I

n the earliest days of the modern state of 
Israel, Dov Noy and his students went into 
the field and recorded folktales recounted 
by local storytellers. Noy founded the Israel 
Folktale Archives in 1955 in Haifa; the collec-
tion now contains more than 24,000 narratives 
in various languages, as told by storytellers of 
Jewish communities around the world, and of 
Israeli non-Jews, Muslim and Christian Arabs, 
Bedouins, Druze and Circassians. 
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 
Israel Folktales Archives, scholars Haya Bar-
Itzhak and Idit Pintel-Ginsberg constructed 
a charming book by asking leading schol-
ars to pick one favorite story and provide a 
short essay analyzing the story. Wayne State 
University has just published this volume in 
English translation. 
The book contains 53 stories representing 
26 different ethnic communities, as told by 19 
women and 33 men. The analytic essays pro-
vide sometimes surprising insights into those 
stories, reflecting the various academic per-
spectives of the scholarly writers. 
Here’
s an example. Professor Esther Schely-
Newman of Hebrew University did her field-
work in Lod, Israel, where she heard Haya 
(Hadjadi) Mazouz, a Jewish woman originally 
from Tunisia, tell “The Mother’
s Gift is Better 
than the Father’
s Gift”: 
The story is about a king who does not want 
to marry after his wife dies because he fears a 
stepmother would mistreat his beloved daughter. 
The people beg him to marry, and he eventually 
does, but he makes his new wife promise to let 
his daughter live idly in luxury. The stepmother 
promises, but when the king’
s not there, she 
makes the daughter dust the furniture, wash 
the floor, learn to sew and to embroider. They 
keep her work secret from the king. Eventually, 
the daughter marries, and moves away with her 

husband. The husband loses his job. Though 
the king sends presents every few months, the 
young couple need more, so the king’
s daughter 
supports her family as a tailor. 
She thanks her father for his gifts but sends 
messages: “Mother’
s gift is better than father’
s 
gift” and “ancestor’
s fortune will end; hands’
 
profession remains.” 
In 2005, 20 years after first hearing this story, 
Schely-Newman again visits Mazouz, and again 
hears the story, told with only “very small dif-
ferences.” The story has not changed, but the 
scholar has. She now appreciates this as a wom-
en’
s story of patriarchal society. 
“While at first the tales seem to conform 
to the patriarchal order, a subsequent reading 
permits a different interpretation,” she says. 
“In traditional patriarchal societies, men and 
women live in separate domains. Heroines in 
these stories get rescued by female initiative. In 
these societies, women protect and afford secu-
rity for each other.” 
Popular Western folk tales, by contrast, 
reward “passive heroines, pretty, good-natured 
and submissive,” she says. “More daring female 
characters suffer dangers, until, usually through 
male intervention, they can get on the proper 
path towards marriage.” 
The scholarly essays also connect these sto-
ries to classical Jewish texts and to the Aarne-
Thompson index of motifs of world folktales. 

Let’s Read!
Power of a Tale: Stories from 
the Israel Folktale Archives

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

WSU Press 
Opens a Library 
of Judaica on 
the Internet

Since its founding in 1941, Wayne 
State University Press has pub-
lished an extensive list of books 
of Judaica. Many of these works 
have gone out of print over the 
decades though the general public 
and scholars remain interested. 
Now, the Press has announced 
that 59 books of Jewish inter-
est have become available at 
WayneOpen.org, “the online plat-
form for open access digital con-
tent made available from Wayne 
State University Press in part-
nership with the Wayne State 
University Library System.”
Anyone with access to the 
internet can download digital 
copies of these out-of-print books. 
 
Among them: 
• Jewish Poland by Haya Bar-
Itzhak, a study of the legends of 
how Jews first came to Poland, 
where Jewish life flourished for a 
thousand years. 
• For our Soul by Teshome 
Wagaw, describing the ongoing 
process of adjustment and accul-
turation experienced by Jews 
from Ethiopia in Israel. 
• From Sofia to Jaffa by Guy 
Haskell, about the relocation of 
Bulgaria’
s Jews to Israel. 
The project was made possible 
through a $94,000 grant award-
ed to the Press in 2016 from a 
joint project between the Andrew 
W. Mellon Foundation and 
the National Endowment for the 
Humanities. 

30 | JANUARY 23 • 2020 

Jews in the D

