The Little Match Girl & the Great Fire

I was looking through some photographs (desperately seeking inspiration) and came across a picture I’d downloaded of The Man of Uz. It is an illustration by a not so very illustrious artist but one who I have known as long as I can recollect. I had copied it down in order to make a card for my partner marking the end of what had been a rather difficult period (but that’s another story).

The reason that I knew of this artist was because when I was a child, my family had a volume of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytales. Now, that’s not that unusual and you might envision it as a pleasant little book that a family library would most likely have in it - but ‘our Hans’ was a fairly dark character and his tales are often edged with frightening scenes - a bit like the Grimms - but somehow, colder.

In any case, this book of fairytales was clothbound and was wrapped, front to back, with an illustration depicting the various characters in the book. Again, you would think that it would be something rather pretty - but it was not. It was completely grotesque and I was drawn to it by the sheer shiver factor it produced - these were not your usual illustrations, but deeply intricate and coloured heavily in rich, dark hues. The people that inhabited them were strange creatures of almost nightmarish origin - and I used to just stare at them endlessly.

But I haven’t mentioned the artist by name. He was Arthur Szyk, a Polish Jew born in Lodz in 1894. He later moved to the U.S. and was well-known for his satirical caricatures during the war years. It wasn’t until recently that I actually learned the name of the man whose work (at least, that in our book) I had become so familiar with.

At some point during my high school years, my father, for some inscrutable reason, decided to ‘rid’ us of many of the books with which I and my siblings had grown up. I’ve never been able to figure that out. Luckily, or perhaps not so luckily, the Hans Christian Anderson had not been among them. No, the fate that befell that wondrous volume was even worse.

It was in my Junior year in high school and I had been excused from class for a dentist’s appointment. While sitting in the waiting room reading, a rather excited conversation occurred among the staff. At first I paid no attention to it but because of its length; in the end, I couldn't help but listen. It seemed there was a huge fire, a conflagration occurring and, being a very small town, this was big news. 
There were a few salient bits of information that began to fill me with a certain dread as it became clear to me that this fire’s destructive forces were being wrought upon my own home. I could not say anything but when my appointment ended, I raced home as fast as I could to find half of our building pretty much in ruins - and that half contained our apartment. That which was not destroyed by the fire, was water damaged beyond repair and unfortunately, there seemed to have been some looting as objects were carried from the apartments. Almost everything I had ever owned, was gone - and so too, was the book.

Years later, after the invention of the internet, I was reminiscing nostalgically about a number of the books we had and decided to begin a search for them on eBay, which I promptly did. It took quite some doing but I managed to track down the HCA and bought it. It was at this point that I learned the artist’s name. Once discovered, I bought a couple more of his illustrated books.

It’s a strange thing - I know it’s not the original book of fairytales I once held in my 5 year old hands - but the book is exactly the same - and somehow connects me to myself in a certain place and time - and like an heirloom, I treasure it.