A Book’s Long Journey: How Librarians Aided One Author’s Award-Winning Research

Patricia Sarles

Nancy Churnin’s Dear Mr. Dickens won this year’s National Jewish Book Award and was named a Sydney Taylor Honor Book. Here she recalls her journey researching the book—and how librarians were pivotal to her research. Here, in her own words, Churnin shares her story from research to publication.

I am very grateful to librarians for making my book possible. I was in my local library in Plano, Texas, doing research on another topic when my mind drifted to Charles Dickens—one of my favorite writers—and I stumbled on one or two sentences in an article that opened a magical door.

The sentences were about how a Jewish woman, Eliza Davis, had written to Dickens to tell him how hurtful and harmful his portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist was to Jewish people and how she had ultimately succeeded in changing his perspective and his heart. Well, now I had to see the entire correspondence and get more context for these sentences. But where could I find the letters?

I looked and looked and came up with nothing. I talked to my librarian about it. She started researching and told me that there were two copies of the complete correspondence in the United States and one of those copies was at the University of North Texas rare books collection, just forty minutes away from me!

I called the University of North Texas, where another kind librarian put me in touch with a professor who had donated the book of their correspondence to the library. He became a mentor and friend in this journey and the librarian at University of North Texas copied and emailed copies of all the letters for me.

Librarians were essential to this story’s journey as were the three professors that helped me make sure each detail was correct. But the real story begins many years before I came across the article that propelled the story.

I fell in love with Dickens’ novels when I was little. My mother, who had always been an enthusiastic supporter of anything I read, shook her head when she saw me reading Dickens. She asked, a bit sharply, how I could read a writer who created Fagin, an ugly Jewish stereotype, in Oliver Twist. My mother had lost family in the Holocaust—a grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins she never met in Bialystok, Poland, when the Nazis marched through their village. She’d experienced anti-semitism growing up in the Bronx during World War II, too.

She knew the power of stereotypes to shape attitudes and spur ugly actions. For the first time, she disapproved of what I was reading. But I couldn’t stop reading Dickens—he was such a great writer. I wished I could have written him a letter, asking how someone with so much compassion for everyone else could write such hurtful things about my people, the Jewish people.

When I discovered Eliza’s story as an adult in 2013, it was surreal. She had written the letter I had dreamed of writing. Not only that, her letters showed he did have a great heart—a heart with the capacity to grow and change much as his Scrooge in A Christmas Carol did.

This book has been like a miracle for my mother and me. When it was finally printed and I could put it in her hands, she read it over and over. “This is so important,” she murmured. And she looked up and smiled. All the years of pain, of her heart hurting as she thought of this person so many admired hurting the Jewish people, began to fade. Thanks to Dear Mr. Dickens, she knew that this person she’d thought of as cold and cruel was someone who could learn and grow and do better.

My mother is a retired teacher, and all her life she has believed in the power of helping children learn and grow and do better. As she read and reread the book, I saw her face soften as if remembering a more innocent time when she truly believed that people were good at heart.

Dear Mr. Dickens reminds us that it’s never too late to learn and grow and do better. Charles Dickens ended up being a “mensch” as we say in Yiddish, who spoke up for Jewish people and changed the hearts of his readers. Best of all, once he changed, Eliza forgave him as we should always forgive when people make amends. Like Eliza, my mother forgave Dickens. And here’s the beautiful thing about forgiveness. It heals the person who forgives. I will be grateful always for getting the chance to see Dear Mr. Dickens heal my mother’s heart. &