Rachel's Library

Alison Mews is co-ordinator of the Centre for Instructional Services at
Memorial University of Newfoundland.

The Polish town of Chelm is well known in Jewish folklore as a village
inhabited by exceedingly foolish people. In this story, which is based
on “Chelm’s School” by Samuel Tenenbaum, the townspeople are tired
of their reputation as fools, and send a delegation to Warsaw to find
some way of letting the world know that they are truly wise. Young
Rachel conceals herself in a cart and, after the elders consider and
reject adopting three Warsaw customs, it is Rachel who spies the library
and equates scholarship with wisdom. She borrows a book on the Sages of
Chelm, and uses it to convince the villagers to develop a library of
their own, which they then name after her.

This is the third book by Richard Ungar in which the child, Rachel, is
the voice of reason among Chelm’s foolish adults. The humour is
understated; the delegates, for example, are determined by drawing
straws (that is, using straws to draw pictures), and the library, which
is meant to attest to the villagers’ enlightenment, is inadvertently
built around the village water pump. But rather than being an
inconvenience, its location becomes a means of drawing villagers into
the library.

Ungar’s coloured-pencil illustrations in vivid hues of reds and
yellows lend a warm, folksy atmosphere to the story. Inspired by Chagall
and by historical photographs of Jewish people, he has filled his bright
illustrations with affectionate details of folks bustling about a Polish
shtetl.

Rachel’s Library is a timeless tale that unabashedly promotes the
library as a symbol of a literate (and wise) society. Highly
recommended.