V. A. Dymshits

S. A. An-sky and V. Ia. Propp, or What is 'Jewish' about the Jewish Folk Tale?

Looking for the origins of folk studies, we find two interrelated movements of European thought: Romanticism and Nationalism. The Romantics were convinced that folk art was useful primarily to offer the local flavor, to reveal the spirit of the people. Unfortunately, those scholars eventually discovered their position weakened by their own efforts: the more material they amassed, the more evident it became that, there were far more , common features in folk tales than specific, ethnic ones. Eventually we ended up in the situation we face today: no one - except for professional patriots - has any idea what the enigmatic phrase the spirit of the people really means.

Yet, in the early 20th cent., the search for inherent ethnic features in folk tales still seemed like a good idea. That was when the folk tales of the Ashkenasi Jews were first collected - this collection had started much later than with other European nations. Note that the fact that Jewish folklore only started to be collected at a fairly late stage is by no means surprising. The phrase Jewish folk tale sounds weird to an adept of the Romantic concept of folklore. The Eastern European Jews were ill fitted for the role of the bearers of a traditional folk culture . To begin with, they were mostly urban dwellers, and they were universally literate, having at their disposal not only 'holy' and spiritually instructive books, but those for entertainment as well, in both Hebrew and Yiddish . A Jew, a trader or an artisan, as a representative of urban, bourgeois mentality, stood in stark contrast to a peasant, an ideal subject for folk studies.

As for Jewish Nationalism, having come into existence at a fairly late stage, it took at once the shape of Palestinophilia, and then Zionism, i.e. it was built around rejecting the nation as it was in favor of the nation as it should be, as well as rejecting Yiddish in favor of Hebrew.

It was only in the early 20th cent. that the motivations for Jewish folk studies revealed themselves, those being the Neo-Romantic trend in Jewish literature, on one hand, and the interest in the 'common people', encouraged by the Socialist movement, on the other. It is quite significant that the founder of Jewish folk studies was a professional revolutionary, a member of the S.R. Party, S.A. An-sky. An-sky, 'the father of Jewish folk studies' was not justone of the first collectors of Jewish folklore, but was the first scholar who made an attempt to come up with a theory on Jewish heritage.

An-sky's most prominent contribution to folk studies is his programmatic essay Jewish Folk Art¹. Here he states his views regarding the special features of Jewish folklore, primarily the Jewish fairy tale, supporting his conclusions by a number of examples. In this essay, An-sky draws on his scattered notes of 1906-1908, as well as his childhood memories. Thus, An-sky's ideas as to what Jewish folklore really was about had been shaped before his folklore-ethnographic field trips of 1912, i.e. before he had started systematic collection practices. No wonder that those ideas had considerable influence on his field work, as well as on the kind of material he collected.

The main question that An-sky tries to answer in his essay concerns the specific features of Jewish folklore, i.e. what is 'Jewish' about the Jewish folk tale. The mere posing of the problem (which, as was mentioned above, seems totally inappropriate for modern folk studies) is directly related to another problem that An-sky also discusses in his Jewish Folk Art. He writes:

...our intellectuals prove to be indifferent to Jewish ethnography and folklore, to the treasury of folk art which is a unique source of first-hand ideas about the ethnic character and mentality of the Jewish people, their peculiar mores, psyche and morality<...>²

Presently we are faced with an urgent task: to organize the systematic and large-scale collection of folk art of all types. <...> It is high time to begin work on Jewish ethnography!³

An-sky highlights the cause of Jewish ethnography and folk studies as a national taskHe is especially concerned with its social, rather than scholarly, aspect. For An-sky, folk studies will help scholars understand the people: folklore is a treasure chest containing the national identity, the spirit of the people. Thus, to outline the specific features of a Jewish tale means to outline the specific features of the Jewish historic destiny, not only of the past, but of the future too. For An-sky, as a public figure and a populist revolutionary, such an approach was absolutely natural.₄

Being primarily a public figure, and then a scholar, An-sky searched in Jewish folk tales for ideology, and he never failed to find it there. To be more precise, he compared his ideology with empirical material, and discovered in folklore exactly what he wanted to discover.

