Yiddish Folktales

by Beatrice Weinreich

  Once in the sleigh, Nicholas cautioned the old woman not to show his note to anyone but the bailiff. Then he bade her a warm farewell and promised that he would see her again after she and her son were reunited.

  In town the old woman, following Nicholas’s instructions, went directly to the bailiff’s house and gave him the paper. The bailiff read it and immediately invited her to sit down. Then he asked her to describe the man she called “this little boy.” She told him what the soldier looked like and how he had stumbled, frozen and snow-covered, into her inn. She told him too that she hadn’t wanted to bring the note, but that the soldier had forced her to.

  The bailiff observed that she had done well to follow the soldier’s advice, because her son would shortly be returned to her. Then he accompanied her to the sled, helped to settle her into it, and once again assured her that her son would be home very soon.

  And indeed, not long after that her dear son, wearing new woolen clothes, came home in a sleigh drawn by post-horses. Plenty of happy tears were shed by both of them. After they calmed down, her son related all the hardships he had endured from the time the khapers took him until he finally came home. And the old woman told him everything that had happened to her: how a poor soldier had sent her to the bailiff with a note ordering her son discharged. And how she had not wanted to go, and how the soldier had insisted.

  A little while later, the old woman and her son heard from the peasants in the village what had happened in the town where the khapers lived. Cossacks had surrounded the town at night, and early in the morning the authorities rounded up all the khapers and all the rich people of the town, put them in chains, and took them away—no one knew why or where.

  Later still, the governor himself came to the town and drafted every rich young man into the army. The old woman and her son were beginning to wonder who that soldier might have been, and what danger they might be in since she had, at first, refused to follow his instructions.

  Not long after these events, an expensive carriage bearing several officials pulled up before their inn. The mother and son watched in fear as the officials made their way inside, but one of them told the woman not to be frightened, since they had come only to take her and her son to visit a good friend. At their urging, mother and son took their places in the carriage, though they were afraid to move a muscle lest, God forbid, they inadvertently damage it.

  The carriage drew up before a palace, where beautifully dressed servants hastened to greet them. They were taken to baths and washed clean, then dressed in fine clothes. Later they were escorted to a second palace and shown the rooms in which they would sleep. The servants brought them food, as well as a certificate that the food was kosher.

  They stayed in the palace for a week, eating and drinking the best of everything. Then an official led them to an even finer palace and into a large, richly decorated hall. There they sat and waited, until a side door opened and Nicholas the First entered. Thinking that he had come to lead them to another hall, they rose. Nicholas drew nearer to the old woman and said with a smile, “Granny, take a good look at me. Maybe you’ll know who I am.” She looked him over for a while, then shook her head. So Nicholas removed his uniform and stood before her in the ragged overcoat that he had worn when he first stumbled to her inn. The old woman had just time to cry, “Oh, my little boy!” before she fainted.

  When she opened her eyes, she found herself lying in a royal bed. Beside it stood her son and a physician. She whispered “My little boy,” over and over again. “My little boy.”

  A few days later when she had recovered, Nicholas sent for her once more and thanked her for her herring and chicory with such generous gifts that her son was later considered one of the wealthiest men in Russia.

  “And that’s how it is in the world,” the gray old storyteller used to say, shaking his head. “It all depends on fate. For some people Nicholas’s excursions brought disaster, for others great happiness.”

  * Under the “cantonist laws,” boys were forced to serve in the Russian army for twenty-five years. Jewish communities in Russia had special officers, dubbed khapers (snatchers), for seizing male children—ages 12 to 25, and in exceptional cases as young as 8 or 10—who were incarcerated in a communal building and handed over to the military authorities to fill the cantonist quota. Russian authorities hoped also to alienate Jewish children from their own people and religion by means of this long army service

  143

  Czar Nicholas Decrees the Burning of the Talmud

  Czar Nicholas issued an edict to have the whole of the Talmud burned. The chief rabbi then disguised himself as the czar and, preceding the czar to the chancellery, he tore up and burned the papers on which the edict was printed. When the czar came to the chancellery to sign his decree, he saw that all the copies had been destroyed. “Who did this?” he asked. “You yourself,” came the reply. “You were here earlier, and that’s when you did it.”

  “Ah,” said the czar, “when Elijah the Prophet meddles in the matter, there’s nothing I can do.”

  And the decree was cancelled.

  144

  Emperor Franz Josef and the Innkeeper’s Infant

  Emperor Franz Josef, disguised as a beggar, came once to Mieditsov, a village near Bitershtayn. There he spent the night at an inn run by a Jew.

  The innkeeper had an infant who was lying in its cradle. During the night the baby cried a great deal. The emperor could not endure the poor child’s crying, so he spent the entire night rocking the cradle. In the morning as he was leaving, he turned to the innkeeper and said, “It was the emperor who rocked your cradle.” Then he gave the man a gift and went on his way.

