Madeline Brandeis

Madeline (Frank) Brandeis, born and educated in San Francisco, traveled the world in search of stories to tell, aiming the lens of her camera at the lives of her characters. She married E. John Brandeis on January 28, 1918, and had a daughter, Marie Madeline. Brandeis married a second time, to Dr. Joseph A. Sampson, on October 5, 1933. They lived in New York City. Brandeis began her writing career at a time when children’s literature was just coming into its own. The publication of dozens of her titles for children and adolescents, including the Children of All Lands series (1933) and the novel Six Face the World (1938), reflected the explosion in the quantity and quality of books for children that began in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to illustrating her books with photographs from her travels, Brandeis took up the movie camera in her role as producer of eight motion pictures for children. Her work does not deal overtly with her own Jewish identity, although the themes of respect for different cultural and national heritages and of passing down family traditions and values resound in her books. In The Little Swiss Wood-Carver, the poor mountain boy of Switzerland keeps the memory of his artist father alive in his own work; and in The Little Spanish Dancer (1931), the young dancer is reminded of how her Spanish foremothers, despite persecution, secretly took their daughters into the dim light of caves in order to teach them the art of the dance. Madeline Brandeis died at age thirty-nine in Gallup, New Mexico, of injuries suffered in an automobile accident.