Episode 246: Feminism, Judaism, and Fairy Tales (with Veronica Schanoes)
/We’re joined by author and professor Veronica Schanoes, who leads us through a forest of the feminism of Alice in Wonderland, taking moralizing out of the fairy tales, and tackling forgiveness.
Stories Based on Jewish Folklore and Magic, on Electric Literature.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of bodily harm, antisemitism, gun violence, murder, arrest/imprisonment, depression, implied pedophilia, emotional manipulation, torture, racism, slavery, child endangerment, kidnapping, dismemberment, and religious persecution.
Guest
Veronica Schanoes is an American author of fantasy stories and an associate professor in the department of English at Queens College, CUNY. Her novella Burning Girls was nominated for the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award and won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella in 2013. She lives in New York City. Burning Girls and Other Stories is her debut collection.
Housekeeping
- Recommendation: This week, Amanda recommends Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be by Nichole Perkins.
- Books: Check out our previous book recommendations, guests’ books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books
- Call to Action: Check out Join the Party: A collaborative storytelling and roleplaying podcast, powered by the rules of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a party, and you’re invited! Search for Join the Party in your podcast app, or go to jointhepartypod.com.
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Transcript
AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits podcast. A boozy dive into mythology, legends and folklore. Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.
JULIA: And I'm Julia.
AMANDA: And this is Episode 246: A Very Exciting and Fantastic Episode with Dr. Veronica Schanoes.
JULIA: I love talking about all things, like, psychoanalyzing, like, stories that we've talked about in the past. And new stories that are new to us. So, this was a great conversation to have.
AMANDA: It was so fantastic, so exciting to see a Jewish perspective on fairy tales as well. And Dr. Schanoes is, like, one of those professors where every class that she describes teaching, I'm like, “I want to take that class.”
JULIA: Can we take that class?
AMANDA: I know. I also bought so many books that she recommended to us during this interview. So, I think you guys are really going to enjoy it. And Julia, do you know what else I really enjoy?
JULIA: Is it our new patrons who I think also would enjoy these classes that we talked about?
AMANDA: It is. Thank you so much to patrons, Julia,-
JULIA: Oooh!
AMANDA: Window Ells, Adrian and Sarah. We so appreciate you carving out some of your human dollars every month to support a podcast that you really enjoy. We enjoy you, we do so as our job because of the supportive patrons like you. And our supporting-producer level patrons: Uhleeseeuh, Allison, Bryan, Debra, Hannah, Jack Marie, Jane, Jessica Stewart, Justin, Keegan, Kneazlekins, Megan Linger, Megan Moon, Phil Fresh, Captain Jonathan MAL-uh-kye Cosmos, Sarah, Scott, and Zazi. And of course Julia, those legend-level patrons don't sleep on it. Audra, Clara, Drew, Jaybaybay, Ki, Lada, Lexus, Morgan, Morgan H., Mother of Vikings, Necroroyalty, & Bea Me Up Scotty.
JULIA: I think of our patrons as, like, a forest where every patron is a tree that has a creepy face carved into it, but it's very cool and very mysterious. That's what I think of every time we read off those patron names.
AMANDA: Oh, I love that so much. My grandma has, like, a face outside the tree outside her window. Like, of her, little like, den study area. Like, we bought it and my uncle, like, put it up there. It's not like, you know, just natural. But every time I see it, I'm just like, I'm so glad I have, like, a grandma who loves all things creepy cool. It just really set me up for a successful life of also enjoying the creepy cool.
JULIA: Hell yeah, hell yeah, Jamie.
AMANDA: Well, Julia, I have to thank you so much for taking care of everything last week while I was on vacation.
JULIA: Oh, hey. You're welcome.
AMANDA: It was strange and nice to, to not work for, like, a week and change. Hey, we should get more often.
JULIA: We should. You're right. But Amanda, what were you reading, enjoying, listening to while you were on vacation? I want to know.
AMANDA: I had a fantastic train ride, and you know how much I love trains.
JULIA: You do.
