ABSTRACT
When adults come upon a book read in childhood, he writes, having only the vaguest memories of it, they respond with curiosity and expectation. They are inclined to think, and to hope, that the book might make memory more precise-might, in fact, restore the “mental state” of “that time.”1 Two associated ideas are at work here, both of which are important for my own account of heritage representations of the past, and their connection to books written for children. The first is that children’s books provoke memory in adults, the kind of memory that invites the adult to think that the past can, in some way, be brought back. The second is that the adult actively desires to bring the past back: “It is not without a certain curiosity, an anticipation of a recurrence of memories and a kind of interior rejuvenation that we begin to read it [the children’s book].”2
