Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kushelevsky, Rella

Titel

Folktales of the Jews

Ist Teil von

• Fabula, 2008, Vol.49 (1/2), p.128-132

Ort / Verlag

Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Erscheinungsjahr

2008

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In this project, Ben-Amos, with Dov Noy as a consulting editor, follow in the footsteps of Bialik and Ravnitzky (The Book of Legends), Micha Joseph Bin Gorion (Berdyczewski) (Mimekor Yisrael), and Louis Ginzberg (Legends of the Jews - also published, incidentally, by The Jewish Publication Society), all of whom set out to preserve Jewish treasures and make them available to a wide audience. The mediation of Ben- Amos' commentary reveals oral storytelling as a dynamic and creative process that expresses the dialectics of localization and general Jewish orientation, die diversity of Jewish themes among different ethnic groups in Israel, and a shared literary tradition. Especially interesting, regarding the diffusion of themes, is the integration of hagiographie legends about the Baal Shem ???, which are particularly Ashkenazi in origin, into Sephardic lore (tales nos. 16, 20, 22, 23, 25). (b) Adaptations of migratory legends as local legends are demonstrated in BenAmos' commentary to five tales (tales nos. 1, 4, 10-12). (c) Oral tradition is a creative process manifested in certain choices of details and the omissions of others. Examining Jewish folktales with more emphasis on inter-textual analysis, focusing on written and formulated texts, may not only reveal "imagined communities" as Ben-Amos puts it, or a "shared imagination" (xxviii) between dispersed Jewish ethnic groups, but also revive this shared imagination through an intimate and personal experience of reading - in an era in which the sweetness of oral storytelling has almost evaporated.