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8 Bashevis’s Interactions with the Mayse-bukh (Book of Tales) Astrid Starck-Adler Yiddish is our memory, the bridge between our yesterday and our today.1 Obvious in a number of Bashevis’s stories featuring demons and ghosts, dybbuks and werewolves, is the writer’s extensive deployment of motifs common in traditional Jewish folklore. Moreover, his supernatural narrators repeatedly refer to old Yiddish storybooks and legends—those mayse-bikhlekh in yiddish-taytsh, bought from itinerant book peddlers or found moldering in old attics—which underprop the tales these supernatural beings relate. This essay seeks to explore some of the similarities and, more significantly, some differences in folk motifs reworked in stories by Bashevis and to suggest reasons for what Bashevis is doing. The Mayse-bukh, from which Bashevis drew his materials for these tales, is the most celebrated of those collections of popular folklore that greatly influenced modern Yiddish fiction dealing with the marvelous, the supernatural, and the forces of the occult.2 Although Max Grünbaum had published some excerpts from it at the end of the nineteenth century (), the Mayse-bukh itself was being rediscovered in the s and s. Ludwig Strauss translated some of its tales into German (); Bertha Pappenheim and Moses Gaster translated them in their entirety into German () and English (), respectively.3 A variety of incentives evidently impelled Bashevis to draw from the tradition of Jewish narrative born with the mayse. Undoubtedly, one reason for his recourse to this material was the possibility it offered him of becoming a kind of demiurge, to create a fictional universe in which the familiar and the strange, the well-known and the bizarre, custom and superstition, terror and desire, could all be yoked together and given material representation as a mirror of both the individual soul and the collective human psyche.  More significantly, however, Bashevis’s treatment of old legends and old themes enabled him to treat time as a continuum, as he remarks himself: ‘‘In this world of old Jewishness I found a spiritual treasure trove . . . Time seemed to flow backwards . . . I lived Jewish history.’’4 His reconstruction of these old stories also becomes a way through which Bashevis can attempt to re-create the culture destroyed by the Shoah, a destruction which, for Bashevis, is embodied in the death of the Yiddish language: I like to write ghost stories and nothing fits a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive the ghosts. Ghosts love Yiddish, and as far as I know, they all speak it . . . I am sure that millions of Yiddish-speaking ghosts will rise from their graves one day and their first question will be, ‘‘Is there any new book in Yiddish to read?’’5 Integrating his own narratives with traditional folklore, Bashevis sets his tales in a period between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, for him the most crucially testing time in modern Jewish history. The sources from which Bashevis draws permit him to illuminate the present with the light of the past, among other ways by omitting certain elements from his sources and by accentuating others. Unlike the narrative models on which they are based, Bashevis’s reworkings do not feature as their chief characters morally edifying types chosen to present a harmonious view of a justly ordered universe; instead, his characters are strongly individualized so that the tales in which they feature become phenomenological and existentialist explorations of a world of moral uncertainty. Both Bashevis’s originality and his message reside in the narrative structure he reconstructs from old models; for him the traditional narrative operates as a function of memory, as a means of questioning the nature of identity, and as a focus of moral perspective. Although the collection of homiletic tales that makes up the Mayse-bukh was compiled by Yakov Pollack, also known as Yakov Buchhändler, the authors of its individual tales are unknown, so that the Mayse-bukh as a whole is virtually an anonymous work. Nevertheless, all its stories, printed in one volume for the first time in Basle in , are united by a singularly clear vision. The Mayse-bukh does not content itself with merely translating into Yiddish legends—aggadot—from the Talmud. Clearly discernible also are specific signifiers that identify the tales as products of the milieu of the Jews during the Middle Ages. Thus the Mayse-bukh  Bashevis’s Interactions with...

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