Category: essays

Fairy tales and Privilege

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m still dreaming about fairytales.

Today’s dream is strongly influenced by a book that’s been on my coffee table for a while. It’s on my coffee table to remind me about certain constructs it discusses. Until I finish thinking through these constructs, it will stay there. It’s been on my coffee table for two months now, because that’s how much is in it that helps me think things through. What is this mysterious book? It’s White Christian Privilege and it’s by Khyati Y. Joshi. https://bookshop.org/a/1838/9781479840236

It reminds me (and is a very good introduction to the understanding of) what it means to be from a majority culture background (or not) in the US. I’m not from that background, so it also helps me see how and why I am who I am and have certain in experiences in relation to those who are from that background.

None of this is why I’m thinking about the book today. First off, I’m thinking about the normative nature of American White Christian Privilege in the publishing world, along with that linked (and older) standard White British Privilege. And today, just ‘cos, I’m not thinking about how the White Australia policy’s legacy in Australia mean I’ll never be quite White, or Christian, or American. All these things have had some large ramifications for my life so far, and no doubt will continue to do so but… today I’m thinking about its influence on how we see fairy tales, or, more precisely, fairy tale retellings.

Fairy tales have always been explained using European views. This goes back to the beginning of fairy tale analysis. Folk motifs and tale types revolve around European culture. This cultural heartland for fairy tales has been mostly carried over into US scholarship. Fairy tales are defined by Europe and retold in cultures where we need to factor in White American privilege.

This means that some tellers are valued more than others – it helps a writing career to have privilege. American writers are more heard than Indonesian writers or writers from Eswatini. There is a hierarchy of countries in publishing, where one is in relation to those privileges makes most of us invisible and unless one is visible. A few extraordinary writers are visible regardless. Rabindranath Tagore and Stanisław Lem and Tove Jansson are good examples of this. Despite the Tove Janssons of this world, there are core cultures that are more visible, secondary cultures (like Australian) that are rather difficult but not at all impossible, and then there are writers from most of the countries of the world who, even in English translation, are not visible. How many of us have read Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s work, for instance. Not me… yet – I need to get hold of it and read it. Every year I spend some time identifying amazing writers I haven’t yet read because they’re not buffered by much of that privilege. I keep discovering many great works and brilliant writers and my life is forever enriched but… none of this is what I’m thinking about today.

Today I’m thinking about how we define certain types of story as fairy tale and we (scholars in the field) generally don’t automatically think “Why is this story classified with these other stories?” It’s culturally problematic to define all story types from around the world in a certain way. It’s great for many reasons (seeing who uses what kind of tale, finding out how stories spread) but it operates in the same way as that White Christian Privilege.

Joshi spends a lot of time explaining that this privilege is not a layer of opportunity and gloss on top of everyday life: it’s the fabric of everyday life. Equally, getting rid of the cultural context for, say, a story taken from the Talmud, or something from the Dreamtime, and reducing it to common denominators, is putting the cultural interpretation of mostly-White, mostly-Western scholars and fiction writers above most of those who tell and use the stories.

They may be fairy tales, and seen as fairy tales, but what if they aren’t? What if they’re part of an immense and complex songlines that cross a whole continent and that predate our knowledge of the fairy tale by thousands of years (at least) and tens of thousands of years?

My questions include the critical one: what do we do to stories when we strip away all of this meaning from them? My answer is that we lose how they’re told, why they’re told, who has cultural responsibility to tell and interpret them and we lose the capacity to see why and how this responsibility is important for the story itself. So many Jews are taught how to read Talmud. We can take stories apparently out of context, and give them relevant contexts in the retelling – this is a part of the upbringing of many of us but… in a world of White Chrsitian Privilege, it’s more likely that someone (even someone Jewish, who lacks this specific training) will see those stories as fair game for retelling from a White Christian perspective. The story derived from this approach will sell better than something with the original contexts still attached, but its culture of origin will be compromised.

There are many ways of handling this.

One is to maintain the commonalities (especially theose that allow the story to be included in those scholarly indices that bring the world of folk tale and folk motif together) but to make sure, as scholars, that the cultural base of all tales are understood. Stories from pre-colonial Australia would, then, always have notes saying where the story was collected, which songline/s it belongs to, and whether the story has been reinterpreted to meet international tale and motif expectations.

