. Both were smart, ambitious New Yorkers and were young when their fathers died, but they definitely “headed in opposite directions.” As he fills his biographical sketches with standard-issue facts and has disappointingly little to say about the car itself (which was commissioned by Capone in 1928 and still survives), this outing seems largely intended to be a vehicle for the dark, heavy illustrations. These are done in muted hues with densely scratched surfaces and angled so that the two men, the period backgrounds against which they are posed, and the car have monumental looks. It’s a reach to bill this, as the author does, a “story about America,” but it does at least offer a study in contrasts featuring two of America’s most renowned citizens. Most of the human figures are white in the art, but some group scenes include a few with darker skin. The car gets shortchanged, but comparing the divergent career paths of its (putative) two riders may give readers food for thought. (timeline, bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 10-12) Pub Date: March 12, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-88448-620-6. Page Count: 64. Publisher: Tilbury House. Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019. Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019. Share your opinion of this book. Did you like this book? More by Michael Garland. A detail-rich picture book best for readers who enjoy nonfiction and are interested in history or science. COUNTING THE STARS. THE STORY OF KATHERINE JOHNSON, NASA MATHEMATICIAN. by Lesa Cline-Ransome ; illustrated by Raúl Colón ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 2019. This biography of renowned mathematician Katherine Johnson featuring illustrations by Colón aims for elementary-age readers. Cline-Ransome ( Finding Langston , 2018, etc.) traces Johnson’s love of math, curiosity about the world, and studiousness from her early entry to school through her help sending a man into space as a human computer at NASA. The text is detailed and lengthy, between one and four paragraphs of fairly small text on each spread. Many biographies of black achievers during segregation focus on society’s limits and the subject’s determination to reach beyond them. This book takes a subtler approach, mentioning segregation only once (at her new work assignment, “she ignored the stares and the COLORED GIRLS signs on the bathroom door and the segregated cafeteria”) and the glass ceiling for women twice in a factual tone as potential obstacles that did not stop Johnson. Her work is described in the context of the space race, which helps to clarify the importance of her role. Colón’s signature soft, textured illustrations evoke the time period and Johnson’s feeling of wonder about the world, expressed in the refrain, “Why? What? How?” The text moves slowly and demands a fairly high comprehension level (e.g., “it was the job of these women computers to double-check the engineers’ data, develop complex equations, and analyze the numbers”). An author’s note repeats much of the text, adding quotes from Johnson and more details about her more recent recognition. A detail-rich picture book best for readers who enjoy nonfiction and are interested in history or science. (Picture book/biography. 9-12) Esther Hautzig dies at 79; wrote ‘The Endless Steppe’ about Siberian exile. Esther Hautzig, whose memoir of growing up in exile in Siberia, “The Endless Steppe,” has become a classic of children’s literature, died Nov. 1 at a New York City hospital. She was 79 and had Alzheimer’s disease. Hautzig was born into comfortable circumstances in Vilnius, Lithuania, then part of Poland, where her family ran a jewelry store. In 1941, after the Soviet Union and Germany signed a nonaggression pact that put Vilnius under Soviet control, Hautzig’s family was arrested for being capitalists. At 10, she was shipped with her parents and grandparents in a cattle car to the Siberian city of Rubtsovsk. She spent all of World War II there, attending school and learning to live with privation and loss. More than 20 years later, after Hautzig had settled in the United States, she wrote “The Endless Steppe.” She wrote the book for children when publishers told her that her story would not appeal to adults. It won several awards and was acclaimed as a worthy successor to Anne Frank’s powerful memoir, “The Diary of a Young Girl.” In the book, Hautzig told a gritty tale of exile and survival. As a child, she adapted to her new surroundings surprisingly well, learning Russian and attending a rigorous school that, as a New York Times reviewer wrote in 1968, “would make a New York City mother envious.” She wrote of trying to make money by selling books of Russian poetry, recalling that one man thumbed through a book before deciding not to buy it because the pages were not the right thickness for rolling cigarettes. The struggles of those wartime years affected her family in different ways. Her grandmother lamented a lost world of servants and grand houses; her father was sent to fight in the Soviet army; and her mother worked in a gypsum mine and bakery. Her grandfather died at 72 in a forced-labor camp. “We spent nearly six years in Siberia,” Hautzig wrote in “Remember Who You Are: Stories About Being Jewish,” a 1990 collection of childhood reflections. “I went to school there, made friends, learned how to survive no matter what life brought.” After the war, her family reunited in Lodz, Poland, discovering that their forced exile had probably saved their lives. Most of their relatives who had remained in Vilnius (then called Vilna) had perished in the Holocaust. Of the 57,000 Jewish residents of Vilnius at the beginning of the war, only 3,000 survived. Esther Rudomin was born Oct. 18, 1930, and had a charmed early childhood in a prosperous and cultured city. “Everything I do comes from Vilna,” she told the Jewish publication Forward in 2002. “I am a guide to Vilna, in absentia.” After reuniting with her parents and grandmother in Lodz, she came to the United States on her own in 1947, meeting Viennese concert pianist Walter Hautzig on the ship across the Atlantic. She completed high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended New York’s Hunter College before marrying