AMANDA: Not just because of industry, but also because it is one of the best places to read. And when I'm having trouble sleeping at night, I often just picture my most recent train journey. And this time, I spent with the new memoir by Multitude partner show's host, Nicole Perkins called Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be, and this is a fantastic book. Nicole, if you know her from any of her podcasts, including This is Good For You, which is Multitude partner show or her previous podcast Thirst Aid Kit, which is, like, hilarious and one of the foundational texts if I was teaching a class about, like, modern podcasting, that will be one of them. You know that her voice is so distinctive and her as a writer is just truly transformative. And there is a great audio book that she read. So, if you're an audiobook person, definitely check that out. But also, reading this collection of essays. There's one about Prince, there are so many just about growing up and about womanhood. About being Nicole in the U.S. right now and Oh, she's just so good. She's such a good writer. I love the book. It's beautiful and, couldn't recommend it higher.
JULIA: Yeah, that title is also fantastic. It's just very evocative about what like, it's all about. So, I really, I love it.
AMANDA: It is, I know. Nicole, it's a, it's a line from a print song. So, Nicole can't take credit for the title itself but she did select an excellent lyric title. So, I think that's as hard as coming up with a new title yourself.
JULIA: That's true. That's true. And finally, Amanda, I want to talk about one of our shows here on Multitude. And I was thinking about how I wanted to pitch this because I was like, "How do I get our listeners to really, really want to listen to Join the Party?" And besides, the fact that you and I are on the show, which is fantastic-
AMANDA: We are.
JULIA: -in it of itself. I know that, like, a lot of our listeners are really into, like, one either like mythology and mythical creatures and Gods and stuff like that. And obviously, if you're into those things, don't you kind of want to try like a tabletop RPG, that's like, all about those things and learn how to play those things. Like, Join the Party will teach you how to play Dungeons and Dragons and then you can be a Forge God who worships Hephaestus. you know? That would be really cool.
AMANDA: Exactly, and some of, like, the coolest and clearest content right now on the internet is coming out of the tabletop RPG space. And if it's something that nobody around you ever was into, it can be very intimidating to be like, "Hey. What is this thing? Like, can I listen to or watch shows that are based on tabletop RPGs without having played them myself?" The answer is, "Yeah, completely". You just need somebody to be like, "Hey, this is how this works" and listening to the beginner episodes or the intro to D&D episode of Join the Party is a fantastic way to get enough knowledge. You can be like, "Oh. Okay, great. Why are you really nice? Now I understand. Let me go forth and enjoy the journey."
JULIA: And meanwhile, if you're more of a urban legends person, you'd like those modern urban legends stuff.
AMANDA: Ooh.
JULIA: Then you would absolutely love our second campaign in Join the Party, which is all about, like, we've created our own city with its own urban legends with superheroes, with like, creepy things happening in the swamps with mushrooms.
AMANDA: Cryptids.
JULIA: Cryptids. There is literally a lake monster. You guys are going to love it. So, check it out, it's Join the Party. It's a party. You're invited. Search for Join the Party in your podcast app or go to jointhepartypod.com and listen to it. It's really good.
AMANDA: Could not agree more. So, everybody, without further ado, please enjoy Spirits Podcast Episode 246: Our Fantastic Interview with Dr. Veronica Schanoes.
AMANDA: We're so excited to have a professor here and writer of many kinds, whose work just makes me, like I, with each word that you say about the work that you do, I just sit up straighter and straighter, so Veronica Schanoes, welcome to the show. Please let our listeners know who you are and what you work on.
VERONICA: Thank you so much for having me, I'm just delighted to be here. As a writer, I write fantasy, speculative fiction, usually inspired by if not based on fairy tales. As a professor and scholar, I study fairy tales and their contemporary revisions and reworking. So, everything comes together quite nicely for me. And I'm just, I, I'm fascinated by folklore, feminism, the intersection of the two. So, I'm very excited to be here.
AMANDA: Us too.
JULIA: We're excited to have you on. Yeah, this is gonna be great. To start with, you have a new book coming out. The Anthology of Short Stories, correct?
VERONICA: It's my first collection.
JULIA: Congratulations.
VERONICA: Thank you. It's called Burning Girls and Other Stories and I'm very excited about it. It's got two never-before-published stories. So, you know, even if you've read all my stuff, and who hasn't? There's new stuff there.
