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Book Review: Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes with a foreword by Jane Yolen

cover art for Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes

Burning Girls and Other Stories by Veronica Schanoes with a foreword by Jane Yolen

Tor.com, 2021

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250781505

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook ( Bookshop.org  |  Amazon.com )

 

 

In Burning Girls and Other Stories, Veronica Schanoes brings the present day into a literary and folkloric past that brings fairytales, history, and Jewish tradition together to form something new and unique.  I don’t think I have ever  encountered new tales that blend Jewish tradition, history and religion in a way that feels familiar to me as a Jew, and the stories in the book that use this technique are, I think, the strongest ones in the book.

 

I had read the titular novella, Burning Girls, when it was originally published, and was wowed by it at the time (I was not the only one, it was nominated for a Nebula and World Fantasy Award and won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella). In this story, a young woman who has been trained by her grandmother in herb lore, Jewish women’s rituals, and witchcraft, immigrates to the United States. Her sister has signed a contract with a lilit, a demon that steals children, and must discover the lilit’s name to break the contract. In addition to the religious lore, Schanoes interweaves the sewing factories’ unsafe conditions in the early 20th century, the growth of socialism, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. The transformation of a Grimm’s fairytale into a story of Russian Jews’ immigration to and intergration in America created a stunning, tragic, and relevant story.

 

In Among the Thorns, Schanoes responds to an antisemitic story that appears in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, “The Jew Among Thorns”, in which a youth is rewarded by a dwarf with a fiddle that enchants anyone who hears it into dancing, a fowling piece that never misses, and the ability to have any request granted. He meets a Jew in the road and forces him to dance in nearby thornbushes and hand over his money. When the Jew lodges a complaint in the nearest village, and the youth is sentenced to hang, he plays the fiddle again, enchanting the town into dancing and using his power to have the Jew hanged instead.  Schanoes’ story is told from the point of view of the daughter of the victim, who agrees to a bargain with the Matronit, or Shekina, the goddess of Israel who appears in the Jewish Kabbalah, so she can take revenge on the fiddler and the town. What’s most chilling in this story is the context in which it’s set. While much of the story may seem just a tale, the first page mentions names and dates: the actual incidents may be fictional, but the antisemitism and antisemitic violence were not.

 

Emma Goldman Takes Tea with Baba Yaga is a wonderful metanarrative in which Schanoes plays with the conventions of fairytales and narrative nonfiction. Emma Goldman was a Jewish immigrant from Russia in the early 20th century who was a notorious anti-capitalist anarchist and was deported back to Russia after many years of activism in the United States, only to become disillusioned with the Russian Revolution. Schanoes begins by attempting to write Emma’s story in a fairytale format, but Goldman is a real and vivid figure in American history, and the details of her life are too important for that. Schanoes imagines Goldman, tired and disillusioned, meeting another controversial and legendary figure, Baba Yaga, and what that meeting would be like.  As a fan of both, I really enjoyed this.  Schanoes also takes this opportunity to speak directly to her readers about the impact of Marxism and revolution on the present day and her own beliefs, an interesting choice.

 

Phosphorous does not touch on Jewish religion or tradition, but is also a strong story. It describes the events and environment of  the London matchgirl strike of 1888, both from a third-person narrator’s point of view and from the point of view of Lucy, one of the striking workers who is fatally ill, deteriorating quickly due to her close contact with the white phosphorous the matches are made with. Her grandmother comes up with a terrible plan to keep Lucy alive long enough for her to see the end of the strike. Schanoes grounds this story in historical fact by including real people such as Annie Besant as characters, and suggesting that physical artifacts exist as evidence of the story.

 

Schanoes’ ability to seamlessly draw real events and people together with folklore and fairytale, even while breaking the fourth wall,  is impressive.  Other stories I haven’t described in detail seem hallucinatory, playing with language and imagery while also using literary or folkloric elements, such as Alice: A Fantasia and Serpents. Jane Yolen’s praise in the introduction that these stories have a “lyric beauty” that “bleeds onto the pages” is well-deserved.

 

Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on September 17, 2021 by , Reply

Book Review: Gershon’s Monster: A Story for the Jewish New Year, retold by Eric A. Kimmel, illustrated by Jon J. Muth

Gershon’s Monster: A Story for the Jewish New Year,  retold by Eric A. Kimmel and illustrated by Jon J. Muth.

