Yiddish Folktales

by Beatrice Weinreich

  “Well, what can we do now?” asked the fool.

  “I’ll tell you what to do,” said the horse. “Carry her three daughters over to our side of the hut. Put them down in our places, with their heads at the threshold, and we’ll lie in their places.”

  The fool did as he was told. He put the three sleeping daughters on the floor with their heads at the threshold, and he and his horse lay down in their places.

  Suddenly, in the middle of the night, Bobe Ha came hurrying back from the forest. She dashed up to the threshold and gave such a terrible stamp with her iron foot that the shattered heads of her daughters flew off in all directions. Then she ran back into the forest.

  The horse said to the fool, “Quickly, harness me up. Take the golden feather and let’s get away. Drive me as hard as you can.”

  The fool harnessed the horse as quickly as he could. Then he grabbed up the feather and off they went.

  The next morning, miserable indeed was Bobe Ha when she came back to her hut from the forest and saw what she had done with her iron foot. “Woe is me,” she wailed. “I hacked my own daughters’ heads off. And those two have escaped with the golden feather. Oh, woe. Oh, woe.” And she started off in pursuit of them. She chased them and they ran for dear life, and as they ran they heard the rat-a-tat-tat of her iron foot.

  “She’s chasing us, she’s chasing us!” cried the fool.

  “Yes, I hear her,” said the horse. “Didn’t I tell you that troubles would follow if you picked up the feather? But you wouldn’t listen. Well, don’t panic, I’ve got an idea. Fill a pitcher with water and throw it over your head, and it will turn into a river that she won’t be able to cross.”

  The fool did what he was told. He filled a pitcher with water and threw it over his head, and it turned into a broad river. When Bobe Ha came to the river, she couldn’t cross it. So she ran back home, snatched up a pot and ladle, and used them to quickly empty the river. Then she raced on in pursuit of the fool and his horse.

  She ran after them and ran, and they fled with all their might, and as they ran they heard again the rat-a-tat-tat of her iron foot. “She’s chasing us, she’s chasing us!” cried the fool to the horse.

  “Yes, I hear her. Didn’t I tell you that troubles would follow if you picked up the feather? But you wouldn’t listen. Well, don’t panic, I’ve got an idea. Pluck a handful of twigs and throw them over your head, and they’ll turn into a forest so dense she won’t be able to push through.”

  So that’s what he did. He plucked a handful of twigs and threw them over his head, and they turned into a dense forest that she couldn’t push through. Back she went to her home, where she grabbed a hatchet and used it to chop a path through the forest. Then she raced on in pursuit of them.

  She chased them and they fled with all their might, and as they ran they heard again the rat-a-tat-tat of her iron foot. “Help,” the fool begged the horse. “Help! What shall we do? We’re doomed.”

  The horse said, “Hush. Don’t panic, I have an idea. Take a heap of sand and throw it over your head, and it will turn into a high mountain that she won’t be able to climb.”

  So that’s what the fool did. He took a heap of sand and threw it over his head, and it turned into a high mountain. When Bobe Ha came to it, she couldn’t climb over. Back she ran to her house, grabbed a spade, and used it to shovel the mountain away. Then she raced on after them.

  Again they heard the rat-a-tat-tat of her iron foot. The fool cried to the horse, “Do you hear? Oh, woe is me. Oh, woe!”

  “Hush. Don’t panic,” said the horse, “I have an idea. Chop some wood into kindling, start a fire, and let the wood burn down to coals. Then take the coals and pour them into a hole outside the forest and put a thin wire across the hole. When Bobe Ha comes out of the forest and sees the coals, she’ll try to walk over the wire to get to the other side, but the wire will bend and she’ll fall onto the coals and burn to death.”

  So that’s what the fool did. He chopped some wood into kindling and built a fire that he allowed to burn down to hot coals. Then he poured the coals into a hole near the forest and set a wire across the hole. When Bobe Ha came out of the forest and saw the hot coals in the hole, she tried to cross over the wire. But it bent, and she fell on the burning coals and burned to death.