Another approach is to read more books by people who come from different backgrounds, and to look for books that address cultural issues as part of the storytelling. My current coffee table book for this is This all Come Back Now (ed Mykaela Saunders) https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/This-All-Come-Back-Now-by-Mykaela-Saunders/9780702265662 .I was happy to give a story for the Other Covenants volume, sharing my rather peculiar background (ed Lobel and Shainblum) https://bookshop.org/a/1838/9781953829405. Some of the stories fit within a general normative context (not all, but enough to make it readable) but both volumes as a whole question all contexts and present more varied cultural background.

There are other approaches, but two are enough for one day. It boils down to knowing where we (as readers) fit in relation to various types of cultural privilege and for us (again, as readers) to reach out beyond that and to read work by writers who come from a range of backgrounds. Our reading is richer and our life is more interesting.

Also, and this is my favourite side effect from questioning privilege, when we ask about how we interpret fairy tales and looking at what stories have been drawn into that net that are not actually fairy tales, doors open to enormous numbers of brilliant writers. Many haven’t yet been translated into English, but the more we read beyond our tiny cultural boundaries and the more we question our privileges, the more publishers will say “That sold well. Let me try another translation of a famous writer from this background.” The more we work on living in a bigger world, the more that bigger world has to offer us.

Birthdays

personby Gillian Polack
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This week I’m late because I went to an (online) convention in New Zealand over the weekend, and had meetings most of yesterday and an excellent but long meeting today. Everyone’s trying to get all kinds of things done because it’s a long weekend next weekend. Last weekend was a long weekend in New Zealand, which is why they held the convention.

This is a long weekend that the US is unlikely to ever want to celebrate. How can I say this with such certainty? It’s called the King’s Birthday and for a long time it was called the Queen’s Birthday). It’s the birthday of neither. It’s an ancestral date that was picked to celebrate the birthday of the monarch of the UK and the Commonwealth. The UK celebrates it at a different time of year and, I was told recently, no longer get a day off for it. Australia doesn’t have a date so much as a day: it’s the second Monday in June. Since the date changes, it’s a symbolic birthday, not an actual one.

Mind you, a century and a bit ago migrants who knew their birthday by the Jewish calendar who chose a random date on the secular calendar to celebrate, basically had a mobile birthday. My grandmother had that, and when we finally checked what precise date her birthday was on… her parents got the secular date wrong. From the time she was four, she always celebrated her birthday on a different (but equally wrong date). I told her this when she was … not young, and she told me back that she was old enough to celebrate her birthday whenever she liked.

We stick by The King’s/Queen’s Birthday, not because we’re wildly Royalist, but because winter celebrations are few and far between. It’s cold and it’s dark and we live in Narnia ruled by Jadis. I don’t mind that there’s no Christmas (I’m Jewish, so why should I mind?) but the cold and dark are harder to endure when there are no parties.

After Monday, my life will be cold and partyless. Right now, the days are getting shorter and it’s very tempting to stay in bed.

Think of me as you enjoy summer.

Not a Machine

personby Madeleine Robins
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My body is not a temple. It’s not a wasteland, either, or a castle, or any other locational metaphor I can think of. It’s a body, and frankly I tend to treat it like a machine. I take moderately good care of it–I don’t eat terribly (I’m fortunate that I like almost all healthy foods except liver and hard boiled eggs). I live a modestly active life–I walk a lot. I try to read and stay involved with the world (there’s a heartbreak) and to laugh as much as possible (I am helped in this by an extraordinarily silly family). But all the laughter and eating healthy and spending 45 minutes on the elliptical does not alter the fact that I’m getting older. I’m not trying to stay young–that’s a mug’s game. I’m just trying to optimize what I have.

My father made it to just-shy-of-98. His twin made it to 100. My mother died relatively young, but she had health complications that made it, well, unsurprising. But her sister is 97. Genetics-wise, and barring speeding vehicles, falling pianos, or illnesses I can’t currently anticipate, I may be around for a while, yet. And so I keep using what I have. Of course, what I have is not what I used to have, I forget that sometimes.

Case in point: this weekend my daughter and her husband moved. Discovery of several rooms-worth of black mold made this not just a good idea but an imperative. My husband and I drove up to help, and spent about eight hours packing things, carrying heavy things, and (in his case) driving a truck to and from storage. The move was complicated by the fact that my daughter had hurt her back and couldn’t lift anything (well, she could and did, but every time she did her body informed her that this was a dumb idea). I climbed up and down stairs (and was grateful to have remembered to bring my knee brace). After a few hours of standing in the kitchen packing dishes I had to take off my shoes: my feet hurt. I carried some boxes I probably shouldn’t have. But the work had to get done, and I did my part. But every now and then the thought occurred to me: this used to be a lot easier. A lot easier.

