Naming Liberty
by Jane Yolen; illustrated by Jim Burke Gr.
2 -5 30
pages Philomel, 2008
In facing single pages, award-winning
author Jane Yolen tells two parallel stories: one portrays
a Jewish family in the Ukraine in the 1800s and the other
pictures a young French sculptor named Frédéric
Auguste Bartholdi. The converging tales add up to an excellent
portrait of both the American immigrant experience and
the American dream.
Bartholdi's dream was to produce a gigantic statue in
the mouth of New York harbor that would welcome the dreamers
arriving from other countries and beginning anew in a land
called America. Those dreamers are personified in the book
by the author's ancestral family (the Yolens) whose hopes
and fears are presented in the first person by Gitl, the
young girl relating the trials and insecurities of transplanting
a family from one side of the world to the other.
Just as insecure was the sculptor's
dream as he lobbied American an French politicians and
businesses to secure permission to erect the statue and
raise the funds for it. Along the way, the name of the
statue -- Liberty Enlightening the World -- was shortened
to simply the Statue of Liberty. The young Gitl, in turn,
would wrestle with a similar name challenge: should she
keep her Ukrainian name or adopt an American one like "Libby" --
short for Liberty.
Along with being a portrait of
the immigrant family (yesterday and today), the book
is brimming with fascinating historical tidbits: the
same man who designed the Eiffel Tower also designed
the interior staircase of Liberty; the model for Liberty's
face was the sculptor's mother and took one year to construct;
after being constructed in France, it was carefully deconstructed
and packed into 214 crates and loaded aboard 70 train
cars for the trip to the harbor; the only "local" part
of the Liberty package was the pedestal, designed by
Richard Morris Hunt, an American.