  Well, now that they were rid of Bobe Ha, the fool and the horse turned around and went back home. When they got there, and when the fool’s brothers saw how handsome his horse was and how brightly the golden feather shone, they liked him even less than before. But the horse, seeing the look of envy in their eyes, said to the fool, “You’ll have to leave home. Harness me up and let’s run off as fast as we can, because your life is in danger here.”

  So the fool harnessed the horse, and they ran away until they came to a large village surrounded by fields. The fool plowed and sowed the fields and became very rich. He sowed rye and ground it to flour, and the horse carried loaves of bread to the city, where the fool distributed them to the poor, and everyone was very happy.

  And he had the dear horse to thank for all that. Oh, was that a horse. What a horse that was! A horse in a million!

  . . .

  Storytelling was not only a pleasure for the father, but a must.… Teach through entertaining. Train children through story telling. “Thou must narrate” was a commandment of God.

  —From a turn-of-the-century Jewish folklore

  journal

  We turn now to a body of religious tales with ethical messages. Like wonder tales, they are told as fiction and often begin, “Once upon a time.”

  Some of these tales, called mayses mit a muser-haskl, “stories with a moral,” serve as guides to proper conduct, making explicit statements about acceptable and unacceptable behavior. While most wonder tales describe the adventures of young men and women and end with their marriage, most mayses mit a muser-haskl focus on married people with families and deal with aspects of moral life: generosity, piety, humility, hospitality, and kindness on the one hand, and stinginess, cruelty, meanspiritedness, immorality, arrogance, and pride on the other. In these tales, just as in the magical tales, the characters are generally all good or all bad, virtuous or wicked, humble or haughty, generous or selfish. The tales teach the Golden Rule and demonstrate that the virtuous will be rewarded and the wicked punished.

  Beyond general ethics, they teach the specific commandments on which Jewish piety is built. The 613 mitsves, commandments, that appear in the Bible, as well as the laws formulated through later rabbinic interpretation, make up the structure of belief in the Jewish community. A number of the tales illustrate such commandments: “honor the Sabbath” (Exodus 20:8, 23:12); “provide for the poor” (Deuteronomy 15:8); “keep your vows” (Deuteronomy 23:23); and “honor the aged” (Leviticus 19:32).

  The benevolent visitation of the prophet Elijah, who wanders the earth in various guises, brings help to the pious and the needy. When the helper is not Elijah, he is often a lamedvovnik, one of the thirty-six holy men in each generation for whose sake God allows the world to continue to exist. The lamedvovnik, a hidden saint, is usually a simple man like a water carrier or a poor teacher.

  The tellers of pious tales generally make sure to drive home their ethical point. Some end their tales with an aside to the listener: “Now, it was hakodesh borekh hu, the Holy One, blessed be He, who did this for the pious man because he had not violated the Sabbath.” Or, “Let those who have wealth refrain from taking things for granted, since the Almighty may retrieve it at any moment and give it to someone else, even as He gave the treasure to this poor family.” It seems clear from endings like these that some of the tales were originally part of a sermon.

  Of course, these sometimes ponderous “codas” were not appreciated by everyone. Sholem Aleichem wrote in his memoirs: “The children would have listened to all of [grandfather’s tales] with delight if he had not had the unpleasant habit of squeezing a moral, a muser haskl, out of each tale: ‘one had to be a piou
s Jew and have faith in God …’ The moral would be followed by a lecture and then he would start upbraiding us … for wanting only to fish night and day … and get into mischief.”1 The coda can also take the form of a popular proverb, such as ver es grobt a grub far yenem, falt in im aleyn arayn, “he who digs a pit for another, falls into it himself”—or it may be a quote of a Biblical or Talmudic passage. The moral can even appear at the beginning of the story, making it an “explanatory” tale that illustrates the truth of the statement.

