Margot Zemach

Margot Zemach (November 30, 1931 – May 21, 1989) was an American illustrator of more than forty children's books, some of which she also wrote. Many were adaptations of folk tales from around the world, especially Yiddish and other Eastern European stories. She and her husband Harvey Fichstrom, writing as Harve Zemach, collaborated on several picture books including Duffy and the Devil for which she won the 1974 Caldecott Medal.

Margot Zemach was born in Los Angeles. When she was growing up there during the Great Depression, she used drawing to make people laugh but she never had enough paper. She studied at the Los Angeles County Art Institute and, on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1955–1956, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Austria.

In 1957, Zemach married Harvey Fichstrom (1933–1974). They had four daughters, including Kaethe Zemach who is another writer and illustrator of children's books. Margot Zemach died in Berkeley, California on May 21, 1989, of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

Zemach began her career when Fichstrom urged her to do children's books. Houghton Mifflin published their first collaboration in 1959, Small boy is listening, based on their experiences in Vienna. She did the illustrations and he did the text under the pseudonym Harve Zemach. Next year Little, Brown published her work with another writer, Take a Giant Step by Hannelore Hahn.

The husband-and-wife team produced 13 books together, often simply as "Harvey & Margot Zemach" although he wrote and she illustrated. For Duffy and the Devil: a Cornish tale (1973), Margot won the Caldecott Medal from the American Library Association recognizing the year's best-illustrated U.S. children's picture book. The book was also a finalist for the annual National Book Award, Children's Literature and it was named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list in 1976. Zemach was one of the Caldecott runners-up in 1970 for The Judge: An Untrue Tale, written by Harve, and in 1978 for It Could Always Be Worse: A Yiddish Folk Tale, which she retold.

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