JULIA: So, the titular Burning Girls story was originally a novella that won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella in 2013. Congrats on that. So what was the inspiration for kind of, expanding this story and, like, all of your stories into the anthology, and as a, as a step further there to kind of entice our listeners, what would you say is kind of the through line of the collection?
VERONICA: Well, I think I'd always wanted to have a collection. I've always thought of myself as a short story writer. Angela Carter, a blessed memory, wrote a fabulous essay once where she talked about enjoying writing tales, because short tales because of the, sort of, literary pyrotechnics, you could do in short-form that would have been, that would be much harder to maintain over a long-form. And so, being a short story writer myself, I've always wanted to be able to put my stuff together and, sort of, see those through lines that you were just, you know, that you were just mentioning. Because I keep coming, I find myself I keep coming back to the same, what's the word, concerns? tropes? I keep coming back to and they evolve over time, but I keep coming back to fairy tales, of course. But within that, the intersections between Jewishness and fairytales, intersections between women and fairytales, intersections between punk rock and fairy tales, and Alice on Wonderland as well, which I never know whether I'm going to classify as a fairy tale or not, because it's clearly not a folktale. And yet, at the same time, it's entered into our collective consciousness in kind of the same way. We all know what Alice looks like, you know? I can, sort of, trace my interest in those, in those threads throughout the collection. Certain times popping up here in one way, and then taking center stage in another story. The other thing I do is a lot of historical fantasy, which I started out as a writer thinking, "I would never do historical fantasy, it's way too hard. All that research, I do enough research as a scholar, I can't take on more research". And then, I guess halfway through my career, such as it is, as such as it is now I felt like, "But I have this really good idea". And that really good idea was for Burning Girls, my thought, "Somebody should do a version of Rumplestiltskin's Set in the sweatshops in turn of the century New York City". And I thought about that for a while and I was like, "I guess I should do that?"
AMANDA: I am the someone.
VERONICA: Someone. Maybe me. I thought it wouldn't involve that much research because it involved a lot of topics I knew about through my own personal interest already. New York City, history, Jewish history, fairy tales, but it ended up involving, gosh, maybe eight years of research? I had the idea and it took me seven or eight years to write it and get it out there into the world. As it turned out, there was a lot I didn't know about Jewish magic practice that I needed to learn and all kinds of other interesting things. So, I guess those are, those are, yeah, some of the themes that you'll find in the collection.
AMANDA: I would love to hear what surprised you about Jewish magic practice. What was new to you in your research.
VERONICA: I mean, everything was new to me, it was not an area I'd previously explored. I've long been interested in fantasy and magic and I've been interested in New York City, Jewish history, but I'd never sort of brought those hands together. It had never occurred to me that there was a place for Jewishness in fairy tales and stories of magic. It just was not part of the general ethos of fantasy fiction or fairy tales when I was growing up, which isn't to say it wasn't out there in any form. I'm sure it was and I just didn't find it, but I was not aware of it and so it was a very welcome surprise to me when I found this gigantic tome published in 1939. Like really, a significant time to be publishing this history of Jewish magic and superstition by Trachtenberg whose first name I always forget. I think it's Joshua, but I could be wrong and I read the whole thing. And as it turned out, I only needed one or two chapters but it was really interesting. So, I read the whole thing and I found out that going back to the ancient world up through 1939, this long history in many different branches, right? Because there's sort of local Shtetl Magic but there's also Quartz Sorcerer Magic. Interestingly, in one of the very early versions of Snow White, which Hilda, I think 18th century German, but I could be mistaken. I'd have to check Heidi and Heinrich's marvelous collection of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty stories to be absolutely positive. The Queen herself is not a sorceress, but she turns to her Court Magician who is Jew, who is a Jew. And he's the one who concox the poisoned apple. He is redeemed in the end because in fact, he decides this is a bad thing to be doing. Even though the Queen has punished me for failing by doing things like clipping his ears and pulling out his beard, I'm not going to poison this apple, it's just going to be a sleeping potion. And so, he's redeemed in the last line of the story actually about how he is, his family has become a tall tree in the some poetic reference to, to among Jews, right? Some poetic reference to among the Jewish people. So, he ends happily but it's a sort of interesting, ambiguous role. And that idea of the, the Jew as sort of sorcerer or magician, right? Is I think, once I realized that that was a theme, it ended up making a lot of sense in terms of how we think of sorcerers, right? With like, long flowing beards and beaky noses and they can read arcane symbols and ancient languages that other people can't read. I was, like, "Oh, yeah. That's where that comes from". Even down to, like, the strange pointy-hat, right? The, which I, I think and I don't know, but I would not be surprised if it connected to the Judenhut. The hats that medieval Jews had to wear in I think, various areas of Europe to identify themselves as Jewish, which were also pointed which i thought was interesting. I think lots of things are interesting, but that especially.