  145

  The Poor Man and Rothschild

  There was a poor beggar who went to ask Rothschild for alms. He was met at the door by someone who asked what he wanted. “I have to see the baron,” he replied.

  He was led into a room where, shortly, Rothschild’s secretary came in and said, “How can I help you?”

  The beggar replied, “I have an important business matter to conduct with the baron.” Well, the long and the short of it was that in spite of the secretary’s insistence that he could help him, the beggar refused to talk with anyone but the baron. Finally there was no help for it; the baron came in and asked the man what he wanted.

  “Nothing, really,” said the man. “I simply wanted to ask you for alms.”

  “What? Is it for alms that you insisted on seeing me personally? Why couldn’t you have asked my secretary?”

  “Dear baron,” said the man, “maybe you’re the world’s greatest financier, but don’t try to give me advice on how to beg.”

  146

  Rothschild’s Shoes

  “What kind of shoes does Rothschild wear?”

  “Probably golden shoes.”

  “Then what does he do when it rains?”

  “He puts on galoshes.”

  “Then nobody can see the golden shoes.”

  “So he makes holes in the galoshes.”

  “But then the shoes get wet.”

  “So he stuffs the holes with straw.”

  147

  Rothschild’s End

  The Vienna Rothschild went one day into his strong room, but he forgot to take his keys. The minute he walked in, the door slammed shut so he could not open it. Since the room had no window, there was no way he could get out. He shouted and shouted, but nobody heard him. A few days later when people began to wonder where he was, they organized a search. Eventually his servants opened the strong room and found the Baron Rothschild lying dead on the floor. He had starved to death.

  Reb Ayzik, a forest overseer, loved to carve in his spare time. And while he carved ritual spice boxes with little towers and doors, and tobacco boxes and toys for us children, he would tell us tales of little elves, of shretelekh.

  —Memoir from Kolomey, Poland, the early part of

  this century

  And in kheyder when the melamed w
as away in shul for afternoon and evening prayers, we would sit in darkness, huddle near the oven for warmth, and tell scary stories about the spirits who throng the shul after midnight, and the tricks they play on anyone who has to sleep there—so that a beggar would rather sleep on the floor of the humblest house than enjoy the honor of a bench in shul. We would tell stories about sheydim, dibbuks, Lilith.

  —Memoir from interbellum Eastern Europe

  Medieval fears and superstitious beliefs survived well into twentieth-century Europe, particularly among tradition-bound villagers and small-town dwellers. Demons, dibbuks, and golems were as vivid a part of village life as the miracles and wonders that were an integral part of received religion. For examples of how these rogue traditions affected Yiddish folklore, we turn now to East European mesoyres, local legends—called “memorats” by folklorists.

  The memorat is an account of an extraordinary event purported to have actually occurred in a specific place at a specific time. The Yiddish memorat may tell of an encounter with supernatural creatures—with a malignant shed, demon, or with a mischievous but kind shretele, an elflike household familiar. It may also explain local lore: how a synagogue came to be built in a certain location, or how it was miraculously saved during a fire; the history of a curious grave marker, and the mystery within a cave.

  The range of supernatural creatures includes the shretele, the lantekh, and the kapelyushnikl. The kindly shretele may well have been brought along by Jews from Alsace and southern Germany, where an elf with the same name has been popular among non-Jews for centuries, and may also bear some relation to the skrzat, the house elf, which made its appearance in Polish folklore around 1500. The naughty bridge hobgoblin, lantekh, appears to be none other than the French lutin, who was brought to Eastern Europe by Jews in the course of their migration. The teasing kapelyushnikl, who likes to pester horses, on the other hand, is apparently native to Slavic soil and may be an original East European Jewish creation. In Polish, kapelyushnikl means “hat maker,” and indeed the little creatures wear hats.

  Lilith, the Assyrian lilitu, was a more formidable adversary. Originally a wind spirit, in Talmudic times Lilith became an evil and erotic night spirit, while in medieval and modern Jewish folklore she was seen as a demoness who attacked newborn children and their mothers.

  Other supernatural interventions described in memorats challenge the very limits of the human condition. They may signal a soul returning after death, or one entering the body of a living person. In some of the tales the transmigrated soul is called a gilgl—though a gilgl can also be an animal’s soul. The term dibbuk seems to be restricted to the restless spirit of a deceased person. Supernatural tales may also involve a golem, a man-made creature of enormous physical strength, like the one said to have been created in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish community of Prague. It was believed that a holy man, possessed of the power of the Holy Name, could exorcise a transmigrated soul, could cast a demon out into uninhabitable places, could create a golem and turn it back into dust again. Even Satan could be foiled by absolute devotion and intense prayer.

  Memorats are nearly always simple in structure, usually containing a single narrative motif. They are often told as eyewitness accounts or contain a personal testimonial: “I heard this myself from an old man who lived there.” Some of them plunge right in: “One night a sick man was walking near the synagogue.” Occasionally the teller will say, “This happened in the old days,” with the implication that such things no longer happen.

