And they must have also arrived with a tremendous sense of their extraordinary good fortune, their ultimate safety. They arrived in New York with almost no money, with their main luggage gone.
The Reys were taken in by strangers, even housed in a barn along the route of their escape. Yet the backstory of the Reys, which was largely unknown for years, makes the dream logic of the story seem different than it at first appears to an adult. The text seems oblivious to the resonances with the Middle Passage, and those resonances now feel at once buried and overwhelming. You can see how it’s not a book that would be written in the same way today. The main event on the boat is that George tries to fly like the seagulls he sees, and nearly drowns. The tone is cheerful, if also charged with a fear of the unknown. The Man in the Yellow Hat then brings George aboard a ship, informing him that he’ll be delivered to a zoo, and advising him to stay out of trouble. George is visibly distressed the text describes him as sad. The Man with the Yellow Hat captures George in the jungle and puts him in a bag.
That night I read the first story to my daughter. The Curious George books seemed out of fashion once my daughter was old enough for them, when a friend passed on a “ Curious George and Friends” anthology with some ambivalence. The couple left the next morning porting some food, a little clothing, and the drawings for a children’s book about a perilously curious monkey. Hans somehow built two bicycles that night. They instead bought spare bicycle parts, which cost them as much as they had been paying for a month’s lodging at a nice hotel-the manic inflation of exodus. Hans and Margret tried out the tandem bike but realized that they couldn’t manage. The couple didn’t have a car none of the trains were running two million Parisians had already fled. The radio was announcing that the city would not be defended from the approaching Nazi army. By the time Hans and Margret Rey went to the bicycle shop, the only one left was a bicycle built for two.
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