JULIA: It absolutely is interesting. Let's, let's talk a little bit more about Jewish representation in English language fairytale traditions, because I know that is a area that you've researched heavily. A lot of your creative work, you talk about the re-telling of fairy tales, often with Jewish protagonists, including a story in Burning Girls and other stories that features anarchist and feminist, Emma Goldman and our favorite witch on the show, Baba Yaga. So, these are, like, really specific choices for figures to highlight. What was kind of the choice behind featuring them both?
VERONICA: Emma Goldman has long been a heroine of mine. I mean, I just, in some ways, I could not ask for a better heroine. She is a feminist [12:45]. I mean, I know technically, there was the word but she was in some ways, I think, way ahead of her time and her conception of what feminism was, in terms of sexuality, in terms of power dynamics, in terms of queer acceptance. She was obviously a devoted anarchist, right? Absolutely devoted to the cause and leftist and she never compromised in ways that would, sort of, lead one to find her political ideas harmful.
AMANDA: Mmh.
VERONICA: Right? And I'm thinking specifically, if that story, in which she comes face-to-face with the way the Bolsheviks portrayed the ideals of the Russian Revolution, right? And the harm that they did, the suffering that ensued, which of course, is not to say that the revolution was not warranted, given the suffering that was ongoing underneath the Czars and perhaps it was simply because Goldman was never in a position of power.
AMANDA: Right.
VERONICA: And so, her ideals were never compromised that way. Whatever the reason was, because of that, I think she remains a figure that is very powerful in the imagination. She was considered the most dangerous woman in America. All she did was talk, you know, she, she conspired with Alexander Berkman to shoot Frick, the steel magnate. Berkman was the one who pulled the trigger. She absolutely aided him and was supported the endeavor and you know what? Like, steel magnates, mining owners, they do a lot of harm. I, I just I don't think it was, I don't think it was necessarily an unwarranted action.
AMANDA: I feel like the only time women are credited for their supporting roles in men's actions is when they are crimes. And not when they are any, any kind of accomplishments in other senses.
VERONICA: Good point. Excellent point. She was a nurse, right? She did do the work of hands on helping people. It was actually, as a visiting nurse that she developed her ideas on birth control and the necessity of birth control.
JULIA: And she was famously arrested for handing out free birth control to people.
VERONICA: Yes. So, Emma Goldman is sort of always lurking in the back of my mind, right? Where, whatever I'm doing Emma Goldman is there. The Baba Yaga, I've always found fascinating as this witch who has no parallel in other European fairy tale mythoses, right? There's something so unique about Baba Yaga that she is terrifying, but she might help you, but she might eat you. And it sort of depends on her mood and it does depend on how you behave, but you don't know ahead of time how you're supposed to behave.
AMANDA: Mmh-hmm.
VERONICA: You can ask some questions and not others. I can't remember of course, who the theorist who originated the idea is probably prop that she has some kind of, sort of, survival of a Goddess figure. Survival of a catatonic Goddess figure, who has relations with the afterlife and can bring you back, or can, you know, leave you there, put you're there if you if, if need be. And one day the phrase Emma Goldman takes tea with the Baba Yaga popped into my head. Well, obviously, I need to bring these women together.
AMANDA: There's no going back from that.
VERONICA: Right. And I had just read a biography of Emma Goldman focusing on her years in exile from the United States and the depression she went into upon reaching the Soviet Union, which was both political and personal as I go into in the story. But she, she somehow recovers herself to some extent, and I sort of wanted to write a story about depression and recovery, because depression is also, it's also a theme, that kind of mental illness is also a theme I write about, because depression has been a major force in my life, right? And I'm, I'm, I'm a living exemplar, that are living through chemistry, I take my meds and I'm, I can do things like write and talk to people and get very excited about things. And so but I don't, and I can't, so I'm interested in in that as well.
