Our Own Superheroes
We’re delighted that our new website gives us the opportunity to feature our CCFW faculty. In the coming months, we hope to showcase work they’ve been doing in other spaces as well as thoughts they’ll share exclusively here.
Today, we begin with CCFW co-director, Jennifer Holberg, who has been regularly contributing to the Reformed Journal for many years and who has served as a bimonthly writer on RJ’s blog.
Her recent piece there seemed especially fitting for the times we’re living in. Like Jennifer, you probably have your own stories about the power of the library and librarians. We celebrate and salute them!
The Critical Role of Librarians
Because I moved so often as a child–nine places but thirteen residences–I’m apt to say I’m not really “from” anywhere. But that’s probably not totally accurate. Though the locations changed and we often lived in multiple quarters as an Army family, it was not completely peripatetic. Instead, I had a childhood with deep roots in church, school, and library. Wherever we lived, those were my true “home” places. And though I grew up in a book-filled house, I never had my fill, so going to the library was a necessity. Each week, I’d go to the public library to get the next haul, and then, come home and place the new pile next to the yellow, over-stuffed chair in my bedroom to devour in the coming week.
It’s National Library Week this week (April 6-12), so I’ve been thinking particularly about how the library anchored my young life. And the critical role of librarians who nurtured my nerdy, exuberant self with such wisdom and kindness.
Like Dr. Banner, our school librarian when I was in first and second grade on a base in South Korea. It was somehow the height of hilarity and incongruity among us kids that this slight young woman shared her name with the Hulk (those Gen-X among you might now start humming the theme song to the cartoon series of the Hulk: “Doc Bruce Banner/Belted by gamma rays/Turned into the Hulk/Ain’t he unglamo-rays!). We made up our own version in her honor, which we loved to sing at her with almost no provocation. She always took it in the spirit intended–and laughed along with us, flexing her muscles and posing in various Hulk-y stances. She was her own kind of superhero to us.
I saw her more often than most because I was so often done with my work quickly, so off to the library I would trot. Dr. Banner and I would have long conversations about books–and after a while, somehow it was decided that I should spend part of each week reading to the kindergarteners. Together we would pick out picture books to present. It boggles my mind a little now to think this seemed like a good idea to people, but I still remember striding (well, as much as tiny little 2nd grade me could stride) alone across the campus with two enormous picture books under my arm, prepared to read to the “little kids.” I had the confidence of Dr. Banner behind me.
Or Miss Elder, when I lived in southern Oklahoma. Carriage Hills Elementary was a so-called “open classroom” school with only blackboards on rollers as room dividers. The library went down the middle of the building, centered between the 1-3 grades on one side and the 4-6 grades on the other. Miss Elder and I became frequent conversation partners because, here, too, as in Korea, I would complete my work before the others. Even though my mother by this point asked me every day as I left the house if I had my book with me, I was known to sometimes lapse into chatting with those around me. Boy or girl, it didn’t matter–I learned early to be able to find suitable topics with anyone I met. (Those of you who know me are, I’m sure, shocked by this admission.) So, my teacher would often say, “would you like to head to the library now?” and of course, I was eager to go. In the library with Miss Elder, we could talk about all the incredible books I was reading from the past, like Little Women, or those coming out at the time by writers such as Katherine Paterson. (I often think about how delighted Miss Elder would be to know that I grew up to be friends with Katherine, but it felt like we were all already friends in the 4th grade).
“I always felt welcomed as someone they were glad to talk to, as someone who they seemed to believe had interesting things to say. That’s quite a gift.”
I can imagine they both had a lot of work to do to delay it in spending time with me. But in my memories, they never seemed bothered or too busy. In fact, they always seemed quite happy to see me–I always felt welcomed as someone they were glad to talk to, as someone who they seemed to believe had interesting things to say. That’s quite a gift.
It’s why this week I’m determined to fight for books and libraries and librarians. The cost of their loss is the very loss of democracy. We know they are under attack, everywhere from the Naval Academy to the Haskell Free Library and Opera House and in the gutting of The Institute of Museum and Library Services. And that’s only a small accounting of the assault.
Librarians are Powerful
My own brother has had a long career as what I like to think of as a servant-librarian. (I think most librarians could adopt that title, to be honest). As an academic librarian, he sacrificially spends his time helping faculty and students alike with all manner of assistance. He stays late, he develops materials, he works intensively with people one-on-one to get them what they need. He even redesigned his reference desk so that he can sit alongside people, instead of across from them, emphasizing, he told me, that they are co-laborers, that he is in it with them. When I was speaking at a high school recently, I wasn’t surprised when I met a teacher who excitedly told me that she knew my brother, claiming that he was “the only reason she passed college.” Though I’m sure she was being modest about her own contributions, I can imagine he was a big factor, encouraging her, aiding her searches, helping hone her ideas. Librarians really do make a huge difference.
Librarians are powerful–and therefore threatening–because they know how to find and share information, they know how to empower others to do the same, and they know how formidable access to knowledge and imagination is. Every authoritarian regime understands that, too.
Photo of Memorial to the Nazi-era book Burnings at the Bebelplatz in Berlin, Germany. Photo credit: Luis Alvaz via Wikipedia.
Protecting Our Superheroes
History has already told us what happens when access to books is restricted. We need only look at a picture of the “Empty Library” memorial in Berlin, the site of the burning of 20,000 books in 1933. And we must not forget that the crowd that participated in this obliteration included educated people, professors and students.
It is not an obvious monument–empty shelves buried under the pavement, visible only through a glass window. It becomes more obvious at night, when a light from below shines out. Turns out, we need what books can give us most when it is darkest–and then, instead, they are gone.
But that’s not all that is at risk. It’s why we need to protect our own superheroes, the librarians, the keepers of the books. They steward something more than text.
Using the words of the poet Heinrich Heine, the plaque next to the memorial says it best when it warns:
“Das war ein Vorspiel nur,
dort wo man Bücher verbrennt,
verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.”
(“This was but a prelude;
where they burn books,
they ultimately burn people”).
