Becoming a Version: The Case of Walter Anderson's Studies of Yiddish Folk Narratives

Variants and versions are key concepts in narrative studies. This article reconsiders these concepts in light of Walter Anderson's pioneering studies of Yiddish folklore in the 1920s. Anderson collected Yiddish narratives in Minsk while he was a teacher in Jewish gymnasia, turning them into versions of international tale types in his publications. An analysis of these studies demonstrate how folk narratives and scholarly narratives are intertwined. By examining teacher'pupil relations and the political context of these Yiddish narratives, this article stresses the collaborative nature of version-making, substituting the question ofwhich stories are versions with the question of when a story becomes a version