Of all the books that helped me learn to read, the one I treasured most was The Magic Glove, a Ukrainian folk tale illustrated by Evgenii Rachev and published in an English translation in the mid-Fifties. Before I could read the first line – “An old man was walking through the forest one day with his dog” – I was captivated by Rachev’s drawings of a snowy, red, sunset forest, populated by a mouse, a frog, a rabbit (which looked more like a hare), a fox, a wolf, a boar and a bear in regional Soviet costumes. They all squeezed into a mitten that, page by page, sprouted a porch, a bell, a door, a window and a smoking chimney.
I have a copy of the book with me as I write. It reminds me that, even...