The only thing I know about chimney sweeps is from the scene in Mary Poppins where Bert takes Mary and the kids up on the rooftops of London and they end with that great song "Step in Time".

It's not very factual, but there it is.

I requested a review copy of Lisa Tetzner's The Black Brothers because I knew so little about sweeps and I was quite intrigued by the idea of an author writing this book in 1941. I did some research on the subject after I finished the book and while I did not find much on boys in Italy doing the job (as depicted in the book), there are several sites like this one about boy sweeps in Britain and it clearly was a pervasive practice across Europe. Basically boys as young as four were sold by their families or by orphanages and went to work climbing up chimneys and cleaning them out by hand. They were covered in soot 24 hours a day and suffered severely from lung ailments. They also were starved because you had to be small to fit up the chimneys. The whole thing was horrible but it took the British almost 60 years (1804 - 1860s) to finally pass laws the permanently banned the practice.

The story behind this edition of the book is almost as interesting as the text itself. Originally written in 1941 by Tetzner and her husband, Kurt Held, the book ran 500 pages and has been characterized as "overly sentimental". (With kids starving and dying left and right at this job, I don't see how you could avoid a healthy dose of sentiment.) The book was published under only Lisa's name because Kurt was Jewish and could not publish. (They were German, but I can't figure out what happened to them - I know they didn't die in the war but went into exile, but I'm not sure where and the translated sites on the net are very weak.)

Hannes Binder lives in Zurich and found the book 50 years later. He cut it down hugely (it runs about 150 pages now) and added pictures, making a graphic novel of the original book. Peter Neumeyer translated it into English.

If you have an interest in history you will be fascinated by The Black Brothers. It's about one boy, Georgio, and how he comes to leave his Swiss farming family (willingly sold under the promise that he would return in 6 months) and work in Milan. He meets other sweeps, joins a hidden group dedicated to helping each other and suffers horribly from the couple he works for. Always he dreams of going home and seeing his family again. It's very sad, very intense and very compelling. I thought it was excellent and Binder's illustrations are a perfect companion to the text. I'll be reviewing The Black Brothers in a historical fiction column down the line....maybe August...for Bookslut.