Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For Jenna A. Felice (1976–2001)
A WITCH FOR OUR TIMES
Veronica Schanoes, an academic who writes fiction like the best of the modern fantasy writers, works in prose both lush and spare. She creates stories that catch both the mind and memory.
Her expertise in folklore and fairy tales is there, but her academic credentials never overwhelm the tellings. Never underwhelms them either. In a very short time, Schanoes has become a master of the short story and novella, known for her stunning prose and her work with revisionary fairy stories. She is already picking up awards: The title novella in this volume, Burning Girls, won the Shirley Jackson Award and was also nominated for the World Fantasy and Nebula Awards. “Phosphorus” was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.
There is a lyric beauty in all her tellings, and coherent plots, something fairy tales often lose along their ages-old winding path of mouth to ear resuscitation. And many of the stories employ a metanarrator who—we are to believe—is Schanoes herself, though she reminds us throughout that all writers, all tale tellers, are liars. Something, she emphasizes, we must never forget.
The tales in this book are full of Jewish fabulism—and by that I do not mean only full of dybbuks and maggids, but personal shoahs as well. Plus fairy-tale rejiggerings that go far beyond the grim and begrimed Bruder Grimm recitations. She has circled her lyrical wagons around hidden histories, those small acts of brutal anti-Semitism that have marked the lives of Jews in Slavic and German towns. Few but scholars have read the now-rejected Grimm’s stories that have been thrown out of the canon, certainly when printed for young readers. Stories like “The Jew Among the Thorns,” which Schanoes has mined brilliantly here for the opening tale.
My ancestors, all of whom fled either the Ukraine or Latvia in the late 1800s, early 1900s, just steps ahead of the Cossacks, the tsar’s brutal “Fists” would have recognized their own stories told here in Burning Girls, though without any actual magic.
And the Irish will certainly find Schanoes’s flawless “Phosphorus”—about the phossy girls who go on strike for better work and wages even as their jaws are breaking into pieces from the bite of the poisonous phosphors they have handled for so long—a bitterly truthful bit of magical realism. Based as it is on Andersen’s “Little Matchgirl” tale, Schanoes turns it into a piece of work that is both depressing and uplifting at the same time. And all without sending her dying girl (as Andersen did a century earlier) directly to her mother’s arms in Heaven, but instead letting her live to fight bravely to the very end.
Surprisingly, Alice in Wonderland makes a number of appearances as well, always bizarrely. But that makes sense given that she is the newest of the many odd characters that take a turn on this stage, even while not being strictly folkloric.
“The Path of Pins and Needles” also appears as a refrain, not Schanoes’s own invention, but lifted and reworked from the French version of Red Riding Hood. Here the grandmother adds like a seeress from some storied past: “You will eat roots. Eventually you will eat stones.” I shiver with recognition. But the way Schanoes uses the path is her very own. I stand in awe. Or rather I sit in awe and keep turning the pages. That kind of book.
Many of these stories made me shiver. One—about rats under the skin—literally. But there is more here than just the cold hand on the back of the neck or the light frisson of terror down the spine. There is mordant humor in Schanoes’s take on the “Twelve Dancing Princesses” where twelve princes are consigned eternally to a filthy dance hall bar ’til twelve young women come to rescue them. And with the tale comes an ending that is both surprising and earned.
This is a book of short stories, not a novel, with no attempt to link the stories. What holds them together in a loose sort of way are the old tales they spring from.
However, make no mistake—these are not those old tales, the ones that wobble about on the superhighway of retellings, often losing both plot and characterization from the long years of tongue polishing. Rather these stories come from an unconfined imagination soaked in the old stories, but told by an author who has studied them with a microscope, and has carved them into her heart. She has also developed along the way a critical understanding that—to make their mark in this century—the characters need real agency, not just chance meetings with old ladies in the woods. Not just a kind fox or rabbit or wolf to show them the way.
As a modern storyteller knows, Schanoes also understands she must crack the stories open like a nut on Christmas morning, she has to bite the head off the haman cookie to reveal the real flesh beneath. Her tales have a pace, a language that is bitter, sharp, even ragged and raw at times. Her characters are often the same—they bleed onto the pages and she does not always stop to wipe up the messes as she flushes the old openings/closings down the nearest commode.
Her sometimes outrageous matching tales to the world’s histories are folkish at the core. “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga.” Really?! A brilliant story that has biography, autobiography, history, plus the greatest female anarchist and the most famous witch in folklore all in one storied place. And Emma holds her own here. How could you ask for more?
So—do I like the stories in this book? “Like” is too soft a word for the way I feel about them. These are stories for our future, not our past. I can’t wait to reread them. They read as if they were composed on the guillotine of that fairy-tale opening “Once upon a time” when such storytellers gained either the king’s patronage or were swung from his gibbet as an enemy, a spy, a wizard, or a witch.
