Spinning Silver

In the opening pages of Spinning Silver the author, Naomi Novik, tells a fairy tale. It is both tantalizingly familiar and utterly foreign at the same time. That is because this version of Rumpelstiltskin, or The Miller’s Daughter, does not focus on the usual suspects.

Neither does Spinning Silver.

If you are Jewish you may immediately pick up on the fact that the first viewpoint character, Miryem, is a Jew. Because having a father that is a moneylender and living with the knowledge that your entire village hates you for no reason is fairly baked into our collective consciousness by now. For other readers, it will be several chapters before the word Jew is used to clue them in. And this is brilliant. Because by that point they will have already felt Miryem’s pain, lived her struggle, and come to understand why she must collect old debts to keep her family from starving.

Indeed, it is painfully obvious that Miryem does not suffer from the greed her neighbors would ascribe to all Jews in order to help themselves forget about the fact that have taken money they never intended to repay. No, if we are to assign her a sin it would be Pride. And even that is the result of having so many things taken from her that she has nothing else left to cling to. For what else could cause a girl to boast that she can turn silver into gold thereby bringing her to the attention of fae like creatures known as the Staryk?

A closer look at original Tale of The Millers Daughter brings up some uncomfortable questions. It is a story steeped in antisemitism. The main villain is heavily coded as a money hungry Jew who morphs into a babysnatcher. That evil scapegoat is what allows the reader to overlook the fact that tale’s supposed heroine is being married off to a King that would have killed her just as easily as married her and she’s signed away the life of her firstborn child. Who needs to worry about defaulting on debts when there’s a monster around to persecute instead?

If ever there was a parable for what Jewish life was like for many of our ancestors, this is it. We do not have fairy tales or happily ever afters. Too many of our stories end similarly to a story Miryem’s mother tells her about a neighboring town: “And now there are no Jews in Yazuda.”

A while ago a list of “bad Slavik rep” and “good Slavik rep” made the rounds of people who enjoy having ‘hot takes’. Anyone with the courage to look behind the surface of their own bias would realize those lists could have been named “books mostly written by Jews” and “books by everyone else”.

Spinning Silver was on the bad list. But how can a story be a bad example of something it never aspired to achieve?

Because this isn’t a Slavik story, nor does it ever try to be. This is the reclamation of a tale that tried to grind Jewish people into the dirt. A joyous retelling of a story that puts flesh on the bones of a people it has previously been used to dehumanize. Much like the story in the opening pages, it forces the reader to consider another point of view. To strip away our preconceived notions, look past the antisemitic tropes and instead peer into our own faults and shortcomings.

For many that is terrifying. Because they have grown up on tales of the Other coming to snatch away their babies, their money, their culture. As if we had any use for those things.

Jews do not need to steal stories. We have our own. Spinning Silver is one of them. And we are more than happy to share them with anyone who will open their mind for long enough to listen.

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E Broderick is a speculative fiction enthusiast. When not writing she enjoys epic games of trivial pursuit and baking. She currently lives in the U.S. but is eagerly awaiting the day a sentient spaceship offers to take her traveling around the galaxy.