BOOKISH
It’s No Fairy Tale Can an anthology of century-old Jewish stories help us understand our own times? by PHOEBE MALTZ BOVY
stories became a means through which Jews could share their problems among themselves.” It’s a book about storytell- ing as a communal survival strategy. Zipes, an emeritus professor of Ger- man and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota specializing in folklore, uses the anthology’s brief in- troduction to explain how the stories that follow “formed a resistance to the antisemites.” The purpose of sharing these stories with contemporary readers is to demonstrate “how Jews, whether re- ligious or secular, found ways to survive
and to find hope.” While the stories may already be known from previous trans- lations, Zipes has newly anthologized them in order “to demonstrate how Jewish folk tales and fantasy writing can help us comprehend how deeply the Jewish Question is entwined in cultur- al history.” This is not the first time Zipes, who is Jewish and originally from New York, has covered this type of source materi- al. In a 1991 book called The Operated Jew and the Operated Goy: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism , Zipes had the brilliant
“WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES in order to live.” So, famously, opens Joan Didion’s 1979 book, The White Al- bum , written while she was examining hippie-era California. This is also the core message of Jack Zipes’s new an- thology, Never-Ending Tales: Stories from the Golden Age of Jewish Litera- ture. For this is, on the most fundamen- tal level, Zipes’s thesis: at times when simply living while Jewish was peril- ous, Jews told Jewish stories in order to assert their right to exist. He writes, “Storytelling and the publishing of
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