  In terms of atmosphere the pious tales are among the most “Jewish” of the stories in this collection. Time is marked by the observance of the Sabbath and the yearly cycle of holidays—Succos and Passover, Purim and Yom Kippur. Religious rituals and customs are carefully observed: the men don talis and tfiln (prayer shawl and phylacteries) at prayers; the women bathe monthly in the mikve in accordance with the laws of sexual purity. The settings in most cases are the small villages and towns of Eastern Europe, peopled by the traditional small-town types: the melamed (kheyder-teacher), the parnes (community leader), the arendarke (innkeeper’s wife), the water-carrier, the merchant, the yeshuvnik (Jewish villager), the porets (the Polish squire), and the rebbe (the Hasidic spiritual leader).

  Of course, no religious community would be complete without its apikorsim, its skeptics and heretics, and from them come some sharply satiric and antipious tales, like “Holding On to One-Quarter of My World,” and “Water Wouldn’t Hurt,” in which the wonder-working rebbe describes a ritual for saving a man’s burning house, but adds urgently that water won’t hurt, either.

  If the pious tales served to regulate religious life from within, they also offer powerful testimony to the threat from without. A second group of tales in this section reflects the persecution to which Jews were subjected. The most insidious charge was the blood libel, by which Jews were accused of killing Christian children to get their blood for ritual purposes. From the twelfth century on, these charges were periodically leveled against Jews. Up to modern times they directly inspired anti-Semitic riots that devastated many communities. The most famous of the modern blood-libel trials was the Mendel Beilis case, which affected Jews throughout Eastern Europe from 1911 to 1917. Despite the fact that the twelve peasants on the jury declared Beilis not guilty, up to the eve of the 1917 revolution the Russian government was still trying to prove its case against Beilis and the Jewish people.

  In the tales of persecution that appear in this section, the villains include viceroys, courtiers, kings, and local priests. The helpers of the Jewish community include a lamedvovnik, a rabbi, and a good emperor—and always the anti-Semites receive their just desserts. One such story is “A Shocking Tale of a Viceroy,” told as a pseudo-historical account set “in Amsterdam, a long, long time ago.” Actually, although Jews in neighboring countries suffered from blood libels, there were apparently never any in Amsterdam. But there is a Yiddish proverb: af a mayse fregt men nisht keyn kashes, “Don’t ask questions about a story.” The “Shocking Tale of a Viceroy,” unhistoric though it is, no doubt served to comfort people in their real dealings with a hostile environment in Eastern Europe. And indeed there were lessons reiterated in the persecution tales: don’t despair, justice will prevail, innocence will be proved, and the libelers will be punished. Through these tales and through the didactic “stories with a moral,” the community and its traditions were strengthened.

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  The Tale of a Stingy Woman

  Once there was a village woman, an innkeeper’s wife, who was very rich. It never occurred to her that she would die one day, and so she never contributed anything to the community—no charity, no alms, nothing. The villagers, therefore, watched her like a hawk and waited for a chance to get even.

  Well, no one is immortal. Her husband—God keep us from the same—her husband died. Naturally he had to be buried. But she, stingy woman that she was, devised a scheme to save the cost of burying him.

  Luck was with her, because a butcher who used to come to her inn to buy cattle and fowl was there on the night her husband died. She took the butcher into another room, gave him food and strong drink, and got him good and drunk. Really very drunk.

  Then she put him to bed. A drunken man—does he have any idea of what’s happening to him? She dressed her husband’s corpse in the butcher’s clothes and dressed the butcher in white graveclothes. He, poor sodden fellow, slept through it all.

  When she was finished, she sent word to his wife that he had died at the inn. The members of the burial society arrived. Well, what was to be done? They could hardly demand money from the butcher’s impoverished wife. So they carried the corpse out and buried it. And that’s how the stingy woman got her husband buried without spending a penny.

  Some two or three days later, the butcher woke up and saw that he was dressed in white. Wondering what sort of trouble he had gotten into, he ran off to his wife. (Isn’t it the truth? When trouble comes, that’s what men do.)

  “Sheyne,” he called, “open the door. It’s me.”

  “Oh, woe, oh sorrow. What do you want of me? Go back to your resting place.”

  “Dear wife, what are you talking about? What’s happened to you?”

  She shrieked, “Go back! Go back to your resting place.”

  Seeing that she would not let him in, he ran off to the rabbi. “Rabbi, open up,” he said.

