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PUBLICATIONS

A Nickel, A Trolley, A Treasure House (Viking, 2007)

by Sharon Reiss Baker, illustrated by Beth Peck
Growing up in the early 1900s, Lionel knows only a tiny tenement apartment and the crowded streets of New York’s Lower East Side. He spends every spare minute sketching scenes from the world around him but doesn’t think his drawing could ever matter to anyone else—until one day a favorite teacher invites him on a momentous streetcar journey to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, he finds that the world is a wider and more exciting place than he could have imagined.
An Association of Jewish Libraries Notable Book for
Younger Readers

Excerpt:
“Long ago, before Lionel grew up and became an artist, he was a nine-year-old boy who lived in a tiny apartment on Ludlow Street. He had lived there ever since his family came from Poland to New York, and he knew every shopkeeper, every doorway, every sidewalk crack on his block.

Lionel’s brothers delivered dresses for Mama’s business. They sold hot chestnuts in the winter and ices in the summer. They shined shoes on the corner. Not Lionel. Drawing was what Lionel loved best. He spent all his spare time sketching on envelope backs and greengrocer lists. Such an odd habit, his mother whispered. Not much use for it, his father sighed. Perhaps he would outgrow it, they both agreed."