Golem by David Wisniewski (1996)

My brain was fried at work, so I went up to the children's section and picked up one of the Caldecott Award winning books I had not read. Golem was about a time in the 16th century in Prague, when the Jews were being put in a ghetto and persecuted. A rabbi decided to invoke a golem - making him out of clay and bringing life into him - as long as the Jews were persecuted. I was thinking that was forever, but there seemed to come a point in the story where the Jews felt safe(r) and the golem went back to being clay. Actually not so light hearted for a kids book, but the illustrations were great - often layers of cut paper creating all sorts of neat effects.