Hautzig in 1950. Her husband survives her, along with two children and three grandchildren. Hautzig became skilled at handicrafts in Siberia, learning, among other things, to dye curtains with onion skins. While working in New York publishing houses in the 1950s, she wrote the first of a series of children’s books about cooking, decorating and making gifts for little or no money. Hautzig later translated works from Yiddish and continued to write books for young people about her early life in Vilnius. During her sole return visit to her hometown in 1993, she said she “had a strong feeling of seeing the dead walking among the living.” Esther Hautzig, Author of Wartime Survival Tale, Dies at 79. Esther Hautzig, an author of children’s books whose true-life tale of surviving World War II in the labor camps of Siberia, told in a guileless teenager’s voice, became a classic of young people’s literature, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 79 and lived in Manhattan. Her death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was caused by congestive heart failure and complications of Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter, Deborah Hautzig, said. Mrs. Hautzig was moved to write about her family’s war ordeal after reading articles in the 1950s by Adlai Stevenson, the unsuccessful presidential candidate, about his visit to Rubtsovsk, the city in south-central Siberia where Mrs. Hautzig, her parents and a grandmother spent the war. She wrote to Stevenson, and in his reply he urged her to turn her impressions into a book. The book, “The Endless Steppe,” tells of the charmed, prosperous life of Esther Rudomin, a young girl living in her native Vilna, then part of Poland and now in Lithuania ​ “a city of lovely old houses hugging the hills and each other,” Mrs. Hautzig writes ​ until German bombs rained down, spelling “the end of my lovely world.” As part of a pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Red Army occupied Vilna, now Vilnius. Mrs. Hautzig describes how in June 1941 Soviet soldiers stormed into her home and humiliated her parents. “Within a single morning, on a perfect June day, my young father had become an old man,” Mrs. Hautzig writes. The soldiers arrested the Rudomins, telling them, “You are capitalists and therefore enemies of the people.” The Rudomins and Esther’s maternal grandparents were deported by cattle car to the “endless steppe” of Siberia. Mrs. Hautzig’s father was soon drafted into the Soviet Army, and her grandfather died in Siberia. But Esther, her mother and grandmother spent the next five years in forced-labor camps, working in gypsum mines and at construction sites in the bitter cold with barely enough food and clothing. Infusing her work with a child’s sense of wonder, she described the delight of washing herself with a rare cake of soap and the deep pleasure she took in a simple drink of cool water. Mrs. Hautzig’s daughter said that her mother had had a knack for turning the squalid into the bearable. “In Siberia she wanted to make curtains for the unheated, filthy hut she was living in,” Deborah Hautzig said, “so she got gauze from a friend whose father worked in the hospital and dyed the gauze yellow by boiling onion peel.” The Soviet occupation of Vilna, seen at the time as a calamity, may have saved her entire family from death. After the arrests, the Nazis invaded Lithuania and slaughtered 190,000 of that country’s Jews, or about 90 percent of a Lithuanian-Jewish community known for its learning and culture. Among the dead were many of Mrs. Hautzig’s aunts, uncles and cousins. After the war Mrs. Hautzig, who was born on Oct. 18, 1930, returned to Poland with her parents and grandmother, spent several months as a refugee in Sweden and then came over alone to New York on a student visa in 1947. Aboard the ocean liner Drottningholm she met the Vienna- born pianist Walter Hautzig, who was returning from a concert tour. They married in 1950. Mr. Hautzig survives her. Besides their daughter, Deborah, Mrs. Hautzig is also survived by a son, David, and three grandchildren. Mrs. Hautzig attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn and enrolled in Hunter College, though she never finished because a professor there told her that her accent would disqualify her from becoming a teacher. Instead, she took a job as a secretary at the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons and later promoted children’s books. Her first books were for children: “Let’s Cook Without Cooking” (1955), which offered recipes to help latchkey children prepare meals without an oven, and “Let’s Make Presents” (1962), offering tips for making inexpensive gifts like paper flowers. Both books were laced with the skills she learned by trying to brighten her life in Siberia. Encouraged by Stevenson’s letter, she had begun setting down memories of her turbulent childhood. In 1968 “The Endless Steppe” was published by what is now HarperCollins. It was a finalist for a National Book Award in children’s literature. Soon it found a place on school and library lists of recommended books for teenagers. The Washington Post said it affirmed “the resilience of the human spirit.” Mrs. Hautzig went on to write several others books ​ some based on her childhood in Vilna ​ including “A Gift for Mama” (1987); “Remember Who You Are: Stories About Being Jewish” (1990); “Riches” (1992), a Jewish folk tale; “A Picture of Grandmother” (2002); and about a dozen others. She also translated stories by the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. Mrs. Hautzig returned to Vilna in 1993 to visit the university where an uncle, Ela-Chaim Cunzer, died in 1944, his grave unknown. With the help of a student at the Vilnius University, Mrs. Hautzig unearthed not only her uncle’s college application with his photograph but also the masterwork of his short life, his handwritten 49-page master’s thesis on mathematics. She persuaded the University of Chicago to accept it for its library and Web site. “At least here is proof, some more proof of how people lived and what they did, not that they died,” she told The New York Times in 1996. “He really was a student. He really worked hard. He really wrote this dissertation. And it resulted in something which is still here.”