JULIA: Well as the same depression squad, what's up?
AMANDA: We understand that.
JULIA: So, you're also a professor at Queens College City of New York and I, I know that, like you said before, a lot of your research focuses on the, the feminist revisions of fairy tales and classical myths that, like, kind of gained prominence in the 70s to 90s. And then the feminist theory that was contemporary with those revisions, that sounds incredible. And I would take an entire semester's worth of lectures of that, like right now. But kind of what inspired you to pursue that course of study? Was there, like, one day there was a story that you're like, "Oh, I see. This is the path I want to go down", or was it kind of a series of events that led you down that path?
VERONICA: It was a sort of a confluence of many things all pointing me in the right direction. When I entered graduate school many, many years ago. Now, when I was very young, I was going to study Shakespeare, and I still love Shakespeare, no cutting on Shakespeare. Absolutely. But the year before I was supposed to choose, I was supposed to actually file my dissertation proposal, I was taking two classes, and one of them was on Renaissance Drama with a scholar I have always admired and long to take a class with. And one of them was on what's called Feminist Fairy Tales, and was with a professor who I very, who I loved and who didn't specialize in fairy tales. It was a minor field for her but I thought, “Well, I'm going to take this too, because I love reading those in my spare time. Who doesn't?". And over the course of the semester, I realized that I wasn't always getting the required reading done for the Renaissance Drama Class, but I was always getting even the recommended reading done for the Fairy Tale class. And I sort of realized, "Oh, I could, I could make this my, my area. I could write my dissertation on this". And the professor whom I loved gave me this, at the same time, the most amazing feedback on my work, I would give her papers and she would give me this page of single-spaced typed comments of feedback on how, what was strong, what needed improvement, how I could improve it in the most constructive way. And I thought, "I really want this woman to be my advisor". Both those things pointed me in that direction and I was also very interested in psychoanalytic theory, and at the time, and I don't know how things stand out, but at the time, in the program I was at, Psychoanalytic Theory was not something that was very interesting to the Early Modern Renaissance Drama Faculty at the program I was at. And so, if I wanted to work on that, it was also a clear sign that I should perhaps move my field. And so, those three things came together and I was like, "Well, I want to do what I love. I've always said Academia does not pay well enough to sell out, you know?" Like, if you're going to sell out get, get big money. If you're going into academia-
AMANDA: Good advice.
VERONICA: Yeah, thank you. If you're going into academia, do what you love, because you don't know how long you'll be able to do it for and I've been very, very lucky. That's how my first books sort of came about. About Psychoanalytic Theory, Psychoanalytic Feminist Theory and its commonality with the fairy tale myth, feminist revisions at the time.
JULIA: It is wonderful how, like, one professor or one person can really influence your whole course of study. I had a very similar story where my first semester freshman year, I ended up taking a class that I, like, wasn't planning on taking at all and the professor was just so great that I was like, "Oh, Professor. What are you teaching next semester?" and then signed up for that. It was, like, a Theory of Death. and I was like, "Okay. Sure, fine, a little depressing for a freshmen, you know, a second semester, but that's fine". And I just kept taking, like, every class that she offered until she's like, you know, you can minor in this at this point, right? I was like, "Oh, cool. Sure" And then I kept doing that. She's like, "You know, if you take one class without me, you can major in this". I was like, "I guess I'll do that, fine".
VERONICA: If I must.
JULIA: If I must take a class without you, professor. I'm so glad that you, like, had that kind of influence that led you down a path that you absolutely loved and realize like, "I can do this". That's so, that's so fantastic.
VERONICA: I've been very fortunate in my mentors, my graduate advisor, Vicki Mahaffey, who was teaching that class. It was amazing. And Christina Bacalega, who's a major fairytale scholar at the University of Hawaii, has been just like nothing short of a, of a fairy Godmother to me in the fields. And really sort of guided me along and I just, I'm very, very grateful for the professors, scholars, writers. Especially the women who have gone before, because I, I hear from friends and family about what it was like to be a woman in Grad school, a generation before me. Not as far back as my mother's generation, but the generation between us. And it was not easy, in a way that I don't know if I would have stuck it out if I, if that had been my experience.