The bill started to come due on the drive home, when my entire body hummed with exhaustion, the knee brace was squishing my leg, and my feet ached no matter whether I had shoes on or off. It took about 36 hours–and two good nights of sleep–to restore me to my usual level of reckless activity. But I am reminded again that, while I tend to treat my body like a machine–oil it, fuel it, make sure it’s running smoothly, surely it’ll run forever–it’s not a machine. (Hell, even a well-tended machine has a useful lifespan, after which it’s–what? a museum display?) My new resolution is not just to hear what my body is telling me, but actually listen. I’m in it for the long game, maybe another 20-30 years, during which time what I have won’t be what I used to have. My goal, in the words of Spencer Tracy in Pat and Mike, is that “what’s there is cherce.”

 

Ice and Snow

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s zero degrees outside right now, and autumn. Translated for the US, that’s 32 degrees and Fall. This is one of the times of year that confuses our friends in the northern hemisphere. I know this because the number of times a day every single May that I’m told that the weather is warming up is ridiculously high.

Once upon a time only my US and Canadian friends forgot the southern hemisphere had different seasons, but these days it’s parts of Europe as well. December is the worst for this, because we’re told that Christmas is for everyone and requires cold weather to celebrate. A storybook Christmas has cold and snow and a big hot meal. Here, it’s more likely to include a picnic by the lake with black swans demanding their share of the food and with unlimited cold drinks.

Being told to rug up during the summer holidays has a special absurdity, but when it’s negative temperatures overnight (-3.2 last night – I’m typing this at breakfast time feeling that sudden rush of warmth as things become less bitter) every “Isn’t it nice that summer is coming” kinda rankles.

Of all those who forget that the southern hemisphere is not the northern, the most annoying are those who insist that I’m wrong and that winter is not coming. Our autumn is fully settled in late April everywhere, and one in three years is cold by mid-May. This is one of those years. Winter may not be already here, but it’s sent very clear messages that it’s close.

I live in the mountains (inland), so it gets particularly chill here. Canberra is too dry, mostly, for snow (though we had snow in northern Canberra over the weekend) but one of the southern hemisphere’s best ski fields is merely a bit over an hour away. Not that I ski. I did, however once unintentionally provoke the Deputy Prime Minister to fall thirty metres in the snow. That was, however, in summer. The snow was remnant snow and it was the day he gave his particular speech at the top of our tallest mountain and… I put the rest of it into one of my novels, because it’s one of those incidents that sounds fictional and therefore was crying to be used in fiction.

Anyhow, the ski season has begun (just) and I now work late at nights.

Why late? It doesn’t get properly cold until 4 am here, and I would rather go back to bed until my toes don’t curl to protect themselves. This is not typically Australian, and, in fact, didn’t used to be typically Gillian. When I was a child I’d wake up before dawn to walk in the melting frost. As I age, more and more I like going back to bed on days like this.

My work day, in fact, will be shaped around how cold it is over the next three months. And what work does this day entail? Mostly research into how writers develop the worlds for their novels and how these worlds, in turn, can feel more or less real to readers. It doesn’t matter (I am discovering) whether or not the world has magic or if all the plant life is purple with turquoise spots. The world can still feel real when things are not like the worlds we know. It can still feel entirely fake when thing are depicted precisely as we know them. It all comes down to the world building and how the writer pulls that world into the story itself.

My fiction for the next little while depends on my mood. This month’s new writing is all about a light novel where I test some of my discoveries about how writers build and depict worlds. The episode I’m typing when I need a breath of warmth has an almost-human couple discovering that kittens, too, can become vampires. Also that braggarts and fools exist just as much in the world of the supernatural as in the world we know.

This week has a few extras and will be busy. I’m late with my tax, so that’s urgent, and I’m editing, and I’m working on my Patreon papers.

This month’s Patreon essay discusses the very curious relationship between Medieval French epic legends and MCU movies, and I’ll be delivering that paper live at a conference later this week (from my home computer). This month’s fiction for patrons includes the how the kitten’s household semi-domesticates that very cute vampire kitten, and this month’s advice to writers will explain how popular knowledge of famous figures can work in fiction.

And that’s my world this week. It’s busy, but not so busy I can’t sleep for an hour more. Since I started writing this, the temperature outside has gone up by a full degree. Soon the sun will beam loudly into my east-facing work area and everything will be almost-comfortable. I shall take that as a victory, because this year’s winter is going to be cold, if autumn already contains frost and black ice.

