Libraries are repos­i­to­ries of knowl­edge, havens for schol­ars, pro­mot­ers of lit­er­a­cy. In Car­o­line Kusin Pritchard and Seli­na Alko’s pic­ture book, the role of these insti­tu­tions is even more fun­da­men­tal. They are keep­ers of sto­ries, essen­tial to the com­mu­ni­ties that they serve. 

In 1966, a fire destroyed many of the books in the library of New York City’s Jew­ish The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary. This cat­a­stro­phe brought out many res­cuers, as both the local and the larg­er com­mu­ni­ties rushed to rec­i­p­ro­cate the care they had received from this irre­place­able trea­sure. With a pow­er­ful­ly uplift­ing text and rich­ly allu­sive pic­tures, The Keep­er of Sto­ries chron­i­cles the fire and its after­math, ensur­ing that this sto­ry will not be forgotten.

The book begins by plac­ing the library in con­text. Found­ed in 1893, it had long housed every cat­e­go­ry of book imag­in­able. There are ​“pre­cious sto­ries” from Jew­ish his­to­ry, sec­u­lar works, and children’s books. Alko’s illus­tra­tions, with their sig­na­ture col­lage style, fea­ture Torah scrolls, books, and let­ters emerg­ing from open vol­umes into flight. An obser­vant Jew selects a vol­ume from a shelf of reli­gious books, while a woman stands on her toes to either select or shelve To Kill a Mock­ing­bird. A copy of The Snowy Day lies on the floor, near a lit­tle boy wear­ing a kip­pah. The sto­ries kept in this library are clear­ly for everyone.

As fire attacks the build­ing, Pritchard’s nar­ra­tive builds in inten­si­ty. She repeats, with mean­ing­ful vari­a­tions, one incan­ta­to­ry phrase: ​“keep our sto­ries alive.” Enu­mer­at­ing the actu­al process of sav­ing the remain­ing books from destruc­tion, the words also cel­e­brate the hero­ism of ded­i­cat­ed vol­un­teers. Begin­ning with first respon­ders from the fire depart­ment, and con­tin­u­ing to include rab­bis, chil­dren, stu­dents, and neigh­bors, every­one coop­er­ates to save the sto­ries from obliv­ion. Pritchard uses both infor­ma­tion and metaphor to pro­duce her effect. The build­ing is ​“wound­ed,” but ​“an unbreak­able human chain” is ded­i­cat­ed to the task of repair. Water can be as destruc­tive to books as the fire itself, and Pritchard describes the inven­tive meth­ods used to counter that effect. Vac­u­um pres­sure, wind, and final­ly, paper tow­els insert­ed between pages are labor-inten­sive to use, but effective.

Alko ele­vates the well-known idea of many hands join­ing togeth­er to accom­plish a goal. She cap­tures the scale of both the dis­as­ter and its solu­tion in scenes of relent­less activ­i­ty. A series of hands pass­es books between helpers, includ­ing spe­cif­ic titles that give evi­dence of the collection’s breadth. One two-page spread con­verts the library into the image of a giant book, con­tain­ing with­in its pages the mate­ri­als of book repair and their metic­u­lous use by one woman hard at work. Anoth­er page fea­tures two scenes sep­a­rat­ed by white space. One depicts the joy of a woman, wear­ing a tal­lit and kip­pah, as she reads to a group of chil­dren. The oth­er, poignant­ly, shows the rev­er­ent bur­ial of Torah scrolls. Anoth­er metaphor con­cludes the sto­ry of the library fire. The Jew­ish The­o­log­i­cal Seminary’s emblem con­tains words from the bib­li­cal account of the burn­ing bush. In Alko’s pic­ture, a mas­sive blue-and-white star, super­im­posed on a shelf of books, also encas­es these words. The star appears to be stand­ing guard as a girl ascends a lad­der to retrieve a book. Slight­ly alter­ing the pow­er­ful words, Pritchard reminds read­ers that ​“our sto­ries were not con­sumed,” reaf­firm­ing that libraries have been guardians of Jew­ish history.