The Jerusalem Post - The Jerusalem Post Magazine
Countering the melting pot
An Israeli multicultural feast of narration and information
Only seven years after the foundation of the State of Israel, with Jews flooding into the country from all over the world, folklorist Prof. Dov Noy founded the Israel Folktale Archives in conjunction with Haifa’s Museum of Ethnology and Folklore. His aim was to collect and document the folktales brought by the wide variety of ethnic communities that were creating modern Israel.
One of the two editors of The Power of a Tale, Haya Bar-Itzhak, maintains that Noy’s determination to preserve this cultural diversity was a calculated attempt to counter what she maintains were then the dominant ideological and political goals of the State of Israel – namely, to mix the inflow of new immigrants into the melting pot of a new society that would reject Diaspora traditions and forge a hegemonic Israeli culture.
Today the Israel Folktale Archives contain more than twenty-four thousand folk narratives, making it the largest collection of Jewish folktales in the world. The archive’s holdings also include folk narratives of non-Jewish groups living in Israel – Muslim and Christian Arabs, Bedouin, Druze and Circassians.
The selection of 53 stories in The Power of a Tale are derived from no less than 26 different ethnic communities. Four of them are non-Jewish – Bedouin, Druze, Muslim Arab and Christian Arab – but most come from Jewish communities emanating from places as diverse as Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Belarus and Yemen. In the 400-page volume, which is lavishly illustrated, each tale is accompanied by a scholarly commentary that provides an insight into its background, origins and history.
The Power of a Tale is a treasure trove of traditional stories preserved in the words, albeit translated, of the original narrators. In the early years of building up the Archives, stories were transcribed in Hebrew as they were told. Later audiotape was introduced, and more recently storytellers are being videoed as they narrate their tales.
Some of the stories are firmly based on Jewish lore like “The Hanukkah Miracle: Hannah and her Seven Sons,” told by an Israeli from the Ashkenazi tradition, or “The Road on the Holiday of Shavuot” from Belarus, or the four different accounts of the one odd stone in the Western Wall. Some are full of magic and ogres and autocratic monarchs whose word is law. Two examples – reminiscent of The Arabian Nights – are “The Princess and the Wooden Body,” which emanates from Morocco, and “The Six Sisters from the Mountains,” which comes from Iraq.
Other tales originate from typical Eastern European circumstances, like “The Girl and the Cossack,” a story from Poland in which a Jewish girl emulates a heroine of old in defending her honor. Another – “Sareh bat Asher” – imbues a story of discrimination against Jews in Russian Georgia with a magical element, and as a result the Jews enjoy a trouble-free life for three hundred years. The tale is a genuine example of wish fulfillment, since east-European Jewish communities were never free of harassment for so long a period.
Demons – somehow embedded deep in Jewish folklore tradition – feature in several tales. Example include the story from Afghanistan called “The Miserly Mohel and the Demons,” or the one from Morocco “The Cat Demon,” or a Lithuanian narrative with Dracula-like undertones entitled “The Bride and the Demon.” A tale from Yemen, “The King and the Woodcutter,” incorporates the age-old folk tale element of riddles which have to be solved if someone’s life is to be spared or some fortune to be won.
This is a feature that migrated into European tradition and Shakespeare makes use of it in The Merchant of Venice. Another of Shakespeare’s plots is paralleled by a long tale from Romania, entitled: “The King who Trusted his Kingdom to his Daughters,” a story which runs very close in some of its elements to King Lear.
One or two tales have the flavor of an Aesop fable about them, like “The Wise Woman,” which ends on a moral. Another narrative with a moral is a Druze story, which like several from Arab sources, illustrates the deeply embedded tradition of hospitality: “Honor Your Guest Though He may be a Beggar.”
Four different legends relating how the old Arab village of Tarshiha got its name appear one after another in this volume, and are compared, contrasted and explained in the accompanying scholarly commentary by Dr. Amer Dahamshe of the Hebrew University. Indeed all the commentaries are veritable storehouses of academic insights into the folklore tradition, and are well worth studying for their own sakes.
Readers will find little difficulty in following up any of the academic lines of inquiry mentioned in the commentaries. The volume is replete with references, and each commentary includes an extensive bibliography. Details are also provided about each of the narrators and their ethnic backgrounds.
The Power of a Tale offers a multicultural feast of narration and information. The reader can dip into it again and again, assured each time of finding something to interest, fascinate or amuse. This is a volume to treasure.