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It was in a New York City library that my fourteen-year-old grandfather, newly arrived from Russia in the dawn of the 20th century, began to learn English. And it was in the Ida Casons Branch of an Atlanta public library that I spent hours upon childhood hours in the youth room reading the Danny Dunn series, and Madeleine L'Engle. The librarian at the Long Island (New York) library scolded me for using "my mother's" library card and not having one of my own. (I had to show her my driver's license to prove the card I was using to check out books was indeed mine.) 

A quarter of a century ago my husband and I were transferred to the Detroit area.  As soon as I was able (I was nine months pregnant when we arrived) I got my Baldwin Library card, carrying on a family tradition that stretched back some ninety years. Somehow, during all the diapers and midnight feedings and endless loads of laundry I managed to lose myself in a novel or two each month.
 
When the above infant was old enough, off we went to the library for story hours, puppets and books,  book, books.  When his sister arrived, along she came, too. Where else but a library are a building's entire contents yours for the asking? The Baldwin Library has been a part of the fabric of my reading life for going on twenty five years now. Not only are the books my friends, but the librarians, too, always there to help me find a new delight, inquire about my own writing, smiling as I am handed another week's worth of reading pleasure.
 
Five years ago my first book was published and took its place on the Baldwin Library's non-fiction stacks. This year, my first children's picture  book will be published. It makes me smile to imagine a young mother, toddler in tow, making her way through the stacks and stopping to draw I Love Jewish Faces, from the shelf. The book celebrates Jewish diversity and hopefully this mother and her youngster, possibly adopted from China, or Honduras or Russia will begin to read and see photographs that reflect their own family's racial diversity.  Because a library is not only where we find books; it is the place where, between the pages of an author's vision, we so often find ourselves.
 
Ms. Darvick is the author of This Jewish Life: Stories of Discovery, Connection and Joy. Her first children's picture book, I Love Jewish Faces will be published later this year.  Visit her blog at debradarvick.wordpress.com.

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