At the same time, Schanoes has carved a different, difficult path. Maybe pins and needles, maybe charcoal and chalk. Perhaps roots and stones. It is a tough walk, full of the dark. There are not always happy images or endings. Yes, you can find some footprints ahead of hers—Catherynne M. Valente’s, Gregory Maguire’s, Isak Dinesen’s, Angela Carter’s. And if I am feeling presumptuous, possibly mine.
But Schanoes has a particular place here, has both daring and a deep core understanding of the old fairy and folktales. I expect she is not nearly done with the old stories yet. They are a cauldron that keeps giving and giving.
She is the one who will be running ahead of the rest of us dawdlers if we are not ready for the race, signaling what is to come. Or as she writes in the Emma Goldman story: “Truth can be told in any number of ways. It’s all a matter of emphasis. Of voice. I have not lied about anything yet.”
Watch out for that “yet.” She is warning us what is still to come. Not a leap off the path of needles and pins. Or perhaps we all need to make that leap together. The Grimms and th
eir cohorts may have seeded many of these stories, but Judaism, Marxism, feminism, and twenty-first-century pop cultural biases have plowed these fields as well. The next generation of fairy-tale scholars will have a field day with her stories.
And if you rise up shouting with joy at this line, where Emma is about to meet the great Russian witch, and is drumming her fingers on the fence: “da-da-dum, da-da-dum, da-da-dum, the anapest of boredom” without mistaking it first for a county in Russia, then this book is for you. And if you expect any story in this volume to remain a story and not become today’s history, or tomorrow’s, then you have mistaken Veronica Schanoes for someone like Spielberg. She is much more lyrical, and much less doctrinaire than he is. Rather she is a seeress, but perhaps one you don’t quite believe yet. And much more a witch for our times than you or I really know.
—JANE YOLEN
AMONG THE THORNS
They made my father dance in thorns before they killed him.
I used to think that this was a metaphor, that they beat him with thorny vines, perhaps. But I was wrong about that.
They made him dance.
* * *
Just over 150 years ago, in 1515, as the Christians count, on a bright and clear September morning, they chained a Jewish man named Johann Pfefferkorn to a column in our cemetery. They left enough length for him to be able to walk around the column. Then they surrounded him with coals and set them aflame, raking them ever closer to Herr Pfefferkorn, until he was roasted alive.
They said that Herr Pfefferkorn had confessed to stealing, selling, and mutilating their Eucharist, planning to poison all the Christians in Magdeburg and Halberstadt combined and then to set fire to their homes, kidnapping two of their children in order to kill them and use their blood for ritual purposes, poisoning wells, and practicing sorcery.
I readily believe that poor Herr Pfefferkorn confessed to all of that.
A man will confess to anything when he is being tortured.
They say that, at the last, my father confessed to stealing every taler he had ever possessed.
But I don’t believe that. Not my father.
* * *
They say that in their year 1462, in the village of Pinn, several of us bought the child of a farmer and tortured it to death. They also say that in their 1267, in Pforzheim, an old woman sold her granddaughter to us, and we tortured her to death and threw her body into the River Enz.
* * *
Who are these people who trade away their children for gold?
My parents would not have given away me or any of my brothers for all the gold in Hesse. Are gentiles so depraved that at last, they cannot love even their own children?
* * *
I was seven when my father disappeared. At first we did not worry. My parents were pawnbrokers in Hoechst; my mother ran the business out of our house and my father traveled the countryside of Hesse, peddling the stock she thus obtained, and trading with customers in nearby towns, during the week. He tried to be with us for Shabbos, but it was not so unusual for the candles to burn down without him.
It was almost always only a matter of days before he came back, looming large in our doorway, and swept me into the air in a hug redolent of the world outside Hoechst. I was the youngest and the only girl, and though fathers and mothers both are said to rejoice more greatly in their sons than in their daughters, I do believe that my father preferred me above all my brothers.
My father was a tall man, and I am like him in that, as in other things. I have his thick black hair and his blue eyes. But my father’s eyes laughed at the world, and I have instead my mother’s temperament, so I was a solemn child.
When my father lifted me in his arms and kissed me, his beard stroked my cheek. I was proud of my father’s beard, and he took such care of it: so neat and trim it was, not like my zeyde’s beard had been, all scraggly and going every which way. And white. My mother’s father’s beard was white, too. My father’s was black as ink, and I never saw a white hair in it.
* * *
We had a nice house, not too small and not too big, and we lived in a nice area of Hoechst, but not too nice. My parents grew up in the ghetto of Frankfurt am Main, but the ghetto in Frankfurt is but a few streets, and there are so many of us. So we Jews are mobile by necessity.
Even though it is dangerous on the road.
