Baboushka and the Three Kings
by Nicolas Sidjakov
Summary
Ruth Robbins retells a Russian folk legend about Baboushka, an old woman so absorbed in keeping her small house in order that when three richly dressed kings stop at her door on their way to Bethlehem and ask her to join their journey to see a newborn child, she puts them off, telling herself she will follow once her sweeping and baking are done. That night, alone, she changes her mind and sets out after them with a bag of small toys and sweets to give the child herself, but by then the kings are long gone and she never catches up or finds her way to Bethlehem at all. The story ends without a reunion; Baboushka is still searching, the legend says, appearing every year at Christmastime to leave gifts for other children in place of the one she never found.
Nicolas Sidjakov illustrates the legend in flat, deliberately primitive color, rigid vertical lines and stylized, elongated figures rather than realistic ones, paired with bold hand lettered type that makes each page read almost like a folk icon. It is a striking, unusual look for a Christmas picture book of its era, closer to folk art than to storybook illustration, and reviewers at the time called it experimental but largely successful even as they noted the subject, an old woman's endless, unresolved search, sits further from a typical American Christmas story than most children's holiday books. It suits children old enough, around five and up, to sit with a story that ends in continued searching rather than a tidy homecoming.
Historical Context & Significance
Baboushka and the Three Kings won the 1961 Caldecott Medal for a book published in 1960 by Parnassus Press, a small publisher founded in Berkeley, California, in 1957 by Herman Schein, who was married to the book's author, Ruth Robbins. That year's single Caldecott Honor book was Leo Lionni's Inch by Inch.
Sidjakov was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1924, trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and worked in French film and European advertising before immigrating to the United States in 1954. He built the rest of his career as a commercial artist and graphic designer in San Francisco, later co founding the design firm Sidjakov and Berman Associates, though he went on to illustrate several more children's picture books, most of them with Ruth Robbins, alongside his design work.