Peter Sís at the Eric Carle Museum

Journeys Through Fact and Fantasy: Peter Sís at the Eric Carle Museum

“I am always trying to follow the path of someone who went someplace and saw something amazing,” Sís explains.

Sís retraces his own path in a trio of autobiographical books. Prague is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, but for the young Sís, “Well, it was the place I grew up in.” After seeking asylum in the West, he feared he would never see Prague again. But with the fall of the Soviet Union, he returned to Czechoslovakia with his American passport. In his book about Prague, The Three Golden Keys (1994), “I became an explorer going back to my own house,” he says.

When Sís was a little boy, his father was drafted into the army film unit and sent to China to make a documentary about building a highway into a remote area (but also known as Tibet). “My father had no idea what he was getting into. He told my mother he would be back by Christmas, and he was, but it was Christmas three years later!” Filming the construction blasting through the Himalayan Mountains was dangerous work, and in a snafu involving a landslide, the film crew got lost. Sís’s father wandered in Tibet for two years, stumbling into the forbidden city of Lhasa and meeting the 18-year-old Dalai Lama.

The Picture Book Odyssey of Peter Sís, Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, on display through October 27.