When I was younger, I dreamed of a good income. I also dreamed of living somewhere warmer (northern NSW or southern Queensland) in winter and in my more-comfortable mountains in summer. Now that I can’t pretend to be young, I complain about the weather. The reason for the complaint today is not, in fact, because it’s cold outside, but because someone left the security door open over the weekend and all the warmth leeched out of my flat and so the warmest I can get it is fifteen degrees (fifty nine degrees for US readers). Crunchy cold grass underfoot ceases to be exotic when the warmest corner of indoors is under sixteen. And I’m sure there’s a joke in there… but my brain is frozen. Even the postie (who just delivered a parcel) tells me that it’s brisk outside. If you’re reading this from the part of the planet that careens towards summer, this morning I envy you, so very much. How much is so very much? Probably about ten degrees.

In Praise of Fanny Price

personby Madeleine Robins
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Originally published in 2016

I have been doing one of my semi-regular Jane Austen re-reads. Every time I find new things: This time I was chagrinned to realize the extent to which certain film versions had overwritten Miss Austen’s original text in my mind–not necessarily to their detriment, but I was looking for a scene in Sense and Sensibility that turned out to be a clever Emma Thompson way of compacting a good deal of information. But the original Austen is still there on the page, and still smart and incisive and funny.

So far I have gone through Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, and I’m almost through Mansfield Park (I skip Northanger Abbey, because Catherine Morland annoys the hell out of me). I started out, as one does, loving Pride and Prejudice; then for a long time Sense and Sensibility was my favorite; then, for almost as long, Persuasion. Now it’s quite possible that I am going over to Team Mansfield Park.

This is, apparently, unusual.

The Paris Review stated that Mansfield Park was Austen’s least popular book:

Austen’s own mother reportedly found Fanny “insipid”; the critic Reginald Farrer described her as “repulsive in her cast-iron self-righteousness and steely rigidity of prejudice.” Even C.S. Lewis—in the voice of his demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters—let loose a vitriolic rant about Austen’s most priggish heroine, calling her “not only a Christian, but such a Christian—a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouselike, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss … A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood, and then dies with a smile … Filthy, insipid little prude!”

Wow, that’s a little over the top, don’t you think, Clive?

Okay, I get it. Fanny is physically delicate, shy, easily overwhelmed. She doesn’t have her cousins’ robust physical health, and she certainly doesn’t have their robust egos. She’s meek and self-effacing (though I don’t think she simpers once, thank you very much). But do you blame her? Here’s a child who, at the age of ten, is sent to live with her very privileged cousins. Her aunt Norris (and to a lesser extent her uncle Sir Thomas) are determined to make the distinction between Maria and Julia and Tom and Edmund (the cousins) and Fanny’s charity-case self. She’s constantly reminded of it, and of the fact that she can’t (and shouldn’t) expect to be treated the same way. She’s physically slight and easily overwhelmed (I suspect nutritional issues and an anxiety disorder, but can’t find any textual evidence to prove it), and initially she’s academically and socially way behind her cousins. It might be satisfying to see the worm turn, the mouse face down the cat, and so forth. That’s bread and butter in a 21st century YA novel. but in Austen-land, where class suffuses everything so deeply that it’s hardly necessary to mention it, it would be hard to make it believable.

Like the Bertram girls, Fanny studies with a governess. But her real teacher, the one who informs her tastes and her heart, is her cousin Edmund. And Edmund, destined for the Church, is a prig. He’s kind to Fanny; he’s really the only one who sees, and values, Fanny for who she is. Everyone else sees only her utility, the perfect poor-relation who can be counted upon to fetch a shawl or stay tactfully home so there won’t be an odd number at the dinner party. Her frankly loathsome Aunt Norris sees her as someone further down the class scale whom she can bully without fear of repercussion. It’s no wonder Fanny loves Edmund, who encourages her to explore literature and history, who talks about religion and principles and right thought–who treats her as if she were intelligent which, as it happens, she is.

Look, I had a serious crush in 6th grade on a kid who held the door for me (because I wasn’t used to people being, um, nice to me at school). I totally get Fanny seeing Edmund as a combination of Parfit Gentil Knight and Moral Arbiter. About the only thing that saves Edmund from being an irredeemable prig is that he falls in love with Mary Crawford, whose moral compass is–shall we say–variable. For once Edmund’s rectitude abandons him and he is blinded by, and led around by parts of himself he would ordinarily not admit to owning. He sees Mary’s witty, shiny, beautiful, feckless self and tries to believe that deep down she’s got the same sort of moral center as Fanny–in a sense, the woman Edmund created. It’s hardly surprising that when Mary displays her lack of moral base, Edmund recoils. At that point it’s inevitable that he’ll back to Fanny.