And Hoechst is a nice place, and we had a nice home. But not too nice. My mother had selected it when she was already pregnant with my eldest brother. “Too nice and they are jealous,” she told me, “so not too nice. But not nice enough, and they won’t come and do business. And,” she added, “I wanted clean grounds for my children to play on.”
We had some Jewish neighbors, and it was their children I mostly played with. The Christian children were nice enough, but they were scared of us sometimes, or scorned us, and I never knew what to expect. I had a friend named Inge for a while, but when her older sister saw us together, she turned red and smashed my dolly’s head against a tree. Then she got to her feet and ran home, and her sister glared at me.
I was less friendly after that, although my father fixed my dolly when he came home that week and put a bandage on my head to match hers when I asked him to.
Some feel there is safety in numbers and in closeness, but my mother thought differently. “Too many of us, too close together,” she said, “and they think we’re plotting against them. Of course, they don’t like it when we move too far into their places, either. I do what I can to strike the right balance, liebchen,” she said.
This was my mother, following the teachings of Maimonides, who wrote that we should never draw near any extreme, but keep to the way of the righteous, the golden mean. In this way, she sought to protect her family.
Perhaps she was successful, for the Angel of Death did not overtake us at home.
* * *
Death caught up with my father when he was on the road, but we did not worry overmuch at first. My mother had already begun to worry when he was still not home for the second Shabbos, but even that was not the first time, and I did not worry at all. Indeed, I grew happier, for the farther away my father traveled, the more exciting his gifts for me were when he arrived home.
But Mama sat with my uncle Leyb, who lived with us, fretting, their heads together like brother and sister. Even though Uncle Leyb was my father’s younger brother, he was fair-haired, like my mother. I loved him very much, though not in the way I loved my parents. Uncle Leyb was my playmate, my friend, my eldest brother, if my brothers had spent time with a baby like me. But Uncle Leyb was also old enough to be my parents’ confidant. Sometimes he went with my father, and sometimes he stayed and helped my mother.
I am grateful that he stayed home for my father’s last trip. I do not think he could have done any good. But Leyb does not forgive himself to this day.
“Illness, murder, kidnapping,” said my mother calmly, as though she were making up a list of errands, but her knuckles were white, her hands gripping the folds of her dress.
“It will be all right, Esti,” said my uncle. “Yakov has been out on the road many times for many days. Perhaps business is good and he doesn’t want to cut off his good fortune. And then you’d have had all this worry for naught.”
“They kidnapped a boy, a scholar,” said Mama. “On the journey between Moravia and Cracow.”
“Nobody has kidnapped Yakov,” said my uncle. He had a disposition like my father’s, always sunny.
“If we sell the house,” Mama went on as if she hadn’t heard him, “we could pay a substantial ransom.”
“There will be no need for that,” my uncle said firmly.
My mother’s fears did not worry me. Though I was a serious child, my father was big as a tree in my eyes, certainly bigger than Mama or Uncle Leyb or most of the men in Hoechst.
And my parents were well-liked in Hoechst. My father drank and smoked with the younger Christian men, and when he offered his hand, they shook it.
When
the third Shabbos without my father passed, Uncle Leyb began to worry as well. His merry games faded to silence, and he and my mother held hushed conversations that broke off the minute I came within earshot.
After the fourth Shabbos had passed, my uncle packed up a satchel of food and took a sackful of my mother’s wares and announced his intention to look for my father.
“Don’t go alone,” my mother said.
“Whom should I take?” my uncle asked. “The children? And you need to stay and run the business.”
“Take a friend. Take Nathaniel from next door. He’s young and strong.”
“So am I, Esti,” my uncle said. He held her hand fondly for a moment before letting it go and taking a step back, away from the safety of our home. “Besides,” he said, noticing that I and my next elder brother, Heymann, had stopped our game of jacks to watch and listen. “I daresay that Yakov is recovering from an ague in a nice bed somewhere. Won’t I give him a tongue-lashing for not sending word home to his wife and family? Perhaps I’ll even give him a knock on the head!”
The thought of slight Uncle Leyb thumping my tall, sturdy father was so comical that I giggled.
My uncle turned his face to me and pretended to be stern. “You mock me, Ittele?” he said. “Oh, if only you could have seen your father and me when we were boys! I thrashed him up and down the street, and never mind that he was the elder!”
I laughed again, and my uncle seemed pleased. But as he waved at us and turned to go, his face changed, and he looked almost frightened.
The fortnight that he was away was the longest I have ever known. Mama was quick-tempered; my brothers ignored me, except for Heymann, who entertained himself by teaching me what he learned in cheder. I tried to pay attention, but I missed my uncle’s jokes and games, and I missed my father’s hugs and kisses. I took to sucking my thumb for consolation, the way I had when I was a baby. Only when my brothers couldn’t see, of course. My mother did catch me a few times, but she pretended not to notice so I wouldn’t be embarrassed.
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 1