AMANDA: Yeah.
VERONICA: So.
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JULIA: Speaking of your academic publications, and stuff like that, and because you mentioned it earlier, I noticed you do have a lot of Alice in Wonderland related papers and publications that you put out. And I got to be honest with you, very influential to me as a child. So, I was very excited to, to see Alice listed on your, your work. So, I would love to hear more about your thoughts on those stories. I know it's not, not exactly related to Burning Girls, but I, I would love to hear more.
VERONICA: Well. It's not unrelated. I have a couple of Alice stories-
JULIA: Okay, good.
VERONICA: -in Burning Girls. Yeah, Alice was very influential on me as a child as well, in all kinds of ways. Even before I read the book, my mother used to take me to climb on the statue in Central Park with Alice in Wonderland. So, she was always kind of literally a looming presence. And when I read the books when I was a kid, and I learned that there had been a real Alice. When I was a child, it's sort of swirled in my head that maybe that meant the books were real. And maybe that meant magic was real. And maybe that meant I could go to a magic world.
JULIA: Mmh.
VERONICA: And that was really interesting to me, to sort of, try to tease out what was real and what was fantasy there as a kid. And as I got older, I became interested not only in the books, but also in Dodgson, Lewis Carroll was a pen name, of course. Charles Dodgson himself in his relationship with the little girls, Alice and her sisters, as well as with other children, and I've had my, my opinion on, on my assessment of those, of those relationships has gone through many different phases. For a long time, I identified very much with him as somebody who was very good with children, and babysat a lot of how I made ends meet during graduate school, when you're in graduate school, you have to do something to make ends meet, because the fellowship isn't going to do it. And I was very, I felt a great deal of love for the children I took care of, and a great deal of connection. But of course, I wasn't a parent yet, and I was scared I would never become a parent because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Lots of, you know, personal life details that we need not to go into. But that, that scared me, and I felt like, "How, how can I have children in my life and not". And so, that this, the idea of this man who had managed to do that spoke to me, I, I'm now at a place where I've since I've read enough of his letters and really interesting, I peer-reviewed a really interesting article that I don't know where it was, where or who wrote it, because it was, you know, blind. And I don't know if it ever got published, of somebody who sort of tracked his relationships with little girls and yeah, I think they were kind of emotionally inappropriate. I obviously have no idea what, what, what transpired physically. But he, he was not good at respecting people's boundaries, at least emotionally in the letters. And I try obviously, not to do that.
JULIA: Sure.
VERONICA: That idea, that dynamic meant a lot to me. And I find the books themselves, they're so fascinating. Alice's Adventure in Wonderland insofar as we can say, this was the first text that did anything, right? Which is you can always look back a little further into. Well, here's one that-
AMANDA: Yeah.
VERONICA: -does something like it. It was a hinge in the history of children's literature insofar as it was the first text for children that did not pretend to, or try to, or want to make them better people. It not only didn't teach you anything practical like your alphabet or rational thinking. Like, Mariah, Ed Schwartz stories were supposed to do? Teach you how to make rational choices. It didn't teach you how to be a good Christian, like, the history of the Fairchild family was supposed to do. Alice doesn't become a better person during the, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She stays the same mouthy aggressive, angry little girl throughout. It's just there for fun. And it was a watershed moment where all of a sudden children, and writers for children, and publishers for children realized, like, you could just have fun. Children we're not merely there to be educated. They could also be entertained and entertained with wordplay and wit and inventiveness and fantasy. And that changed children's literature as we know it, right? And I actually think there's some really interesting differences between Wonderland and Looking Glass, but that becomes more academic and esoteric and you may not want me to spin off into that.
JULIA: I mean, listen, I would listen to a lecture on it if you want to give me the, the TLDR I'm into it.
VERONICA: Okay, okay. So they're written seven years apart, right? And by the time Dodgson writes Looking Glass, Alice Liddell herself is 17 or 18 years old, and he hasn't seen her for five or six years.
JULIA: Mmh-hmm.