A lot of people think of Jane Austen as a “romance writer,” a notion that would very likely have made her head explode just a little bit. But, as Austen herself said, she wrote of “love and money.” And class. Austen writes about class all the time. Elizabeth Bennet’s comment to Lady Catherine de Bourgh that Darcy “is a gentleman and I am a gentleman’s daughter” is quite correct. They may be at different ends of the “gentleman spectrum”*–he’s got relatives in the peerage, and centuries of economic and class privilege behind him, and she’s got “inferior connections:” relatives in trade–but they in terms of class they are equals. Sir Walter Elliot may regard himself as the very model of a modern country baronet… but he can’t suck up fast enough to his cousin the viscountess. Fanny Price, whose mother married beneath her, is introduced to a world very different from her own when she moves to Mansfield Park.

Fanny Price has good reason for being the person she is. And she continues as that person despite pressure from within and without her family. For a woman constitutionally skittish and anxious as she is, that in itself is heroic. It’s nice that she gets the guy in the end. It’s nicer that she does so without having to become a Mary Crawford or a Maria Bertram.

Say It Again

personby Madeleine Robins
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Almost three decades ago, when my older daughter was in preschool I got a call one day: she had slipped on a slide at the playground and cut her chin. How badly? “I think you’re going to want to take her to the doctor.”

Okay. Bad enough to flap her generally unflappable teacher. I made my apologies to my boss and got myself uptown, and inspected the chin–when you can see identifiable layers of adipose tissue, yes, it’s time to call the pediatrician. So I called the doctor, asked our after-school babysitter to meet us there, and gathered up my bloodied but unphazed girl. With the immediate scare of blood and tumult over (Julie had been holding an ice pack and gauze at her chin for some time) she regarded the whole exercise with curiosity–until the doctor told us he had to stitch up her chin. This would involve several small injections of lidocaine to dull the pain, then the process itself. At which point Julie went from vaguely curious to Totally Against The Whole Idea. Continue reading “Say It Again”…

Embedded Dislike

personby Gillian Polack
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I wrote this not-actually-academic piece for my Patreons about a year ago. This is how I play with a concept. It’s what I do in the very early stages of research, when I’m trying to understand what approaches are sensible and which are stupid. I’m giving it to you now, partly because the themes of Hogwarts’ Legacy apply to it and partly because, while I talk about things Jewish in this example, we need to understand embedded prejudice for so many things. I face embedded prejudice every day because of my physical restrictions and because I’m female and Jewish; transpeople are dealing with far too much facing of it right now (and without nearly enough support); and most minority cultures in face it every day (sometimes in horrific ways) while being dealt with by mainstream culture. Australian politics has just demonstrated how poverty brings forward such embedded attitudes, and in the UK ‘class’ shouts as an issue. No country has the same set of biases, but all of us have groups whose everyday is flavoured by how others simply accept stories and what lies embedded in them.

While I’m researching cultural embedding, I’m not on top of this part of the subject yet. That deep acceptance of stereotyping and hate that appears in literature is very difficult.

I really need to focus on more ways of discussing embedded prejudice in my research. I began experiencing how literature delivers wallops related to prejudice when Oliver! (and its source Oliver Twist) caused me many problems as a child, then, when a whole year level studied The Merchant of Venice, I had to deal with it again. The deeper bias in these works are led to by a shallow bias and some really stupid interpretations. Every time Fagin is given a European Jewish accent, for instance, I see the application of the Universal Jew prejudice. Fagin was based upon a real person, Ikey Solomon, who was probably Sephardi and who almost definitely had a London accent. Solomon was well-known for dressing nattily (and for being a high-level, well-connected fence for stolen goods), not for leading children astray. He ended up in Australia (before it was Australia, when it was a bunch of British colonies) and his personal story is so much more fascinating than  Dickens’ novel. There’s a modern novel about him, too, but I don’t recommend it because it gets the Jewish side very wrong, too and poses a very different set of problems.

I can’t follow this research up right now – I am in the middle of a project that examines other facets of culture in fiction. This other project is helping me understand how to look at these things fairly. I need that fairness. Not everyone who depicts people using these biases does it intentionally. However, every single one of them hurts people. Since I’m terrified of the impact Hogwarts’ Legacy will have in this respect, I need to share some of my thoughts. These thoughts are neither serious nor complete, but they play with some very important concepts that I will return to, when I can. I’m writing a novel that addresses some of them and I will do old-fashioned research for the rest.

