Susan Lynn Meyer

I had another “small world” moment today when I came across George Ella Lyon’s delightful nonfiction picture book, Mother to Tigers, illustrated by Peter Catalanotto (Atheneum 2003).

This is another terrific picture book to buy for children who love animals and true stories. It would also be great for elementary school teachers looking for irresistible nonfiction for the classroom. In simple, engaging prose, this book tells the story of a woman, Helen Martini, who nursed rejected lion and tiger cubs from the Bronx Zoo in her New York City apartment in the 1940s.

 

At first Martini did this for free, and then in 1944 she talked the zoo into letting her establish an animal nursery. She became the first woman keeper at the Bronx Zoo.

No tigers born at the zoo had ever survived before, but Helen raised twenty-seven! The vivid, energetic illustrations and lucid telling of this compelling narrative make this book an absolute winner, and I’m so glad that I came across this book and learned this story.

I especially enjoyed an incident involving Helen’s attempt to do laundry in an apartment bathroom while mothering three rambunctious tiger cubs. It turns out that tigers, unlike domestic cats, love water!

 

I definitely need to read Helen Martini’s memoir, My Zoo Family (Harper 1955), next. It is long out of print, but, via the magic of interlibrary loan, it is winging its way to me even as I type.

 

But here’s my “small world” moment. Reading the “Author’s Note” in the back of the book, I was mildly astonished to discover that Helen Martini (then Helen Delaney) went to Joan of Arc Junior High on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

 

Why?

 

 

Because that’s where my father, Jean-Pierre Meyer, first went to school in America when he arrived as a French Jewish refugee in November of 1942. And that’s where my grandmother, Germaine Meyer, learned English in night school classes.

 

 

 

 

 

So in my second novel, Skating With the Statue of Liberty (coming out on April 12), which was inspired by my father’s first months as a French Jewish refugee in the United States, that’s where twelve-year-old Gustave first goes to school and negotiates the complex strangeness of America.

 

I mean, what are the odds? There are a lot of public junior highs in New York! So it’s really kind of remarkable.

 

It is all the more so because I had another “small world” moment about Joan of Arc Junior High a little over a year ago. I was speaking at a Wondermore “What’s New in Children’s Books” event in Boston along with Eric Velasquez. He’s the illustrator for New Shoes, and I was excited to meet him for the first time. He spoke before I did and he described a graphic memoir he is writing that is in part set at the junior high he attended, which was—wait for it—Joan of Arc Junior High!

 

The school isn’t even all that enormous. I find this odd because I’ve never met anyone in my adult life who went to Dumbarton Junior High, in Maryland, where I suffered through 9^th grade.

 

I don’t know whether Joan of Arc keeps a record of its notable alumni.

 

 

 

But here are three.

Helen Frances Theresa Delaney Martini, a student in the 1920s. First woman zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo.

 

Jean-Pierre Meyer, my father, a student in the 1940s. Algebraic topologist and long-time Math Department Chair, The Johns Hopkins University.

 

Eric Velasquez, a student (I’m guessing) in the 1970s. Artist and writer.

 

Small world.