Thus, one of the central ideas of his Jewish Folk Art essay is the following: unlike the folk tales of other peoples that glorify physical strength, Jewish folklore glorifies spiritual power. An-sky writes,

Jewish folk art does not feature giants of physical strength<...>, but we see therein equally, or even more powerful giants of spiritual strength, armed with words or spirit, rather than the sword.⁵

To prove this statement, as dubious as it is important for him, An-sky is forced to divide all folk tales into 'authentic' and 'alien.', As one might expact, only the pieces that comply with his own criteria fall into the former category. Thus, An-sky claims:

The authentic tales and songs <...> lack completely either the heroic element or any motifs of struggle for material or physical domination. Even in those tales and legends that are obviously alien (e.g. "Tsenturia-Venturia", "Tale of Three Brothers", "Tale of Bova", about the King's daughter, about the seven robbers, etc.) this element is very tentative and subdued.⁶

Thus a number of tales that were highly popular amid the Jews fall under the second category, 'alien', not typical. The artificial and non-academic nature of such an approach, based on the a priori determined criteria of the 'Jewishness' of a Jewish tale, is self-evident.

The second most important specific feature of Jewish tales was, according to An-sky, their close relationship with the Biblical and Talmudic texts, direct borrowings from these texts into folklore.

We must point out that An-sky's point of view (his tendency to oppose Jewish folk art to the folk art of other groups, rather than compare them) could not but cause a reaction.: According to the folk scholars of the next generation (1920-30s), the Jewish folk tale exemplified the folk tale as such (meaning that it closely resembled. the tales of other Eastern European nations) . (Note the work of the Jewish folk scholar and folk tale collector I.-L. Kagan)

Modern scholarship might find An-sky's views naive, but they do have a certain logic. The central question of Jewish Folk Art, what is < > about the Jewish folk tale, although it sounds unscholarly, is still relevant. An-sky realized that apart from the language of the narrator and his audience, apart from the mundane details and the names of the characters, there might also be certain ideological traits that link the Jewish tale toJewry as a specific cultural entity.

Trying to understand the peculiarity of Jewish folklore, An-sky did not touch the question of genre of the texts in question, while now, thanks to the efforts of V. Ia. Propp, we know for certain what a fairy tale is and what features it must possess. Vladimir Propp is the most prominent theoretician of modern folklore studies. His main idea was discovering the morphology of the fairy tale. According to Propp, fairytales all possess a very rigorous structure that imposes its own laws on the text, regardless of the ethnic and confessional specificity of the narrator and his audience⁷. We can apply Propp's theory to Jewish folk tales, and we will immediately see that a number of texts conform to this pattern. Yet, the system of values proclaimed by a classical fairy tale inevitably clashes with 'Jewish' values, which is primarily indicated by the fact that a number of what Propp terms functions (e.g. the marriage of a Jewish protagonist to a Christian princess) cannot be realized. Thus, we see the problem of a clash between two highly demanding systems: it would seem that under such conditions the tale should be either a 'fairytale' or 'Jewish'.

I believe that the truth is to be found in between these two models: Jewish fairy tales do exist, and they even triy to tackle the almost impossible task of combining the rigorous 'fairy tale' etiquette with the no less rigorous 'Jewish' values. How do they achieve that?

Propp's remarkable book has a telltale title, The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, and indeed it tackles the specific features of a fairy tale as a specific form of narration. Yet, in the Jewish folk tale, as in Jewish folk art as a whole, a non-Jewish form contains purely Jewish content.

In Jewish folk art (not just in fairy tales), form and content almost inevitably have different backgrounds. The form is arbitrary, and thus almost always borrowed, while the content is strictly Jewish: elements borrowed from other cultures retain their form, but are loaded with new meaning. That is true for more than just fairy tales; it applies to Jewish applied arts too. Thus, an aron-kodesh in a synagogue is crowned as a rule with the double-headed eagle, copied from a coat-of-arms (Russian or Austrian), yet there it symbolizes not the state, but the Almighty.

Jewish narrative folklore, like traditional Jewish art as a whole, was always open to alien influences and borrowed willingly whatever it could and wherever it could. Yet all the borrowed elements, including the structure of the fairy tales, were restricted to the artistic form only and did not interfere with specifically Jewish meanings and values, even when the 'fairy tale' form clashed to a certain extent with the 'Jewish' content.

