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How a Neighborhood Rallied to Save a Library’s Collection Unavoidably Soaked by Firefighters

January 7, 2025

The Keeper of Stories by Caroline Kusin Pritchard with illustrations by Selina Alko; New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers; © 2025; ISBN 9781665-914970; 38 pages including author’s note and explanatory pages; $19.99.

SAN DIEGO – In 1966, a fire that started on a top floor of the 10-story Jewish Theological Seminary building in New York City destroyed 70,000 books and other written items.  Many were extra copies of the books stored below; others were irreplaceable items such as the Torah scrolls sent for safekeeping from Danzig during the Holocaust.

To protect the books on the lower floors, firefighters covered them with canvas before spraying large volumes of water onto the building.  The canvas helped but not enough to prevent the soaking of the books that hadn’t been turned into ash.

Jews and non-Jews alike rallied to save the remaining collection, passing the soaked books down by hand from the shelves to the streets where they could be dried.  Many techniques were utilized to dry the volumes, none more effective than putting sheets of paper towels between the pages to absorb the moisture and prevent the words on the printed pages from turning into sludgy blotches.

“A library is a keeper of stories.  A keeper of memories. A keeper of hope,” author Pritchard begins her account of the remarkable way in which neighbors came together to save the stories.

When the water surged, “it spilled past the Aramaic and Ancient Greek, the Yiddish and Ladino,” she continued.  “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….”

Thousands of hands preserved millions of pages to keep their stories alive.

The story is well illustrated by Selina Alko for an intended audience of 4 through 8-year-olds.

A quibble from this reviewer: The story says 70,000 books were destroyed and 170,000 books were saved.  That adds up to 240,000 books. But in explanatory material, written for adults, it says the library “held nearly 200,000 books, magazines and newspapers.”  Which figure is correct for the size of the collection prior to the conflagration?

The book emphasizes for children the importance of libraries and hints at the depth and breadth of the Jewish experience over the centuries.  It also makes a point of crediting people of all faiths, creeds, and races who participated in a mass neighborly effort to preserve the books.

*
Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.

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