Black Thorn, White Rose by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

Author:Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, fairy tales, roger zelazny, neil gaiman, fairies
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2011-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

GRANNY RUMPLE, by Jane Yolen

Here we have another take on “Rumplestiltskin” by a writer who blends the literary and oral storytelling traditions into a thoroughly original rendition of the classic tale.

Jane Yolen is one of the most celebrated writers of modern fairy tales, with well over one hundred books in print including Tales of Wonder, Dreamweaver, The Hundredth Dove, The Girl Who Cried Flowers, and BriarRose (an extraordinary adult novel based on the Sleeping Beauty legend, set in Poland during World War II). She has also published Touch Magic, an excellent book of essays about fairy tales; she is the editor of the Pantheon Folktale Library’s Favorite Folk-tales from Around the World; and she edits the imprint “Jane Yolen Books”for Harcourt Brace & Co. Yolen lives in western Massachusetts and St. Andrews, Scotland.

Granny Rumple

She was known as Granny Rumple because her dress and face were masses of wrinkles, or at least that’s what my father’s father’s mother used to say. Of course, the Yolens being notorious liars, it might not have been so. It might simply have been a bad translation from the Yiddish. Or jealousy, Granny Rumple having been a great beauty in her day.

Like my great-grandmother, Granny Rumple was a moneylender, one of the few jobs a Jew could have in the Ukraine that brought them into daily contact with the goyim. She could have had one of the many traditional women’s roles—a matchmaker, perhaps, or an opshprekherin giving advice and remedies, or an herb vendor. But she was a moneylender because her husband had been one, and they had no children to take over his business. My great-grandmother, on the other hand, had learned her trade from her father and when he died and she was a widow with a single son to raise, she followed in her father’s footsteps. A sakh melokhes un veynik brokhes: Many trades and little profit. It was a good choice for both of them.

If Granny Rumple’s story sounds a bit like another you have heard, I am not surprised. My father’s father used to entertain customers at his wife’s inn with a rendition of Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish, passing it off as a story of his own invention. And what is folklore, after all, but the recounting of old tales? We Yolens have always borrowed from the best.

Great-grandmother’s story of Granny Rumple was always told in an odd mixture of English and Yiddish, but I am of the generation of Jew who never learned the old tongue. Our parents were ashamed of it, the language of the ghetto. They used it sparingly, for punchlines of off-color jokes or to commiserate with one another at funerals. So my telling of Granny Rumple’s odd history is necessarily my own. If I have left anything out, it is due neither to the censorship of commerce nor art, but the inability to get the whole thing straight from my aging relatives. As a Yolen ages, he or she remembers less and invents more. It is lucky none of us is an historian.

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