If you want to read something a bit more considered than a daft essay, you will find better discussions (but not of  vampires) in my book Story Matrices. I wanted to develop methods that would help writers and editors understand what they’re doing so that they can make active choices in these matters. Story Matrices is that book.

 

My entirely daft theory about Bram Stoker and his Jewish vampires.

There is one thing you need to know about Bram Stoker, before I can begin talking about his relationship to vampires and my new (totally untenable) daft theory: he didn’t like Jews. If he were brought forward to this century and put on a convention panel with me, he’d be very uncomfortable, even though I don’t match the Jewish stereotypes he carried. I’ve had Thoughts for a while about this, but the Problem of Garlic brought everything together. That’s as good a reason as any to begin with the problem of garlic. Except I can’t.

I’ve been trying to handle this for years. Behind his writing there is something significantly more than the various put-downs you see in other authors of his time and place: he genuinely didn’t like Jews. My current random theory is that this didn’t mean he knew nothing about Jewish culture. He probably didn’t know that he used Jewish culture and also the stuff used to describe Jews by bigots, but his own bias meant that his incorporation of these things together in his work was seamless and convincing and created our classic vampire story. Our classic vampire story, in order words, quietly reinforces antisemitism. Just like Dracula, it looks charming, but it hurts people.

My theory goes (in its wayward way) that he took some Jewish folk culture from Eastern Europe and applied it to vampires. Also, there were quite a few Jews in Transylvania in the nineteenth century. They spoke Hungarian, were classified ethnically as Hungarian, and were citizens. This is the by-product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. None of them (as far as I can work out) were in any way related to any branch of my family. Jews in Ireland were not granted citizenship until 1846, while most other people were given citizenship in 1783. None of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish Jews were in any way related to any branch of my family, either. (This is another aspect of various Jewish cultures – the need to work out relationships to other people.)

And now we’re finally up to that garlic.

There is one very folkish and not at all religious part of Jewish culture that contains garlic as a repellent. Just one. But it’s a big one. In fact, it’s how some Jews handle Christmas.

It’s not been easy to be Jewish over the centuries and much folk culture has sprung up to help people deal with it and the violence towards Jews that can go alongside it. A lot of the folk culture was lost with the various mass murders that tend to be handed out to Jewish populations, but recently, I have been exploring one set of folk practices in particular. This aspect began about 1800 years ago, and it’s the Jewish stories (note the plural) of the life of Jesus. My favourite is, of course, from the Middle Ages and one of several lives of Jesus from that time.

Lives of famous people is such a Medieval thing: it includes the lives of saints, and the spectacular deeds of kings and princes and noble knights. The stories about Jesus don’t fit into those types of stories at all: in this set of Jewish folk cultural traditions Jesus was no saint, king, prince or noble knight. The stories of Jesus all fit into the category of lives about famous magicians, alongside people like Merlin.

All of the versions of the story of Jesus are entirely unacceptable and not-nice from a Christian perspective. My favourite includes flying and the pulling out of hair. Being a polite religion and this being considered fictional and part of folk culture, it was mostly kept hidden from Christians, out of respect. Also, of course, because it isn’t always safe to be Jewish and one doesn’t want to provoke more persecution.

That variant of the life was told on Christmas Eve, for hundreds and hundreds of years. We don’t know which Jewish cultures told it, nor how they did, nor how many knew it, but Christians being upset about the story have written about it over the centuries and scholars have checked what they’ve written against what they knew about Jewish cultural practices and… it really happened. It might still really happen. If it does, it’s not part of my family’s tradition at all.

The stories about Jesus seem to be a way of dealing with antisemitism and its accompanying violence. In far too many times and places it was unsafe to leave the house at Christmas, you see. Stones were thrown at Easter, so Christmas wasn’t the only time and place that it was safer to shut the doors and make home tight and safe and not leave it until the bigotry passed a bit.

This is all related to garlic. I’m getting to that.

When one shuts one’s doors and shutters windows and pretends one isn’t home because otherwise it was dangerous, one develops folkways to keep the evils out. Some European Jews had a tradition, over hundreds of years, of eating garlic on Christmas Eve to keep Jesus away. His rising from the dead, you see, was not interpreted the same way by Jews as by Christians. Garlic, in Eastern Europe from at least the 19th century, kept evil beings away… and while it’s deeply troubling that Jesus was seen as evil by some Jews (historically) when you consider what was done to Jews in his name, it’s very easy to see how this occurred. An undead magician who brought evil with him was kept away by garlic on Christmas Eve. And maybe also salt. I forgot the salt.

