L'dor Va'dor: From Generation to Generation

What would you take with you if you had to leave your home?  What thing - an object, a recipe, even a story - have you inherited?  What do you want to pass down to your descendants?

Maybe it's a shovel - like in Dan Yaccarino's All the Way to America: The Story of a Big Italian Family and A Little Shovel and Leslie Connor's Miss Bride Chose A Shovel - which can be put to any number of uses, from the expected digging to the less predictable scooping flour and salting the sidewalk in advance of a snowstorm.  Or a quilt as in The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco or a rope, as in Jacqueline Woodson's This Is the Rope: A Story From the Great Migration, both of which can also be used in myriad ways - the quilt becomes a chuppah (wedding canopy); the rope ties, and hauls, but also becomes a jump rope and the string for a pull-toy.
















Maybe it's a cup, broken but still whole, like in Chachaji's Cup by Uma Krishnaswami (perhaps my very favorite of all the titles here), or Patricia Polacco's The Blessing Cup.

Or a precious doll or stuffed animal, perhaps lost forever as in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr, perhaps only thought forever lost and then found again, like Tomi Ungerer's teddy bear Otto or Claire Nivola's Elisabeth (all three of these involve WWII). Or a doll damaged and repaired, like Miki in Yoko's Show and Tell  or a teddy bear that could tell quite the story if only it could speak, like Anzac Ted and A Bear in War (both set during WWI) or Polar the Titanic Bear who journeyed on the ill-fated ship.


What about something that your whole family had to bring, piece by piece, like Izzy and Olivia's ancestors did in Under the Sabbath Lamp?

Perhaps you'd bring with you a smell or taste of home, via seeds that you could plant in your new land.  That's what Azzi does in Azzi in Between and what the protagonists do in The Butterfly Seeds.

Or maybe you'd take a piece of jewelry, like the necklace in The Granddaughter Necklace or the ring in When Jessie Came Across the Sea, or the bracelet in Yoon and the Jade Bracelet?


Or a collection of small mementos, like an olive pit to remind you of hunger, or a single bead from a rosary, like those in The Matchbox Diary or Small Beauties: The Journey of Darcy Heart O'Hara, 

Would you bring an instrument with you? Mendel did.

Maybe something you left behind - or merely a remnant of it - was found and returned to you after you left, like the pillow in The Feather-Bed Journey.

Or something you created under the worst conditions imaginable, like the menorah in Nine Spoons: A Chanukah Story?


Or maybe you had to leave with nothing. Nothing tangible, that is. Instead, just the story of an item, recycled and reused until nothing is left but the memory of it, as in How I Learned Geography or Joseph Had a Little Overcoat and its many iterations (Something from Nothing, Maya's Blanket: La Manta de Maya, My Grandfather's Coat, Bit by Bit, I Had A Favorite Dress).  Or not even a recipe on a worn, creased piece of paper, but one memorized, so no one could take it from you, as Bill Freund writes in The Cookie That Saved My Family, "Something you've learned can never be taken away."

What would you bring?  What did you or your ancestors bring?  What do you want to pass down to your children?