  Needless to say, there were many who sneered at these spooky local legends. After all, they were beyond proof, and founded on medieval superstitions. In “A Balshem Drives Out a Dibbuk” a rationalist has a good laugh with a pseudo-holy man. The powerful final story in this section, “The Last Dibbuk,” recreates a dramatic and decisive confrontation between those who believed in spirits and those who did not.

  148

  The Shoemaker and the Shretelekh

  Some shretelekh, small elflike creatures, slipped into the home of a shoemaker and made themselves cozy there. At the time, the shoemaker was so poor that he had only enough leather to make a single pair of shoes. He cut the leather to the pattern and laid it on his worktable. Then, in confidence that the Lord would come to his aid somehow, he went to sleep. When he rose the next morning, imagine his astonishment at finding a completed pair of shoes! He examined the workmanship and saw that it was of the highest quality. He sold the shoes for enough money to buy leather for two more pairs. And the next morning there were two finished pairs of shoes on the table. When he sold them, he had enough money for four pairs. After he had cut out the leather this time, he and his wife decided that they would hide to discover who was making the shoes. And in the middle of the night they saw four tiny, handsome, raggedly dressed little men who sat down and began, each of them, to make a pair of shoes. The shoemaker was amazed at their speed. When they were finished, they put the shoes on the table and ran away. In the morning the shoemaker’s wife said, “Those little people have made us rich, and we must thank them. See how ragged they are; they must be cold. So let’s make them some clothes.”

  When the couple had finished sewing four tiny suits of clothes, they hid once again to see what the little people would do. The shretelekh were astonished to find clothes instead of leather waiting for them. One of the little men, when he had put on a suit, began to clap his hands, and he sang,

  “Hey, don’t we look glorious.

  No more shoemaking for us!”

  With that all four began to sing. Then, dancing on the table and chairs, they danced their way out of the house and into the street and were never seen again.

  But the shoemaker and his wife continued to prosper right down to the last day of their lives.

  149

  The Synagogue, the Church, and the Town Hall

  For a long while the Jews of Alik had been begging their nobleman to build them a synagogue, and the Christians had been pleading for a church. He, for his part, wanted to build a town hall.

  Well, a day came when the nobleman was taken so ill that it seemed no one could cure him. So he made a vow to build a large and beautiful church. But he stayed as sick as ever; indeed, he grew weaker by the day. When he felt himself at his last gasp, he made a vow to build a large and beautiful synagogue. Lo and behold, he felt himself growing better at once.

  After he was fully recovered, he began to think about which of his vows to keep first. If he built the church first, the Jews would take offense. If he built the synagogue first, he would provoke the Christians. If he followed his own wishes and built the town hall, the Jews and the Christians would both be angry. So he decided to have all three structures built simultaneously and to make them identical.

  He hired a famous foreign architect and instructed him to erect the three buildings at exactly the same time, stone for stone. The architect drove three posts into the ground to indicate where the church, the synagogue, and the town hall were to be built. Then he stretched a rope from post to post and, balancing himself on it, went from one point to the other, laying brick after brick in sequence. As the buildings rose, he tied the rope higher and higher up the posts. And that was how he was able to build the three structures simultaneously.

  They were the most beautiful buildings in the world, so beautiful that the nobleman, worried lest the architect construct others as wonderful somewhere else, had the posts cut down just as all three were finished. As a result the architect fell from the ropes and died.

  When I visited Alik, I came upon an old church with remarkable architecture, but I did not see either a synagogue or a town hall. I was told that they had burned down some while ago.

  150

  The Transmigrating Soul

  My grandfather bought the forest in Paluzh and ordered the peasants to cut down some trees. One day a group of children went to the forest to gather mushrooms. When they finished they ran off, having forgotten about one litt
le girl so that they left her behind. The girl sat down to rest on the stump of a tree—and at that moment she began to cough, because a gilgl had entered into her.

  At last she got home, and her family noticed that she coughed with the sound of a dog barking. When she was silent, the gilgl spoke; and when the gilgl spoke, she developed a goiter. The gilgl used to call the girl’s mother “Mother,” and they had to give him whatever he wanted. One day when he wanted milk, he said, “Mother, unless you give me milk, I’ll strangle your daughter. So bring me milk.” Another time when the girl’s mother was baking khale, the braided Sabbath bread, he said, “Mother, make khale for me, too. I want to eat some.”

  One of my uncles told him one day, “You’ve got an awfully big mouth. You want everything.” This made the gilgl cry. Whenever they ordered him to leave the girl, he would say, “If you want me to leave, you’ll have to bring ten rabbis. But if you bring the Rabbi of Oshmen, one will be enough.”

  My grandfather disguised himself and said, “I’m the Oshmen Rabbi, and I order you to leave this girl.”

  The gilgl replied, “Some rabbi you are! You’re the one who bought the forest and sent a couple of huge peasants with axes into it to chop down trees. And they cut down the one I lived in so that I had to enter the girl.”