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