Folktales of the Jews, Volume 2: Tales from Eastern Europe

47. White Flowers, Red Flowers (IFA 18156)

47 White Flowers, Red Flowers T O L D B Y H I N D A S H E I N F E R B E R T O H A D A R A H S E L A In our town there was a physician who had a son. The son went abroad to study. During the summer, he came home for vacation—two months. There were two young women he was friendly with. They spent the two months together. When he left, the two women went to the train station with him. The boy had two bouquets of flowers, one white and one red. Because he didn’t know the language of flower colors, he gave the white flowers to one girl and the red flowers to the other. Then he went away. Red means love and white means friendship. But he gave the white bouquet to the young woman who loved him and the red bouquet to the one who really wasn’t interested in him. The girl who received the white flowers was very upset and very sad. She almost fell ill. Her parents sent her to America, to stay with family there. After several years there, she moved to EretzYisra’el. When the son came home for his next vacation, he found only the young woman he wasn’t really interested in. When he learned that the other woman was in America he went there to look for her, but didn’t find her. When she reached Eretz Yisra’el she opened a flower shop, because she had been so badly hurt by flowers. Once a man entered and asked for a bouquet of flowers. “What do you want them for?” she asked. “It doesn’t matter,” he replied “What color?” “That doesn’t matter.” “Yes it does. If you have time I’ll tell you a story.” So she told him this story—and he was her lost love! 342 COMMENTARY FOR TALE 47 (IFA 18156 ) Told by Hinda Sheinferber to Hadarah Sela in 1991 in Haifa. Cultural, Historical, and Literary Background This tale is grounded in modern Jewish life in Eastern Europe, America, and Israel. In the original Hebrew text, the narrator mentions the shtetl’s rabbi, but accords him no narrative function within the story, shifting the focus immediately to a father and his son, who is studying abroad. The tale itself hinges on a symbolic system that was part of western and central European popular culture and that apparently had diffused into lower- and middle-class Jewish society of Eastern Europe, where it was known during the twentieth century. This is not to say, however, that colors and flowers did not have symbolic value in traditional Jewish cultures. Biblical poetry suggests the romantic use of flowers. In Song of Songs (6:2) the beloved sings about her lover: My beloved has gone down to his garden, To the beds of spices, To browse in the gardens And to pick lilies. It is implied that he will present the flowers to his beloved. The Hebrew word of the flower in this verse is shoshan, which in modern Hebrew means rose; but quite likely in biblical Hebrew this word referred to the white lily (Lilium candidum ).1 Thus the modern and the biblical symbolic values of the colors are reversed : In biblical times, white flowers were for lovers, as they still were in some cultures in the nineteenth century, evidenced by the following nursery rhyme: Blue is true, Yellow’s jealous, Green’s forsaken, Red’s brazen, White is love, And black is death!2 Berlin and Kay3 studied color terms from a variety of languages. According to them, the distinction, perception, categorization, and naming of colors across a number of cultures indicate that there are eleven basic color terms: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. This influential study stimulated further research examining both the physical neurological basis of color distinctions and the linguistic representation and literary use of color terms.4 47 / White Flowers, Red Flowers  343  Modern Hebrew has all eleven basic color terms.5 In biblical Hebrew, only the first eight are in use, and of them only four—black, white, red (with its two hues, argaman, purple, and shani, crimson) and blue—acquire symbolic meanings in poetry and ritual. However, none of them is associated with flowers. Blue was the...