As proof, I will analyze a Jewish fairy tale, combining Propp's formal reasoning with An-sky's ideological one. I'll summarize the story, which is titled

An Amazing Tale of Two Brothers Carried Away in Their Ship to the Sea of Ice and Their Miraculous Salvation⁸

There lived two brothers in a town. One was called reb Chaim, the other reb Shimshon. Reb Chaim was very wealthy, while reb Shimshon was a poor man, but what a pious one. One day reb Shimshon came to reb Chaim and said that he had a secret to share, but that could only be done on board ship. So they went on board ship.

The ship sailed off, but as soon as reb Chaim and reb Shimshon began to talk, a horrible storm broke out and blew the ship away into the Sea of Ice. Next morning, when reb Shimshon woke up, he saw some other ships around, that had also been blown away to the Sea of Ice.

Then reb Shimshon plucked a piece of wood from the deck, and tossed its other end to the next ship. He and his brother made their way to that ship and saw many dead people, starved to death, surrounded with piles of gold and silver. Reb Chaim snatched a large bag and began to stuff it with gold.

As for reb Shimshon, he made his way from one ship to another. Then he saw a high wall. And the wall had the names of the dead scribbled all over it reb Shimshon copied all the names and said, 'Help me, God, to get out of here, and then I will walk to all the cities and call out the names of these people, so that women will no longer be agunas.'

And hoping that God would not leave him, reb Shimshon started to climb the wall. Suddenly, someone lowered a rope for him, and pulled him up to the top of the wall.

Now reb Chaim had a bag full of gold on his back. He saw reb Shimshon on the top of the wall and also tried to climb it, but the heavy bag pulled him down and he fell. That's how the brothers got separated. Reb Chaim went back to the ship, recited the Psalms and asked God to help him, for the merits of his pious brother.

And reb Shimshon set off on his way. His road took him through a forest with beautiful trees that bore delicious fruit. All of a sudden he saw a hill and a door in the hill. He came closer and threw the door open, and out came a terrific blast of wind, that reached the Sea of Ice, picked up all the ships and blew them out into the ocean. Thus reb Chaim was saved.

Meanwhile reb Shimshon still stumbled through the forest, until he saw the King's palace in the distance. He approached the palace and beheld a youth all clad in white. Reb Shimshon took a closer look and - lo and behold! - it was his dead disciple! The youth recognized reb Shimshon, brought him an apple from forefathers and showed him the road.

Reb Shimshon followed the path, got to the main road and soon reached a city. He came into the city and saw people weeping and moaning all over the place. Reb Shimshon knocked on the door of a Jewish home and asked why everyone was so upset.'

And the Jew told him that the King's only daughter had fallen asleep, and neither medicine nor doctors could wake her up. Then the King issued a decree: if his only daughter dies, he will expel all the Jews from the city and expropriate their belongings⁹.

Reb Shimshon went to the King's palace and promised to cure the Princess. Reb Shimshon approached the Princess, brought the apple to her nose and said, 'Smell it.'

She did smell, and felt her strength coming back. 'Look,' said reb Shimshon, 'you must promise not to tell anyone how I cured you. If they ask, tell them that I cured you with prayers. If you let the secret out, you will die.'

Reb Shimshon stayed at the palace until the Princess was again in good health. Everybody treated him handsomely. When the Princess was cured, the King gave to reb Shimshon his native town and built there a palace for him.

Then reb Shimshon arrived at his native town, but his palace was not finished yet. So he went to his brother's place and asked whether he, a wealthy man, could stay in his house. But since he had not told reb Chaim who he was, he was not recognized. So reb Shimshon stayed with his brother, and then one day he heard music playing. So he asked, 'What is going on t?'

The answer was, 'It is the wedding of the master's niece.'

Then reb Shimshon said, 'I also want to attend the wedding.'

Reb Shimshon came to the wedding. The bridegroom was a yeshive-bokher, and the time came when he was to be asked questions and give answers. The questions came, but he was not very good at answering them. But there was a young man there, who answered all the questions. Reb Shimshon took a closer look at him and noticed that the young man was also clever and handsome. Then reb Shimshon asked for the bride's mother and told the guests who he really was. Then he ordered the young man who had answered all the questions to become the bridegroom. And then they had a merry wedding.

Reb Shimshon stayed in the city until his death, studied Torah, prayed and did a lot of good for the Jews.

***

An Amazing Tale combines the motifs of a fairy tale and the motifs of a folk novel, a sermon and a fable.

