As Britons welcome a new screen adaptation, author Michael Bond muses on the bear’s quasi-Jewish roots
By Rachel Shukert for Tablet Magazine
Look at any picture of London these days, and it appears a small army has invaded—an army of bears, that is. Over 50 celebrity-designed life-size statues of the beloved children’s character Paddington Bear have been placed at strategically chosen locations around the city, including, of course, at Paddington Station, to coincide with the feature film debut of everybody’s favorite, accident-prone, duffle coat loving Peruvian.
The film is, by all accounts, a delight—an instant children’s classic that adults will love as well. Unfortunately, like so much of the best of Britain these days (your Downton Abbeys, your Sherlocks), we in the States will have to wait until January for it. But we can enjoy the flurry of British press surrounding the film, particularly the interviews with Paddington’s 88-year-old creator, Michael Bond, in which he reveals his inspiration for the kindly bear: the Jewish evacuee children he remembered seeing in the train stations of London during the Kindertransport of the late 1930s. “They all had a label round their neck with their name and address on,” a recent article in The Guardian quotes Bond as saying, “and a little case or package containing all their treasured possessions. So Paddington, in a sense, was a refugee, and I do think that there’s no sadder sight than refugees.”
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