VERONICA: And so the opening poem to Looking Glass is this, like, elegiac sad poem where you could be forgiven if you didn't know better and for thinking she had died. But she's not dead. She's a teenager. That's all, right? Alice's character in Looking Glass is very different from the Alice of Wonderland. In Wonderland, Alice sings the threatening songs about the crocodiles that upset everybody, right? She's always being like, "Oh, you'd love my cat Dinah. She always loves to eat little mice like you. And the mice are like, "Yeah, goodbye, lady". The pigeon is like, "You're after my eggs. Go away". Everyone's terrified of Alice, she's powerful. She kicks Bill the Lizard up the chimney, and that's even too much for the 50s. By the time Disney makes its Alice movie, she sneezes accidentally and sends Bill up the chimney. She's not allowed to be aggressive and angry anymore in Disney. But all that is also gone by Looking Glass. She ends up being much more of an audience for people reciting poetry, she bites her tongue, so she doesn't say rude things. She tries very hard to be helpful and kind and there's nothing wrong with being helpful and kind of course. But for me, part of the reason I love Wonderland so much is because Alice isn't forced to be any of those things. She's allowed to be just sort of, like, a mouthy, loud, angry little girl, right? And by the time you get to Looking Glass, she's been sort of softened, perhaps by nostalgia into this gentle, kind, very different kind of character. I still love Looking Glass. I think it does amazing things with language and story. I just don't love the character of Alice in it, as much as I love the character of Alice in Wonderland.
JULIA: Totally understand that.
AMANDA: Yeah, Alice in Wonderland has always struck me as, like, a very queer text. And not just because of the aesthetic, and because of the fantasy, you know, and just the I think the roleplay too and sort of, like, putting on costumes and differences of perspective. Like all of that, I'm sure people have written very smart things abou. But also just because of the, now that you give me the words, I totally see it, that it's, it's not instructive. It's not moralistic, it's not tracing a character journey. It's, you know, being. And your being is separate from what society thinks you should be. I think that's the sort of, like, heart of the appeal to me that I have never been able to name before. So, thank you.
VERONICA: I think that's right. There's something very anarchic about Wonderland. Alice keeps trying to impose the social rules she's learned, right? Up in the real world, and they fall apart every time and then she loses her temper and shouts at the queen, right? Like, she she, she says, "To hell with decorum" at a certain point and goes for it. So yeah, I agree.
JULIA: Yeah, and looking at some of the publications that you have, just because I have them in front of me, you refer to Alice as the Monster's Child. You talk about beastly girls and just like, reading as a child, I never saw Alice as, like, I just saw Alice is me. And like, that's how I would have reacted in those situations because I was not a, like, you know, demure, gentle child. I was, I'll, you know, stomp my feet and everyone listened to what I say. So, I think that's why i related so much the stories and just the bizarreness of the things that was happening in the stories obviously, also appealed. But I love that, I love that interpretation. I guess I never thought of it that way because Alice was so close to who I was.
VERONICA: Me too. Me too.
JULIA: I love it.
AMANDA: You mentioned the kind of Christian moralizing of much of children's literature and I think a lot of fairy tales kind of either began as or have been sort of, like, subsumed and, and massaged and twisted into being that, at least the ones that I grew up with. How did the, either the fairytales that you grew up with, or the Jewish fairy tales and folklore that really fascinate you as an adult, how do those differ? Like, how would you describe them? What's the, what are some of the commonalities or some of the missions or some of the heart of those stories?
VERONICA: What I find really interesting about the Christianizing of very popular fairy tales, and I agree, is it was a conscious decision by the Grimm's and I can't remember which one now. I sort of want to say Wilhelm but it could be, it could be Jacob. I could be completely wrong about that.
AMANDA: You can just say whatever you want. I have no idea.
VERONICA: So, that when Hansel and Gretel is first published in the, in their first version, right? I'm sure you know this. There are no references to God, and the kids just wandered through the forest and the whole, the whole interpolation with the white duck isn't there. And then subsequently, they keep having the kids subs-, subsequent editions stop and say like, "Oh, God will take care of us. Let's stop and pray to God". And those things weren't there in the earlier folktales. It was a conscious decision to try and Christianize them along with taking out sex but leaving in the violence. Makeup that what you will.
AMANDA: It's almost like the character arc of the last like 200 years of western cannon. Yeah.