Scholastic, 2000

ISBN-13: 978-0439108393

Available: Hardcover, paperback

Gershon’s Monster is based on a story from the Hasidic tradition of Judaism, retold by Eric Kimmel, also the author of Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins. Gershon is a man who never regrets or apologizes for his mistakes. Every week he sweeps them into his basement where he won’t have to see them, and once a year, on Rosh Hashonah, the Jewish New Year, he gathers them into a sack, carries them down to the ocean, and empties them in.

Gershon and his wife desperately want a child, and Gershon visits a great rabbi for advice. The rabbi’s prayers are successful, but he warns Gershon that his selfishness will eventually cost the lives of his children, as the sea will claim them as payment for washing away his errors.  Gershon ignores the rabbi’s warning, but one day as his children are playing near the water, a monster rises from the sea, created from years and years of Gershon’s misdeeds. To save his children, Gershon must act selflessly, and acknowledge and repent his errors.

What could have been a simple, well-done retelling of a Hasidic folktale on the wisdom of making amends (the author’s note says he is a stand-in for the mystic Ba’al Shem Tov, a great rabbi who lived in the 1700s). takes on extraordinary power with the illustrations of Jon J. Muth. While the art for most of the story is light and delicate, darker browns and golds illuminate Gershon’s visit with the prophetic rabbi,  with grays and blacks dominating the scenes where Gershon’s selfishness is most obvious. The page where Gershon leaves the rabbi is framed in gray, with the sad expression of the rabbi in the foreground, but a bright green visible from the doorway, as Gershon  once again blithely leaves without dealing with the selfish behavior in his wake. The darkest illustrations are the most dramatic, though. Gershon’s individual mistakes are small, dark shapes that look almost gleeful as they ride alongside him or on top of his sack, set apart from the muted and blurred images by their sharp edges.  The monster created by Gershon’s years of errors that he has deposited into the sea is indistinct, blending in with the dark clouds and threatening waves while simultaneously emerging as a gigantic black horror, and turning to that page, even though I knew something terrible would happen, left me momentarily breathless. It really was a “wow” moment.  While illustrations such as this could be considered too dark and disturbing for some younger children, most children, Jewish or not, will enjoy the story, and it’s a great jumping off point for a discussion of the importance of making amends, and on the ability to change for the better. With Rosh Hashonah just around the corner, I recommend following it up with a snack of apples and honey.

Gershon’s Monster is a winner of the Sydney Taylor Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Highly recommended, especially for libraries in communities with a strong Jewish population.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 


Posted on October 1, 2016 by , Reply

Book Review: Compulsion by Meyer Levin

Compulsion: A Novel by Meyer Levin

Fig Tree Books, 2015 (Originally Simon & Schuster, 1956)

ISBN-13: 978-1941493021

Available: Pre-order paperback (April, 2015)

 

There is a fine line between horror fiction and the fictionalized true crime novel.

 

Meyer Levin’s Compulsion is considered the founding classic of the genre of the fictionalized true crime novel, popularized by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. The events contained in Compulsion are based on a real case, thinly veiled into novel form, with names changed to protect the not-so-innocent. The source of the horror is in the minds of the two successful college students who murder a child, simply as an intellectual exercise.

 

This new reprint of the 1956 novel shows its age from time to time. It is based on the case of Leopold and Loeb, which took place in 1924 Chicago, and was considered the crime of the century at the time. Levin was a contemporary of the accused, and based this novel on his experience of following the real case.

 

Some of the most interesting aspects of the novel involve the Chicago Jewish community’s reaction to the crime. The community demanded justice, but there was a lot of fear of anti-Semitic backlash. I suspect that is why a new publisher of Jewish fiction, Fig Tree, has chosen this as its first release.

 

As a novel, this work feels like the works of Grisham and Turow– most of it is courtroom thriller. Although I felt that the book was drawn out longer than it needed to be, it is a compelling account, and I can see why it is considered a classic.

 

Libraries, especially in communities with large Jewish populations, will find this book essential. I am interested to see what this publisher does next. Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by David Agranoff

Posted on December 10, 2014 by , Reply