Salt has some big baggage. Salt was used in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth when someone was investigating a case. It was blessed according to Christian rite and put in the mouth of Jewish witnesses to force them to tell the truth. And now I can’t remember if salt was used in Stoker* or in other vampire stories. One day I will check, I promise.

Stoker used folk material from Wallachia and Moldavia for his vampire background. It’s really as simple as that. There was a significant Jewish population (some cultural overlap here with me, because Romania did, at times, include what is now known as Moldova and my mother’s maternal grandparents were from there) and Stoker simply included the whole. His main source was An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, and was written by the British diplomat in that region, William Wilkinson. Stoker used other sources, but this one is freely available on the web and I can give you a link to it, so it’s the one I’m citing. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=RogMAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Really, this is not about Stoker being antisemitic (though he was, and Wilkinson himself describes Jews as of “obscure race” and an “inglorious nation” so he would not have liked me, either) it’s about how cultural practices develop and what happens when an Irish writer doesn’t stop to think about whose culture he’s borrowing and how. It’s about the damage done by inconsidered cultural appropriation.

The vampiric traditions in the various cultures of Europe have little to do with most English vampire stories. My favourite European vampire tradition is that you can handle vampires by strewing seeds and grain on the ground, because they will be forced to collect them and count them and that gives the victim time to escape.

The burial of possible vampires, though, is just as interesting. It has been verified by archaeologists, which is where I found out about bricks. Potential vampires might be buried upside down, or decapitated, or buried with sharp objects to prevent them from doing harm. Some people were buried with bricks in their mouths, to prevent them rising (in Scotland and in Italy as well as in Romania). This is all evidence that European belief in a vampire rising and causing damage is something many cultures share. The vampire as sexy and pale, however, that’s the stuff of novels. (Also, there was a vampire craze in the eighteenth century, and I need to explore this one day. We call all kinds of things vampiric these days, when they were far more clearly demonic possession, and I need to find out where the eighteenth century assigned it.)

The thing is, there was a “Jews are dangerous because they are sexy and pale and lead good Christians astray” cultural construct in the nineteenth century. Also, not everyone considered us full human beings. The impurity of blood notion the Inquisition spread had consequences. And blood drinking is a libel that has been used to attack Jews from the Middle Ages. Invented, and has not a thing to do with either the Jewish religion or any Jewish folkways and debunked so very many times… but Jews are still being accused of it and murdered with it as an excuse and… near-humans who are pale and sexy and find the cross really uncomfortable and drink blood and won’t disappear when you want them gone so you have to resort to violence and awful means? Sounds like vampires to me. The garlic is an extra, a bit of appropriation to make the thing real.

Stoker’s vampire doesn’t fit the folk tradition, but it’s a good literary metaphor for Jews by antisemites. I don’t think it’s that any more, for most people, but the moment I saw the nature of the folkways and bigotry inherent in the first century of vampire tales told to the general public in English (and French, to be honest, and possibly German) I started realising that many of these stories underpin antisemitism and violence.

This is why, when I use vampires, I use them a bit differently. But that’s a different story.

*You need an endnote. Most of what Stoker wrote was borrowed, however, he invented vampires not being visible in mirrors for Dracula. In Judaism, mirrors can be portals for the soul at certain times. I doubt Stoker knew this and I can’t see any evidence of him knowing it, unless he’s describing evidence of vampires not having souls.

 

 

Manners

personby Madeleine Robins
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Life overwhelmed this week, and I didn’t finish the post I was working on. So: something from a few years ago.

 

Manners are important. I’m not talking about not chewing with your mouth open (though please, don’t). I’m talking about that old stalwart you heard when you were a kid: Don’t be a Brat. Don’t talk back.

Really: someone on Amazon doesn’t like your book? Pound a pillow, burn her in effigy, but resist the impulse to get on line and explain in detail why You are Right and She is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong. It’s a losing game, I promise you.  The best you can do is say “I’m really sorry it didn’t work for you.”  Silence is even better.

Don’t Talk Back to Editors. You’d think this was a no-brainer, but sadly: no.

Case in point. An acquaintance of mine, years and years ago, wrote a novel.  Friend, who liked my mother and valued her literary judgment, sent her a copy of the manuscript and asked if she knew any editor who might be willing to look at the book.  So far, so good.  This is how careers get started.

