The stories are organized by source; some are anonymous and the rest have short biographies before their tales. I particularly enjoy the section of work from the 18th century Dubno Preacher, who ended each tale with a clearly delineated moral (e.g., “If a man seeks respect, he should be ready to pay for it.”).
All of the folktales have an organic tone, without the predictable, smooth transitions of a modern children’s book. Instead, you feel you can actually see the storyteller’s face light up with a sudden invention for the plot. A new character will appear out of nowhere, or someone will unexpectedly die, and the reader just follows the author’s imagination as it spins.
The narrators don’t mind adding in colloquial expressions, with which they assume their readers will feel at home. The anonymous author of “The Story of Bovo” exclaims, “Now when the king’s uncle, Count Oyglin, heard about the betrothal, he hit the roof!” While that’s not a Yiddish expression, Neugroschel did a wonderful job translating the feel of the idiom. I like when the storyteller puts in conventional storyteller quips. One story ends with the line, “and if they haven’t passed away, then they are still alive today.” This is not the tone of an anonymous author speaking to an anonymous audience; it creates a much more familiar setting.
Other authors put in irony-tinged morals, such as: “We Jews are the prince. Our father, the king of the universe, saw that we were not obeying the doctors and servants—the priests, the Levites, and the teachers. So He sent us into exile, among the non-Jews, who do not know the Good Lord, and these Gentiles are supposed to cure us with harsh hands.” He uses a folktale to describe a grim reality, a religious ideal of devotion and a humorous cringe at both.
In the middle of one of his tales, Shmuel Bastomski says, “The rule is: He who does business is smart, for he constantly converses with merchants. However [the characters in this story] had always been in the forest. That’s why their minds had dulled.” Asides of this sort, as much the narrator’s passing observations on life, make the tale richer. We get of a sense of the storyteller and his surroundings and experiences.
The twisting storyline and host of strange characters (e.g., The Oldster, The Wanderer, The Owl) in the tales of Der Nister, a Ukrainian mystic, reminded me of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Another story, in which the hero gets trapped in a one-eyed ogre’s cave and escapes by poking the ogre’s eye with a burning poker and sneaking out hidden under a sheep’s belly, had a clear connection to Homer’s The Odyssey.
Neugroschel tucked several pages of folk riddles into the collection. Some sound too stilted to the modern ear to actually seem funny, but others are quite clever. It’s interesting how the themes revolve around the daily lives of the folks who told them. For example, “For what does a Christian priest buy a cane with a big knob?” (For money.) And of course, there are many death jokes (“What always comes too soon?”).
Like jokes, folktales have many tellers, each with a slightly different version and slightly different timing. Collectively, they represent the imagination of a people.
Radiant Days, Haunted Nights: Great Tales From the Treasury of Yiddish Folk Literature
Joachim Neugroschel, Ed.
Overlook, 432 pages, $35
