A Big Quiet House: A Yiddish Folktale from Eastern Europe - Tapa dura

Greenstein's bright, colorful scratchboard illustrations add a delightfully humorous tone to the piece.--School Library Journal

In a rhythmic storytelling voice, Forest gives us a wonderful version of the old Yiddish folktale 'It Could Always be Worse.' Greenstein's bold, colorful pictures with thick black lines are great for group sharing; they capture the broad farce and the droll characters of the shtetl setting....Shelve this with Margot Zemach's classic 1976 version of the story.--Booklist

A poor man who longs for a "big quiet house" where his wife's snoring and his children's giggling will not annoy him consults the wisest woman in the shtetl (most versions cast a rabbi as the advice-giver). On successive visits, she instructs him to bring first a chicken, then a goat, horse, cow, and a sheep inside his house, which of course adds to the din. Finally, when she tells him to remove the noisy animals, the man has a new appreciation for his relatively large and quiet house. Forest hams up her telling with intermittent rhymes and refrains, inviting audience participation with a number of animal noises ... Greenstein enhances the story's historical flavor by using watercolor and streaky white pencil on a black surface, resulting in a pleasingly old-fashioned, woodcut-like appearance. Ages 4-7.--Publishers Weekly

When a poor man just cannot get any sleep in his noisy house because his wife is snoring and children are giggling, he seeks the advice of the wise woman and receives some rather odd advice, which leads to an equally unusual solution to the problem.