Jewish fairy tale retellings
As a Jewish reader, I have a complicated relationship with fairy tales. On the one hand, I love stories of beautiful princesses, clever heroines, and mythical creatures. On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to ignore that the villains being defeated in these tales are more often than not some form of antisemitic charicature. Even in modern retellings, the evil character is often just shy of Jewish coded and, as a bonus, often queer coded too. How to make ones peace with such heinous source material? A crop of books by Jewish writers seeks to do just that by inserting Jewish characters and viewpoints into tired old tales, thereby giving readers a new perspective.
Possibly the most commercially famous of this new brand of Jewish friendly fairy tale is Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver. In this book, Novik takes the most egregious of antisemitic source materials, Rumpelstiltskin, and re-imagines it. There is a sympathetic Jewish heroine, but also a web of understanding and appreciation that spreads between all the viewpoint characters whether they are Jewish or Gentile. It is no surprise that my review of this award winning book is one BookishlyJewish’s most highly visited pages. There is something for everyone here, whether they identify as Jewish or not.
Picking up that mantle and diving further into the world of Jewish shtetl life is The Sisters of the Winter Wood, which takes another story rife with antisemitism, The Goblin Market, and uses it to showcase complex Jewish characters. The plot also depicts how fairy tales and other such bedtime stories are used to scapegoat Jewish people any time the local government needs a convenient way to distract the population over whom they rule. These tales sow the seeds of dehumanization and othering that result in later pogroms whenever something bad happens. There are goblins that are most definitely not Jews in this story, but also a hassidus with an interesting magical power of its own, and a reflection on conversion and the family bonds that keep us all together.
More recently, R.M. Romero’s The Ghosts of Rose Hill, features a BIPOC Jew fighting a long forgotten demon over the memory of the Jewish children that are also all but forgotten by the local gentiles that have taken over the once thriving Jewish community of Prague. The book is a YA novel in verse, and it’s musical theme reminded me of The Pied Piper as well as several eastern European demons, but the true power of this story, for me, was in its ability to remind us all that there is power in remembering. Much like the heroine, our current stories can be brought to bear on tales of yesterday to give them a more just resolution this time around.
Another tactic to reconcile a love of fairy tale with Jewish roots is to actively bring Jewish mythological characters to the forefront. Many books have recently started to feature Golems, Sheidim, and other characters from Jewish myth. Rebecca Podos’s YA fantasy, From Dust a Flame , read to me like a modern fairy tale, complete with a heroine undergoing a distressing bodily transformation while simultaneously attempting to unravel the mystery of her curse and rescue someone else. She has both a sibling and a Golem assistant, in addition to the intriguing love interest from down the road. The story acknowledges the person hood of these creatures, from the villlain to the newly minted Golem, by giving them motivations and goals of their own.
Speaking of allowing villains person-hood, in her adult fantasy Thistelfoot, GennaRose Nethercott gives flesh to that most hated of presumably Jewish witches: Baba Yaga. Not only does she make this bogeyman relatable, she uses her to remind us all about the power of the stories we tell. It is a welcome message in a field that has once told stories used to dehumanize Jews and justify their persecution. This is not your grandmother’s Baba Yaga and the wold is better for it.
Still, readers might wonder what all this terrible legacy has to do with the whitewashed, Disney-fied fairy tales we tell our children today. Certainly those are harmless? Yet, I would argue that they are just as perniciously anti-Jewish, bu in a different way. These stories push a christian ideology as the only way of viewing the world. They create societal norms that are so ingrained in the media group-think that they seep into other cultures, including Jewish ones, and change how we tell our own stories or view our own traditions. This can occur either through a subconscious acquiescence to Christian hegemony or through the more insidious insistence of traditional publishing on relying on standard story forms, only one form of morality, and content quotas which is only now beginning to change.
Two recent books that I have read take these more recent retelllings, and retell them once again, possibly for the thousandth time, but now with a Jewish twist. In My Fine Fellow by Jennieke Cohen, the story of My Fair Lady – originally based on Ovid’s Pygmalion – is retold with an added layer of complexity. The story is genderbent and the character being “improved” by his societal superiors is Jewish. This allows the reader to sit with some very uncomfortable thoughts about how society views people as other for various reasons – including poverty, and yes, being Jewish. The tale is otherwise lighthearted and yet it still managed to trigger that next level of thought for me.
Cinderella, possibly the most famous fairy Princess of all time, is also genderbent in Felicia Grossman’s Marry be Midnight. In this story, he is the Synagouge custodian and the object of his affections is the richest woman in the Jewish community of 1830’s London. The historical adult romance, while extremely charming and sizzling, does not shy away from both the divisions between Jew and gentile and between ashkenazi and sephardic Jew at the time. The romance is more nuanced and richer for the author having done so. The happily ever after feeling more earned.
I read these books with extreme pleasure, because they allowed me to touch base with pervasive story archetypes in a way that not only did not denigrate my religion, but actually embraced it. Jewish stories come with some necessary layers of complication. Far from getting bogged down, these authors embraced the difficulty of being a Jew at any period in time, by having their characters actively engage with their heritage. It creates a fairy story that is actually believable and far more meaningful for his reader.
Fin the books mentioned in this article by clicking the links below:
Spinning Silver: GoodReads | Bookshop | Amazon | BookishlyJewish Review
The Sisters of the Winter Woods: GoodReads | Bookshop | Amazon | BookishlyJewish Review
The Ghosts of Rose Hill: GoodReads | Bookshop | Amazon | BookishlyJewish Review
From Dust a Flame: GoodReads | Bookshop | Amazon | BookishlyJewish Review