  “My son,” said the rabbi, “you have received all the proper rites due a pious Jew. Go back to your resting place.”

  The butcher, finding how bad things were and seeing that no one would let him get near, went to the cemetery. Where else could he go?

  Meanwhile, though he was in the graveyard, the butcher grew terribly hungry. He looked around (it was early in the morning) and saw local women passing by with baked goods in baskets. He leaped out at them. When they saw what they thought was a dead man, they dropped their baskets and ran off, leaving him with plenty to eat. Then a villager who was carrying eggs came along. As soon as he saw the butcher, he dropped his basket of eggs and ran off. So the butcher sat at his ease, dining happily on bakery goods and eggs. Just then someone carrying a little barrel of brandy drove up. Seeing what he thought was a corpse, he dropped the barrel and ran off. So now the butcher had loaves of bread, eggs, and brandy.

  But sooner or later, things turn bad. He couldn’t sit there forever. So he went once more to the rabbi’s house: “Rabbi, what’s going on here? I’m a living person. What does everyone have against me?”

  The rabbi asked, “Where have you been? Where do you come from?”

  The butcher explained that he had gone to the inn. That the woman had gotten him drunk. That he had slept for three days. That when he woke up, he found himself dressed in white. “When I came home to my wife, she cried, ‘Go back to your resting place.’ Then I came to you, and the same thing happened.”

  Finally everyone understood the innkeeper’s trick. There was an uproar in the town, and this time they decided to make her pay. The town trustees directed that her husband’s grave be dug up at her expense and that the corpse be carried back to her home. And so for once, she had to pay many times over for her stinginess.

  49

  The Wheat Poured In at the Dear

  Once upon a time a very charitable man had a daughter who was about to be married. So he went to the market to buy food for the wedding feast. Everyone knew him. People said, pointing, “There goes the charitable man, there goes the generous man.” Then someone said to him, “There’s an orphan in town who has nothing for her wedding.” So he bought a trousseau with the money he had intended to use for his own daughter, and he led the orphan to the wedding canopy. Having bought the orphan’s trousseau, he had no more than a gildn left. Since he was a dealer in wheat, he bought a gildn’s worth of wheat. He put it into a cupboard in his pantry and went off to the synagogue. When he came back, his wife said, “Look, there’s wheat pouring in at the door,” and indeed, his pantry was so full of wheat that it had
overflowed into the house. And that’s how he became a rich man.

  50

  In Heaven and Hell

  Borekh bar Zorekh and Berl bar Shmerl were business partners in St. Petersburg. They were as close as brothers, but they had to part because the business made it necessary for one of them to move to Moscow. So, taking heaven and earth as their witnesses, they swore an oath that whoever died first would return to tell his friend what it was like in the “other” world.

  It happened one day that Berl was in the street when he saw a man on horseback coming toward him, and the rider was Borekh. “Stop!” shouted Berl, “Stop! Stop!” but the horseman went by and disappeared. Though Berl jumped into a cab and pursued him, Borekh was not to be found.

  “Something’s not right,” thought Berl. And so he sent a telegram to Moscow asking for news. The reply informed him that Borekh had died, and that his funeral had taken place at precisely the moment when Berl saw the rider. And so Berl was confident that he would soon hear from the other world. But a year went by, then a second, a third. And still nothing.

  One day when Berl was on a boulevard in St. Petersburg, his dead friend Borekh came up, took him by the elbow, and started to lead him away. “God preserve me,” said Berl. “Tell me how it is with you, brother, and then let me go home.” But Borekh made no reply. He continued to lead Berl by the arm through fields and woods until at last they came to a desert. “There,” said Borekh, pointing, “you will find a cave. Walk ten yards down and then ten yards up and you’ll come to the Garden of Eden. That’s where you must ask for me.” Then he disappeared.

  Berl did as he had been told and entered the Garden of Eden, which turned out to be a tumbledown hut. Inside were a number of men reciting their prayers. It was raining, and water dripped into the room through the thatch. The place was dark, filthy, slippery. “Dear God in heaven,” thought Berl, “this is the Garden of Eden?”