The Empty Chair

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

No one had much money to spare in north-end Winnipeg in the 1930s. Rebecca Devine’s family lived from hand to mouth and often did without. But they were never poor, they had each other. There were Mama, Papa, Rebecca, and Simply Simon. (Mama and Papa called him Saul, but he just couldn’t stand that. “Call me — simply — Simon,” he said; so Rebecca did.) There was to be a new baby too, and Becky waited anxiously for the great day — never dreaming that when it came it would be a time of sorrow rather than of joy — Mama died in childbirth. Soon the uncles, and especially the aunts, are on the lookout for a new wife for Papa. But Becky can’t bear the thought of an interloper, even one as nice as the teacher Miss Cohen, taking Mama’s place.

The Empty Chair, simply and powerfully told, is the story of a child coming to terms with what must be. Kaplan has adapted it for younger readers from her successful adult novel Corner Store (Queenston House, 1975).