"This Is the Rope," by Jacqueline Woodson, and More What parent wasn't thrilled to hear about the Emory University study suggesting that children who are told stories about their families" pasts may develop a greater ability to cope with the vicissitudes of life? But most children's books that convey a sense of family history and tradition - "All-of-a-Kind Family," "Little House in the Big Woods" - are written with the older child in mind. Younger children are more likely to learn the day-to-day habits of rabbits, monkeys and bears. So it's refreshing to find three new picture books that take as their subject the stories of human families, illuminating the ways certain rituals - along with sayings, jokes, pastimes and world views - get passed down through the generations. Set in the early 20th century, "Rifka Takes a Bow" follows the daughter of two actors through the ragtag yet magical realm of a Yiddish theater on New York's Lower East Side. The 96-year-old author Betty Rosenberg Perlov grew up in that world (her mother was an actress, her father a writer and producer), and it's clear she knows it well. In telling her story, she's helped along by Cosei Kawa, whose intricately lovely drawings, with their Chagall-like colors and perspective, establish an appropriately folkloric atmosphere. As Rifka watches her parents transform into stock characters - "Papa pastes on a brown, curly mustache and picks up a cane. Mama puts on a white wig" - the book recognizes the abiding mystery of parents, with their alluring yet inscrutably adult ways. Piff-Paff! I am really your papa," her disguised father later tells her. How else would I know your name is Rifkeleh? Mirroring the way that children negotiate a love of make-believe with their deepening knowledge of artifice, Rifka likes to be reminded that on stage, blood is ketchup, whiskey is tea, and when an actor hits another actor no one gets hurt "because a stagehand slaps his hands together behind the curtain." When the curtain rises, Rifka sits on the sidelines until she's drawn up a flight of stairs into the center of the action. Piff-Paff. She handles the pressure of the spotlight just fine. Vividly capturing a bygone New York, "Rifka Takes a Bow" also celebrates the enduring pleasures of childhood, from cherry pie to the thrill of exiting a subway station ("I am always glad to see the sky"). Written in English, it offers a charming tribute to the droll cadences, reassuring logic and irrepressible humor of Yiddish itself. In "This Is the Rope," the Newbery Honor winner Jacqueline Woodson uses a common household item to reflect one family's experience of the Great Migration. "This is the rope my grandmother found beneath an old tree a long time ago back home in South Carolina," the young narrator recounts. This is the rope my grandmother skipped under the shade of a sweet-smelling pine. Spare and evocative as a poem, Woodson's refrain winds through the book, fastening us to the comfort of memories and the strength of family ties. That same rope binds luggage to the top of the car that takes that grandmother, along with her husband and baby daughter, to New York City, where she holds on to it as they drive into the big city - a telling image for children, who are constantly asked to venture into new situations while retaining a sense of self. That same rope is used at their new house in Brooklyn to dry flowers, as a clothes line, to pull a child's duckie, and always to recall home. A tangible sign of the family's connection to the past - and a measure of the distance they've traveled - the rope helps get the grown daughter's belongings to college, and eventually comes back to Brooklyn, where the young narrator learns to tie a sailor's knot with it and to jump rope with her mother "just last Friday night." The illustrator James Ransome's warm, orange-infused palette and realistic tableaus link the South to the North, history to hope and one generation to the next. When, after a big reunion, the rope is returned to the narrator's grandmother, its rightful owner, one feels the satisfaction of a story coming full circle. Like "This Is the Rope," Patricia Polacco's book "The Blessing Cup" centers on an item, in this case a cup that links the author to her Russian-Jewish family's turbulent past. A companion book to "The Keeping Quilt," reprinted this month in a 25th anniversary edition, the story brings to life Polacco's great-grandmother Anna's childhood in a shtetl in Russia, beginning ominously as she hides with her mother and sister in an animal shed during a pogrom. Later, Anna's mother takes down "a magnificent china tea set" - along with Anna's bright red babushka, one of the few colored objects in Polacco's detailed pencil drawings - so that the family can celebrate the Sabbath. When the synagogue is burned down and all the Jews in the village are ordered to leave, the set - a wedding present from an aunt in Minsk that came with its own special blessings - is preciously packed for the difficult journey to America. After a welcome respite at the house of a kind doctor the family make their way out of Russia, and by the time they arrive in New York Harbor, only a cup remains, a vivid reminder of "the bread, salt, love and richness of being together." If "The Blessing Cup" never quite lifts off from its history lesson as do "Rifka Takes a Bow" and "This Is the Rope," it nonetheless imparts a valuable message. When the original cup breaks in two, Polacco, now its custodian, decides to give one piece each to her two children, reminding us - as do all these books in their own ways - that no matter how fragmented, family history needs to be cherished and passed along in order to survive across the years. Valerie Steiker is the culture editor of Vogue and the author of "The Leopard Hat: A Daughter's Story."