The plot reflects, to a great degree, the typical pattern described by V. Ia. Propp in his Morphology of the Fairy Tale. In fact, according to Propp, this Amazing Tale would be a fairy tale in the pure sense of the word. As if he wants to confirm Propp's theory on the genesis of the 'Far-Away-Kingdom-By-The-Sea'¹⁰, the hero, goes straight to Heaven, i.e. to the world of the dead, and procures help from the forefathers, i.e. his ancestors.

At the same time, the exposition of An Amazing Tale (the secret, the storm, the Sea of Ice), like its melodramatic and naively psychological elements, seem to be derived from a primitive adventure novel. Besides, a number of motifs (gold prevents man from getting into Heaven, etc.) are of didactic order and resemble a sermon or a fable more than a fairy tale.

Finally, in An Amazing Tale all the traditional elements of the fairy tale plot acquire new motivation, which would be acceptable from the point of view of the Jewish tradition: a dead man rewards the hero for teaching him Torah in life; the hero heals the Princess not to marry her, but to save the Jews from expulsion, etc. The hero becomes a 'General' (an equivalent of 'half a kingdom'), but, as a Jew and a married man, cannot wed the Princess. However, the logic of the narration demands a wedding at the end, so we get his daughter's wedding, where he turns up, as is required, unrecognized, and requests the change of the bridegroom (the 'false hero' motif). The whole epilogue: the hero's appearance incognito, his daughter's wedding, the change of the bridegroom - indicate that the 'fairy tale' canon is imposing its rigorous regulations. The two ends, the 'fairy tale' and the 'Jewish' one eventually meet, even if with a certain tension.

The textual analysis of Jewish tales shows that however naive were some of An-sky's folkloristic concepts, he was right in the main thing: the Jewish fairy tale, while remaining a fairy tale, was still capable of expressing a particular set of values, which are specific to a traditional Jewish community.

Thus, the question what is <JEWISH> in a Jewish tale? turns out to be not as pointless as it might seem nowadays, and the answer to it proves to be more complicated than it seemed ninety years ago.

1 S.A.Ansky. Evreyskoye narodnoye tvorchestvo (Jewish Folk Art).// Perezhitoye. 1908, Vol. 1. Pp. 276-314. Cited from Jews in the Russian Empire, 18-19 c. symposium (Evrei v Rossiyskoy Imperii XVIII-XIX vekov. Sbornik trudov evreyskih istorikov. Moscow-Jerusalem, 1995. Pp. 641-686.

2 Ibid Pp. 641--642

3 Ibid. P. 643.

4 The evolution of S. An-sky's views is analyzed in detail in V. Lukin's essay From Populism to the People (S. An-sky As an Ethnographer of Eastern European Jewry) (V.Lukin. Ot narodnichestva k narodu (S. An-sky - etnograf vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva). // Evrei v Rossii. Istoriya i kultura. St.Petersburg, 1995. P. 125.

5 S.A.Ansky. Evreyskoye narodnoye tvorchestvo (Jewish Folk Art) // Evreyi v Rossiyskoy Imperii XVIII--XIX vekov. Moscow-Jerusalem, 1995. Pp. 641-642. Pp. 665-666.

6 Ibid. P. 658.

7 V.Y.Propp. Morfologia skazki (Morphology of Fairy Tale). Academia. Leningrad, 1928.

8 The tale was recorded from Yose Ukrant in 1920s in the town of Kremenets, Volyn. Published in: Jewish Folk Tales of Eastern Europe. Compiled and edited by S. Tsfasnam. Jerulasem, 1991 (Yiddish). Pp. 107-111. Russian translation published in: Evreyskiye narodniye skazki, predaniya, bylichki, rasskazy i anekdoty, sobranniye E.S. Raize. Compiled by V. Dymshits. St.Petersburg, Symposium. 1999. Pp. 15-21.

9 It often happened in the Middle Ages that a King benevolent to the Jews would expel them and, as a rule, confiscate their property, if a misfortune befell him, for the misfortune was explained away as God's punishment for easy-going attitude to the 'Christ's enemies'. Thus, in 1670 the Austrian Emperor Leopold, an ardent Roman Catholic, ruthlessly expelled the Jews he had previously patronized from Vienna. The reason for expulsion was the death of the heir to the throne and the Empress's subsequent miscarriage.

10 V.Y. Propp. Istoricheskiye korni volshebnoy skazki (Historic Roots of Fairy Tale). Leningrad, 1966.