SEPTEMBER 23 • 2021 | 43

ARTS&LIFE
BOOK REVIEW

P

eople who like food (and we all 
do eat!), people who like folktales 
(don’t we all like a good story?) 
and people who like scholarship (a smaller 
group) will enjoy The Angel and the 
Cholent, the latest collection of folktales 
from the Israel Folktale Archives published 
by Wayne State University Press.
The Angel and the Cholent: Food 
Representations in the Israel Folktale 
Archives presents stories about food told 
by 29 storytellers representing 17 different 
locales or communities around the world. 
With each story, author Idit Pintel-
Ginsberg provides information about 
where and how the story was collected, 
and from whom. She also provides a 
scholarly discussion of the significance of 
each story in relation to Jewish traditions 
and in the context of the Aarne-Thompson 
index of motifs of world folktales. 
The Israel Folktale Archives collection 
in Haifa now holds more than 24,000 
narratives gathered from Jewish 
communities around the world, and from 
Israeli non-Jews, Muslim and Christian 
Arabs, Bedouins, Druze and Circassians. 
Pintel-Ginsburg groups the stories 
according to five themes (though she 
admits that many stories could belong to 
more than one classification): 
• Worldly Pleasures
• Food and Gender
• Food and Class
• Food and Kashrut
• Food and Sacred Time
If you think of folktales as simple, 
entertaining advocacy for the expected 
old-fashioned values, each ending with a 
neat moral, this anthology will surprise 
you. Some of these stories seem simple and 
sweet, some come across as light humor, 
but other stories come across as subversive, 
and some seem as complex as any work of 
famous authors. 

A few examples: A story that might 
seem sweet:
A king asks his guests at a banquet, 
“What is the best kind of music?” He 
finds their answers dissatisfying. When 
the waiters bring out the food, the serving 
vessels clang, and the guest begin to 
rejoice. The king observes, “This is the 
best music!” 
A story that might seem like a mere 
joke: “The Angel in Charge of the Shofar 
Blasts”:
God assigns an angel the task of 
overseeing the sounding of the shofar. The 
angel, though, has nothing to do during 
the rest of the year, which seems a waste of 
angelic talent, so the angel also makes sure 
that the cholent comes out good every 
Shabbat. Though other foods need human 
attention, cholent has been cooking away 
on the stove or in the oven, ignored since 
right before Shabbat, and still comes out 
delicious, because of the angel assigned 
to cholent. On Rosh Hashanah, the same 
angel makes sure that the shofar sounds 
correctly. But when Rosh Hashanah comes 
out on Shabbat, the poor angel has a 
conflict. He cannot do both. That explains 
why we do not blow the shofar when Rosh 
Hashanah falls on Shabbat. 
A subversive and complex story, “The 
Way to Become Rich”:
Discouraged by his years of poverty, 
a man finally listens to his wife and 
demands that the rebbe teach him to 
become rich. The rebbe tells him to go 
home, to earn a little money, to spend 
what he has on a sumptuous Shabbat meal, 
and then eat it all by himself, without 
sharing it with anyone.
He follows the advice. When his wife 
and sons beg for a bit of the food, he 
refuses, though it hurts him to do so. 
When his littlest child, his daughter, begs 
for food, he relents. He yells, “God, just 

give me 
clothes to wear and bread to eat. 
I don’t want to be rich. Do you hear me, 
Rebbe? I don’t want to be rich!” He then 
shares the meal with his family. 
What does this story, “The Way to 
Become Rich,” want us to think about 
the rebbe? How does it evaluate wealth? 
The story seems enigmatic, paradoxical, 
reminiscent of the celebrated stories of I.L. 
Peretz, Franz Kafka and S.Y. Agnon. 
The collection includes “If Only You 
Knew the Taste,” a version of a familiar 
tale in which a priest at a banquet offers 
the rabbi delicious, but not kosher, food, 
When the rabbi refuses, the priest says, 
“If only you knew the taste.” Later, the 
rabbi thanks the priest for inviting him 
to the beautiful meal, though he did not 
eat, and he asks the priest to convey the 
rabbi’s thanks to the priest’s wife. The 
priest replies that “his Torah forbids him 
to marry.” The rabbi replies, “If only you 
knew the taste.” 
In the scholarly notes on this story, 
oddly enough, Pintel-Ginsberg attributes 
the rabbi’s attempt to thank the priest’s 
wife to the rabbi’s “ignorance and naivete.” 
The rabbi, in her analysis, simply does not 
know that priests must remain celibate. 
Possibly she believes that the priest does 
not know that rabbis refrain from eating 
non-kosher food. The scholar, Pintel-
Ginsberg, overlooks the possibility that the 
priest intends to mock the rabbi, and the 
rabbi returns the mockery. 

The Angel and
 the Cholent

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

give me 