My mother, ever helpful, read the manuscript, was dubious, but sent it on to one of her best friends who was, in fact, an editor at a Major Metropolitan Publishing House.  And the friend, because she loved my mother, read the book. And sent back an eight page letter to my friend, explaining why the book was not commercially viable, and giving detailed feedback about what problems needed to be fixed in order to render the thing more commercial and, therefore, more publishable.

Think about this: this editor took the time to read the manuscript and give pages and pages of useful feedback to the author on a book that she had no interest in publishing.  She did it because she and my mother were friends.  And what did my friend do?

Fired off a letter explaining the ways in which the editor was Wrong Wrong Wrong.

Now, even if the editor had been wrong (and, at least in my opinion, she was not), what my friend should have done was say “Thank you so much for your time and professional expertise, for which I did not pay a dime. I will take your cogent suggestions to heart, and hope to submit the revised novel to you at a later time.” After that, she could have gone home, pounded that pillow, burnt the effigies, whatever made her feel better.  But writing a tantrum-like letter to the editor was dumb in a Big Dumb Way.  Not only did she burn that particular bridge; she burnt a lot of bridges with one fell swoop.  Cause editors talk to each other.  They go out to lunch, they call each other, they email, and you can bet that if my friend submitted a book to someone who mentioned her name to my mother’s friend the editor, the feedback would not have been stellar.

This doesn’t mean you can’t advocate for your work.  If someone says “we want to publish your book, but we really want the protagonist to be a lizard,” it’s perfectly reasonable to say “You know, that’s not the book I wanted to write, and while I appreciate your viewpoint, that’s a dealbreaker for me.”  But don’t tell an editor that your therapist, your writing workshop, or the guy who makes your latte at Starbucks think your book is a flawless work of genius as it is.  It’s the editor who’s going to have to persuade the company to spend money buying the book, and publishing and advertising the book.  Anything you can do to make yourself look like someone she wants to work with is a good thing.

Being a brat, obviously, is not.

Shedding a Layer of Protection

personby Madeleine Robins
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Like almost everyone I know, I have a lot of books. A few fewer since the minor flood in the garage took out a couple of boxes that were stored in anticipation of getting new bookshelves, but generally a lot. For pretty much my entire life, from before I could read, I have believed, somewhere deep in my heart of hearts, that books are a form of wealth. It’s only lately that I realized they were also a form of… insulation? protection? I feel safe when there are books. The more books, the safer. (I have no idea what I need protection from. Boredom? A lack of reading material?)

So yeah. I like having books around. But I have also reached a point in my life where I realize that I have a lot of stuff. Emphatically including books. I don’t seem to be able to keep from accreting them, but I’m being a little more deliberate about which books I keep. I am still giving house space to all the plays I read and studied in college. And my Chaucer textbook (because sometimes I want to re-read the Wife of Baths Tale or something). All the paperback Georgette Heyers I ever bought, and so many many of the paperback science fiction and fantasy books I bought from the spinner racks at the drugstore in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where I spent my high school years.

Lately, with a sense of bemused sadness, I look at the stacks of books and realize that I’m never going to want to read some of them again. It’s hard to contemplate getting rid of some of them because they were such one-hit wonders, books I don’t think will ever have a digital edition. If I get rid of those books, who will ever know of them? On the other hand are the books I have replaced more than once due to loss or wear and tear–finally I got e-copies. You never know when the need to re-read Murder Must Advertise or the Jane Austen canon might overwhelm.

These days I read a lot on my phone. It’s less to carry, and I never run out of things to read. I also read paper books, of course. Especially before I go to sleep, when I’m trying to get the blue light of the day’s screens out of my brain. Truth be told, I still prefer paper. But paper is heavy, and if I need to carry more than one book (because I’m nearing the end of one and God forbid I should find myself book-less) it’s less to schlep. The luxury of getting on to a plane and knowing that–barring battery problems–I need not be stuck at 30,000 feet with nothing to read, is significant. And if-and-when we downsize from our current house to something a little smaller, I’m going to have to get rid of a good number of my books.

So these days, as I walk around the house, I find myself picking out some books–you. And you. And you. And adding them to the “donate” list in my head. The public library, or the Little Free Libraries of my neighborhood, will get a modest donation. A series of modest donations over the next few years. Because, as safe as it may make me feel, I cannot be Madeleine’s Home for Forgotten Books forever. Better that they find new homes with people who have not read them and may find them a source of delight. And I will learn to live without that particular layer of insulation.