Founded in 1893, New York City's Jewish Theological Seminary Library originally had ten floors full of sacred stories of the Jewish people, "of how their ancestors sang and studied and feasted and faltered and prayed and persisted." This riveting nonfiction book tells how the library — the keeper of stories — welcomed "the words that were safe nowhere else," because others had tried to erase them and their tellers. And by the time we fall in love with this library, it tells about a terrible April 1966 fire that nearly destroyed all these rare treasures.
Starting with a maintenance worker who smells smoke and runs to see what's wrong, waves of effort protect as many books as possible and, of course, the building itself. Firefighters cover the bookshelves with canvas before spraying their hoses; hundreds of people wind up the staircases in "Operation Booklift" to bring out as many volumes as possible; and volunteers place books in sheltering nooks on campus, outside to dry in the fresh air, and eventually in a food-science freeze-drying machine!
Each of these stages and more is described in vibrant words accompanied always by a prayer that four-to-eight-year-old readers can grasp. For instance, when the firefighters have covered the shelves:
"... then, the water surged.
"It spilled past the Aramaic and Ancient Greek, the Yiddish and Ladino.
It tumbled through medical texts and medieval love stories.
It blasted over bindings, book after book.
It wrestled the fire until the sun sank behind the city's skyline.
"Rushing water, keep our stories alive."
Touching details of how people saved an estimated 170,000 books include the role played by preschoolers from the neighboring Riverside Church. They held a bake sale to help rescue efforts, raising $62.65.
The outpouring of communal kindness supplies a tremendous dose of inspiration and a reminder that "we are the keepers of these stories too." A thorough historical account accompanied by photos follows the main story, and the book concludes with an author's note and a bibliography of key sources.
Selina Alko's illustrations are the kind you can view again and again, always spotting new wonders. In a picture prior to the fire, a young boy wearing a yarmulke watches a librarian restock books, with stories scattered around him on the floor including The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats — and all that is just one corner of a two-page spread.
Author Caroline Kusin Pritchard writes picture and middle-grade books for children, including Gitty and Kvetch, which was a Tablet Magazine Best Jewish Picture Book of the Year. She hopes that this book "will keep the memory of the fire alive. It is a story that reminds us of who we are at our core, and who we can never stop striving to become."
