The Keeping Quilt

Polacco, Patricia. The Keeping Quilt. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1998.

The Keeping Quilt, by Patricia Polacco is a children’s realistic fiction picture book, based on intergenerational family bonds. Patricia Polacco recounts her great-grandmother's arrival in New York City, from Eastern Europe. Her great-grandmother’s dress and babushka, as well as other family members’ old clothing, become part of a quilt that is handed down from one generation to the next and incorporated into a multitude of family traditions.

This is a tender tale about the love between generations, and an important look into the difficulties immigrant children face when coming to a new country. For example: “English sounded to [Anna] like pebbles dropping into shallow water.” (pg. 2, “The Keeping Quilt”). Patricia Polacco also does a wonderful job of introducing Russian-Jewish traditions and customs to young children. When Grandma Carle was born: “She was given a gift of gold, flower, salt, and bread…Gold so she would never know poverty, a flower so she would always know love, salt so her life would always have flavor and bread so that she would never know hunger”.

The themes throughout this book are the love and bonds of family and the ability to honor the past while embracing the present; these two themes are connected by the “keeping quilt”. Patricia Polacco’s contrasting illustrations between the charcoal/pencil drawings and the brightly illustrated “keeping quilt” enhances these themes. The brightly illustrated quilt represents the link between the ever changing customs and traditions of a family and the love that family has for one another.