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Roots of responsibility Winnipeg's Carol Matas was looking for answers to the big philosophical questions decades before she became a leading author for young people Sunday, May 25th, 2003 MORLEY WALKER EVERYTHING has a beginning, as all storytellers know. If you want to discover Carol Matas's roots as one of Canada's leading authors for young people, her best friend will tell you to go back with the girls to at least Grade 4. "Carol may be tiny, pretty, feminine and nice," says Morri Mostow, who was in the same major work class at Queenston Elementary School in the late 1950s. "But she has a backbone of absolute steel and determination." From the time she first picked up a pen, Matas claims, her stories always came with a child's point of view. The recipient of numerous awards, she won her latest a month ago. The Manitoba Historical Society's Margaret McWilliams Award for historical fiction was given to her 2002 book Footsteps in the Snow, part of Canadian publisher Scholastic's high-profile Dear Canada series. She has recently completed a new trilogy of historical fiction about an American Jewish girl's adventures in turn-of-the-century New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Published by Key Porter in Canada and Simon & Schuster in the U.S., the first volume, Rosie in New York City: Gotcha! is set against the famed 1909 garment worker's strike. It will be launched 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at McNally Robinson Grant Park. Even in their school days, Mostow recalls, Carol was consumed by the questions of morality and ethics that dominate her novels, most aimed at the elementary and junior-high age group. "Most of us are detached from these philosophical issues," Mostow says from her home in Quebec's Eastern Townships. "Carol cared about the big questions: What is the meaning of things? Why is there evil in the world?" In her early science-fiction titles, published in the '80s (several in tandem with an early mentor, University of Winnipeg children's literature professor Perry Nodelman), Matas tackled these subject in an indirect manner. A throughline in many of these books was: "How does one person make a difference in the world?" As her confidence and skills increased, she addressed this theme more directly, in a series of novels set against the Holocaust. "Her historical fiction is really what she excels at," says David Jenkinson, a professor in the education faculty at the University of Manitoba. "If any middle-school grade is doing a section on racism, one of Carol's books is likely being taught." Impressed with what they read in her first stabs at the genre, 1987's Lisa and 1989's Jesper, officials at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington commissioned her to write a book to complement a museum exhibit. Daniel's Story follows a boy and his family from a German ghetto into the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. It remains one of her bestsellers. "I know it sounds a bit corny," says Matas, who worked as an actress before being bitten by the writing bug. "But I'm motivated by the idea of making the world a better place." She comes honestly by this mission. Her late father, Roy, was a judge on the Manitoba Court of Appeals. Her first cousin David is a prominent Winnipeg immigration lawyer. Her husband, University of Winnipeg theatre professor Per Brask, is a Dane whose father was a member of the resistance when the Germans invaded Denmark. Lisa and Jesper draw from their experiences. She estimates that two-thirds of her 30 novels feature Jewish protagonists, but her reasons for writing about her own ethnicity have changed over the years. "I started because I didn't see books in which Jewish children could recognize themselves," says Matas, who weathered several years of rejection following the publication of her first book in 1982. "That's no longer the case. Now I just seem to be more drawn to the subject." She and Brask have two children. Rebecca, 25, an aspiring writer herself, lives in Palm Springs, Calif., with her husband Michael Nathanson, a Winnipeg playwright who's trying to break in to the TV biz. Sam, 21, still in university, is about to move into his own place, so his parents are leaving their River Heights bungalow for a nearby condo. Anything, it seems, to avoid domestic chores. "We're both hopeless," says Matas, a slender brunette who looks a decade younger than her 53 years. "I cooked for the first 20 years of our marriage, but I got to the point where I could no longer face it." In Winnipeg's impressive community of writers for young people, a list that includes Martha Brooks, Margaret Buffie, Linda Holeman and Sheldon Oberman, Matas is by far the most prolific. She has been averaging at least two titles a year. She did all three of the Rosie books in 12 months and has four other outlines completed. She and Rebecca also have their first joint effort, a children's picture book, making the rounds of publishers. "I love writing first drafts," Matas says. "During that phase, I'll start in the morning and work until late at night." During baseball season, she can be diverted by any Blue Jays game on TV. She is also exploring a long-held interest in spiritualism. All three of the Rosie books, for example, feature an element of extra-sensory perception. Once a month, she gets together with a group of writer friends, Buffie, Susan Bowden and Maureen Hunter, for what feminists in the '60s used to call consciousness-raising sessions. "We talk about everything," she says, "not just about writing." Despite having more than 25 titles still in print, numerous foreign-language translations and several books selling to school courses and reading clubs in the U.S., she claims writing has not made her rich. "I'm to the point where I make a comfortable living," she says. "No artist does what they do primarily for the money."
morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca
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