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2008-01-22 issue:

Husband releases wife’s final peace book

Ruth and Allan Eitzen finished ‘Tara’s Flight’ before Ruth’s death in April.

by Anna Groff

Print Article

Ruth Eitzen, peace advocate and author, never saw a finished copy of her children’s book Tara’s Flight, which will be released on Feb. 1 by Boyds Mills Press, Honesdale, Pa.
















An illustration from Tara’s Flight by Allan Eitzen.

Ruth died of an illness in April 2007. She wrote the story about a dove of peace—a retelling of Noah and the Ark—last year, and her husband, Allan, illustrated it. Her health declined too quickly for the couple to set deadlines for the book.

“We took as long as we felt we needed,” Allan says. But Ruth finished the writing months before Allan finalized the illustrations.

Allan, who now lives in Lititz, Pa., says it’s bittersweet to have the book released after her death. He received his copies in November 2007 and says the book means something special to him.

Allan says Ruth was a peace advocate her entire life—from World War II to the Iraq war.
“I don’t know a time when she wasn’t concerned about peace,” he says.

Ruth worked with children’s programs in Europe with Mennonite Central Committee after World War II, before she married Allan.

Ten years ago, they spent four months in Nepal, leading workshops on writing and illustrating as well as programs at an orphanage. Ruth returned to the United States with a desire to write a new book about peace for children and had the idea of a dove, Tara, carrying a message of peace to people. Allan says he and Ruth agreed to use the story of Noah’s Ark to tell a story of peace, but Ruth’s idea that the dove could actually carry the message of peace was one issue he questioned. However, Ruth worked with an editor who liked the idea.

Eitzen’s art
Allan likes to illustrate children’s books because children’s imagination provides an opportunity to “expand and use creativity,” even when drawing objects like people, animals and buildings, as in Tara’s Flight.

“Kids are surprising,” he says. “Sometimes they like things you don’t expect.”

Allan describes his work, often with watercolors, pens, pencils and cut paper, as “stylized realism”—that is, “simplification or slight abstraction … a little exaggeration here or there to give it a personal touch.”

Allan’s peers often recognize his work in magazines. He says that even if one tries not to, over time, illustrators will have a style.

 Allan has worked with many religious publishers in the past and says biblical characterization is “much more universal than [it] used to be.” However, illustrating is often “more or less trying to adapt to the publisher’s wish,” he says. For example, some publishers want angels with wings and others do not.

The Eitzens also wrote and illustrated The White Feather (Herald Press, 1987) and Ti Jacques: a Story of Haiti (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1972).—Anna Groff

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