<p>The article focuses on Lucia Merecka Borski, a Polish-American compiler, translator, librarian and storyteller, tracing her life story from childhood and emigration to her literary achievements and professional career as a librarian-storyteller at the New York Public Library. It shows how Borski was shaped as a professional storyteller and translator by the large-scale institutionalized phenomenon of library storytelling, promoted by dedicated women librarians and by the climate in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s, which was receptive to the translation of foreign children’s literature and its cultural otherness. The central part of the article analyses her publications, emphasizing the diversity of her literary output, which included tales by established Polish literary figures, local folk tales typical of certain regions of Poland, such as Kashubia, as well as the stories of a small ethnic minority, the Romani people of Poland. In this way, Borski included in her collections both more mainstream and culturally marginalized minor literatures, which could be described as secondary in status to both global English and the Polish language. The article also focuses on the way the tales were retold and on the treatment of cultural references, which were often retained in translation, with the underlying assumption being that young readers should be confronted with the foreign nature of the stories.</p>