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It's been a long day (good! But long!) and I am pretty tired, but I wanted to knock off this post about Joseph Had a Little Overcoat before going to bed. The book (which won the 2000 Caldecott award) is based on a Yiddish folk song, about a man who had an overcoat which wore out... so he cut it down into a jacket... and then a vest... and then a scarf... and so on till it was just a button, and then he lost it, and that was the end of the overcoat, until he made this song about, so I guess that means the overcoat lives on forever in a way.
I feel like I've heard a retelling of this song in the context of American pioneers, except it wasn't presented as a retelling at all, but as a fact of life about living in a world of homespun: cloth is expensive so you use it till you've twisted every last dreg of life out of it. Maybe it's not a retelling really, but a convergence? People all around the world cut down their old clothes to get more use out of the good bits, and told stories about it...
In any case. This is a particularly Jewish telling of that tale, and quite charming. (My favorite little detail: the discarded newspaper with the headline "Fiddler on Roof Falls Off Roof.") The illustrations are sort of collage-y, with die-cut bits so that, say, you turn the page and the holes will frame just the parts of the coat necessary to make the jacket - which I think would charm me more if I hadn't spent time working in book repair: now I just look at them and quietly have vapors about how easily damaged these die-cuts are. You are giving children a book that is pre-holed, just imagine what damage they will in all innocence do when they stick their clumsy little fingers through.
I feel like I've heard a retelling of this song in the context of American pioneers, except it wasn't presented as a retelling at all, but as a fact of life about living in a world of homespun: cloth is expensive so you use it till you've twisted every last dreg of life out of it. Maybe it's not a retelling really, but a convergence? People all around the world cut down their old clothes to get more use out of the good bits, and told stories about it...
In any case. This is a particularly Jewish telling of that tale, and quite charming. (My favorite little detail: the discarded newspaper with the headline "Fiddler on Roof Falls Off Roof.") The illustrations are sort of collage-y, with die-cut bits so that, say, you turn the page and the holes will frame just the parts of the coat necessary to make the jacket - which I think would charm me more if I hadn't spent time working in book repair: now I just look at them and quietly have vapors about how easily damaged these die-cuts are. You are giving children a book that is pre-holed, just imagine what damage they will in all innocence do when they stick their clumsy little fingers through.
