The Welcome Chair
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“An eloquent account of the American immigrant experience.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Deserves to become a modern classic.” —BookPage (starred review)
“A resounding welcome to immigrants.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Based in part on a 100-year-old family journal, Rosemary Wells brings to life a story that the diary’s fragile pages tell. It’s the story of a wooden rocking chair handmade in about 1825 by her great-great-grandfather, an immigrant Jewish boy who made his way to America from Germany in the early 1800s.
In 1807, Sam Siegbert is born in southern Germany. Sam’s favorite pastime is carpentry, much to his father’s displeasure. His mother says he has a gift from God in his hands. After moving to America, he builds a wooden chair with the word WILLKOMMEN on the back. The chair’s back panel was later marked with welcomes by four generations of the family in four different languages.
After the family lost track of the old chair, the author created a new life for it among new owners from other corners of the world. All the families who loved the chair came to America, escaping religious conformity, natural disasters, tyrannies, war, and superstition. In its lifetime, the rocking chair, with its earliest word WILLKOMMEN, stood for openness, hospitality, and acceptance to all who owned it or rocked safely in its embrace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An inscribed cherrywood rocking chair becomes a symbol of refuge, comfort, and connection for generations of immigrants in this volume by two children's book luminaries. The chair is created by Sam, a character based on Wells's great-great-grandfather, who escapes an unyielding father in Bavaria, becoming a woodworker first in New York and then in Wisconsin. He carves the first three "Welcomes" on the chair: in German, as tribute to employers; in Hebrew, to commemorate his own son's birth; and in English, because, as Sam's daughter notes, "We are in America." As the chair passes from family to family, more languages are added, and more stories unfold; the final welcome is inscribed by a present-day family sponsoring a young refugee of war. If Wells paints America's historical acceptance of others with an overly broad brush, she makes her vision of the country clear. Pinkney's elegantly textured watercolor, pencil, and pastel pictures occasionally pull back into historical sweeps, such as a covered wagon moving westward in swirling snow. But mostly he hones in on the intensely personal, capturing moments of emotional complexity and immediacy as new arrivals take the chair into their lives and America into their hearts. Back matter includes creators' notes. Ages 4–8.
