The Wisdom of Grandmothers

M y local library website informs me that, since 2011, I have checked out 1,803 items. With material ranging from Far Side Gallery comic-strip collections to seasons of Psych to Anna Karenina, the list doesn’t lack variety, even if it has a bit of repetition. Top among the repeated favorites were Frances Wise Brown’s Granny’s Wonderful Chair and Adèle Geras’s My Grandmother’s Stories. I’ll write about the first title in due time, as it’s one of the most charming collections of fairytales, but for now, let’s enter the rich world a Jewish grandmother paints with her tales.

First published in 1990, My Grandmother’s Stories is a collection of Jewish folktales, as told by a grandmother to her granddaughter. I’ve never quite figured out the origin of Geras’s stories — they may be traditional folktales or Geras’s own creations — but this only adds to their charm. The book is a series of short stories, and the tales are coaxed from the grandmother by the sight of a pair of shoes or a lace shawl or simply by her granddaughter’s insistence. “Bavsi’s Feast,” “The Market of Miseries,” and “A Phantom at the Wedding” are just a few of the traditional (or so I’m told) tales recounted here.

There is a sense of mystery pervading the book. Nagging at the reader throughout is the fact that we never learn the granddaughter’s name. We uneducated readers may also join in the granddaughter’s bafflement over the necessity of drying one set of dishes with the blue-striped towel and the other set of dishes with the red-striped towel. Within the tales themselves are further mysteries, such as the exact location of Chelm, the town of fools, or precisely where the wise Rabbi Samuels actually lived. Grandmother herself says at one point — when responding to her granddaughter’s implication that she made up Chelm — “Me? I couldn’t make up such a place if I lived to be a hundred and twenty. Always, for as long as I can remember, there have been stories about the people of Chelm, and believe me, there’s nothing magic about them.”

Adèle Geras was born in Jerusalem in 1944, the daughter of British-Jewish parents. The nature of her father’s work meant that she lived in or visited many exotic places during her childhood, including Nigeria and Tanganyika. She studied modern languages at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, and, though she was a talented actress and singer, she decided to pursue a writing career. To date, she has written over 50 books, both for adults and children, and she has published award-winning poetry as well.

Rich descriptions fill the pages of My Grandmother’s Stories, drawing the reader into not just the tales told by the grandmother, but the grandmother’s own life. This grandmother may be the storyteller, but almost without the reader noticing, Geras has given us the beautiful daily story of this weaver of words. We read about her cooking, “If only you could taste the dishes that my grandmother cooked: cinnamon cakes, braided loaves of bread, meats stewed in velvety sauces, fish fried to the color of gold, soup with matzo dumplings, fragrant with nutmeg”; her method of Sabbath preparation, her knowledge of neighborhood goings-on, and even that she has nine children. The rhythm of her daily life is just as much a part of this book as the highlighted tales — it is the cloth of silk and the tales are flashing jewels which adorn it.

As a child, and even now, I was enchanted by both the stories of far-away places and the simple actions of the granddaughter, descriptions of which open each chapter. I, too, played with my grandmother’s button collection and “arranged them in groups according to size or color, or beauty, or spread them out in huge patterns all around me.” I also loved to water plants and watch as “the earth around each cactus was cracked and dry and almost the same color as the flowerpots, but as soon as I poured some water onto it from my jug, it became a wonderful dark, shiny brown, like melted chocolate, and all the little cracks would disappear.” These qualities were deftly brought to life in the 2003 edition, illustrated by Anita Lobel. Whimsical, vibrant illustrations fill the pages, and every feature is attended to. On a recent rereading, I even noticed a delightful detail I’d overlooked before: In her depiction of Frankel and the Czar in “The Faces of the Czar,” Lobel has given our peasant (Frankel) a robe embroidered with turnips, the very vegetable he’d been harvesting at the story’s outset.

Colorful, magical, and mysterious, this book and its tales are often on my mind. I’m by no means an expert on Jewish folklore, but I can confidently say that this book informed and deepened my understanding and love for the Jewish people’s stories and traditions. It is a link to times gone by, to stories that should be remembered, and to wisdom that should be cherished.