The picture books I used to read with my children were long ago packed away in boxes and consigned to the attic.  In a home filled with books, some of the best-loved stories – of bears and gorillas, adventures on the moon and in faraway lands – are no longer on view.  Even so, with a little effort, it’s easy to remember them, the books that taught my kids to read, dream, and imagine.

It’s been a long time since I read a picture book, but I recently won an assortment of books in a fundraising raffle that included Peter Sís’s The Wall.  It’s a wonderful book and worthy of the many prizes it received, but by no means is it a book exclusively for kids.  It tells the story of the author’s upbringing behind the Iron Curtain, in post-war Czechoslovakia, and recounts what it was like to live during the Prague Spring before the Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing everything in their path in 1968.  Through a series of intricate drawings, predominantly grey to emphasize the colorlessness of life under a totalitarian regime, Sís conveys brilliantly the constraints, the monotony, and the miserable uniformity, lightened only by occasional glimpses of the symbols of Western freedom: blue jeans, The Beatles, and The Beach Boys.