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Mapping the Imagination by Dr. Carol Reynolds
ne of my favorite children's books happens to be Uri Shulevitz's How I Learned Geography. Touchingly illustrated by the author, the story is based on Shulevitz's actual childhood. Born in Warsaw in 1935, he fled with his family after the Nazis incinerated the city center in 1944 and razed Warsaw to the ground. The family was taken to a refugee camp in the remote steppes of Turkestan. There, everything was harsh and unwelcoming. After a number of years, the Shulevitz family found a pathway to Paris, and ultimately Israel. The storybook recreates Uri's life in that Turkestan village through the character of a little boy fleeing exactly the same tragedy. War refugees lived in trying circumstances and existed primarily on small parcels of bread. So, it was a serious decision when the father in the story (and Uri's own father in actuality) chose one day to invest the pennies available for daily bread to buy a wall map. The seemingly frivolous purchase was met with ire by the wife and the hungry boy. The child went to bed filled with anger and shame. Yet, the next morning, when Father hung the map, the drab, dusty hut built from blocks of camel-dung transformed into a living cinema. The child spent hours gazing at the colorful map, memorizing the strange names, marveling at the blue seas, tracing the mountain ranges, and copying its details onto any scrap of paper available. In his imagination, he flew across the globe, ran on beaches, swung with monkeys, ate fresh mangos and papayas, froze in the Arctic, and stood in awe of the endless windows of New York skyscrapers. At the story's end the child forgives his father, for Father had been right. For Shulevitz, that long-ago map and the waves of imagination it triggered got him through an awful period of displacement and set his course to become a fine author and illustrator. Few things are more powerful or valuable than the human imagination. Expressions of the imagination garner praise in young children, but later imaginative play often gets labeled as a distraction that needs to be put aside. Imaginative speculations (and the mess they create) are muzzled. The wrongness of this muzzling ought to be self-evident, particularly since we simultaneously praise the imaginations of writers, inventors, and artists who long ago created works like the Divine Comedy, the printing press, or the glorious ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Beyond fostering tangible, praiseworthy achievements, the imagination has the power to nurture the well-rounded mental, emotional, and Dr. Carol Reynolds is a widely acclaimed author, speaker, and educator. She regularly leads arts tours throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, recently in partnership with the Smithsonian Institute.
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