The Keeper of ­Stories

Gr 1-3–In a warm celebration of community spirit, Pritchard and Alko look back to a devastating 1966 fire in the library of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary and the ensuing collective effort that rescued 170,000 surviving but drenched books. Paired to an oracular narrative—“The charred shelves cradled hope/ hope/ hope. /Swollen pages, keep our stories alive”—the illustrations depict multiracial lines of students, neighbors, children, and other volunteers busily passing volumes down flights of stairs and outside to be fanned out, laid down in long rows, freeze-dried or, in what proved the most effective way to protect them from the ravages of water and mold, interleaved with paper towels by “thousands of hands.” Then “Side by side, they/ sang/ and studied and feasted/ and faltered/ and prayed/ and persisted,” the author writes, and so joined libraries themselves in becoming “keepers of these stories.” Period photos of ashy wreckage accompany the more detailed end notes, and images of a letter sent by a kindergarten class that held a bake sale to raise funds for the recovery close out this uplifting episode.