VERONICA: So, I think that I, I am especially interested in fairy tales that do not have a moralizing component. And a lot of my students that preceded classes will say all fairy tales have a moral and I'll always say, "Really? What's the moral of Rumpelstiltskin?" And there's this long silence and someone will be like, "Don't lie?" And I was like, "Well, she becomes queen". Anyway, she's not the one who lied, her father lied. Nothing bad happens to him. And they're like, "Well keep your bargains" I'm like, "But she doesn't". Also because that's a terrible bargain that you should never force anyone to make. What kind of moral would that be? And so I'm especially fascinated by the stories that are just about trickiness. Or about I guess this goes back to what we were just talking about Alice, people who are trying to sort of, make their way through a crazy wild world and are doing the best that they can and maybe that involves a little bit of a morality at times. Or maybe it involves a kind of morality that is not best encapsulated in contemporary Christianity and that was something that I tried to work with. One of my, the first story in Burning Girls, Among the Thorns is a reply to a little a now little known Grimm story. It had been widely anthologized before called, The Jew in the Thornbush, in which essentially, like, a stout German peasant gets three wishes because he's kind to a dwarf by the side of the road, and he uses them to torture a passing Jewish man and then get him hanged at the next village and proceeds on with his life, I guess unharmed. When I workshopped that story, there was resistance to the fact that I had the protagonist take revenge, and it didn't destroy her. It is not a story that is against revenge, it is a revenge story and I actually think revenge stories are really important. But there is such a narrative, I think in the United States, particularly of a certain kind of Christianity that nonviolence is the only possible response to injustice or the only acceptable response to injustice. And you see that narrative mobilized against protesters in the black freedom struggle all the time, right? In which case, anything they do is defined as violence, whether or not it's violence, that there was resistance to it when I workshopped the story. I really felt strongly that I wanted this to be a revenge story that especially in Hollywood, in our popular narratives, white men get to take revenge all the time, right? You have entire series devoted to white men, you know, gunning down anyone who gets between them and the guy who has hurt their girlfriend or something.
AMANDA: Like every prestige drama of the last 15 years, ultimately is about revenge in some way. You know, Mad Men succession billions.
VERONICA: Yeah. And I thought like, "Well, why is revenge only okay, why is it revenge, okay, when it's in the service of a righteous cause", right? Like, rectifying an injustice. At least in narrative form, it's not like anybody is actually hurt by my writing this story. So, I felt very strongly that I wanted her to not only take revenge, but to have a reasonably happy ending. And that I think, is a way that I was trying to trace the morality that was different from the dominant Christian inflicted morality of United States in a fairy tale retelling.
AMANDA: Totally. And I mean, forgiveness, in so many ways is, like, much easier to preach from a position of hegemony and of dominance. And it is, it is very easy to tell others to forgive when, when you are never needing to be forgiven, because all of society is set up to enforce you and reinforce your power.
VERONICA: I completely agree and you can see it in the way that after Dylann Roof shot up the black church, people were asking, Oh, gosh, sorry. The survivors, whether they forgave him. What a thing to ask people who've just to suffer to that extent.
AMANDA: Yeah.
VERONICA: What an immoral thing to say to them, and forgiveness in Jewish tradition is a very different thing. It involves, it can only be done by the person whom the sin, or the crime, or the violence was committed against, right? So, if that person is dead, you don't have the right to forgive on their behalf.
AMANDA: Yeah.
VERONICA: It requires that the person who committed the offense, you know, go through a process of not just repentance, but atonement. They don't just have to feel bad, they actually have to, like, do some work to make it clear that they have changed as a person and our, you know, just it's a very different concept of forgiveness. And for all I know, the Christian idea of forgiveness began that way. But the way it is often mobilized in the United States today is in a way that puts pressure on people who have been hurt by systemic injustice, as well as individual violence to disavow feelings of anger.
AMANDA: And also to forget.
VERONICA: And don't I think that's okay.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: Yeah. There's definitely been a misinterpretation of, like, the early Christian idea of turning the other cheek. And like, “No, that's not, that's not what they mean”. We recently were talking about fairy tales in a, an earlier episode, and the, like, inclusion of Christianity in a lot of Tales often feels really heavy-handed when it comes to fairy tales. We were talking about the story of Tatterhood and one of the, like, instances of Tatterhood is, like, "Oh. They look outside, and there's a bunch of witches and ogres and stuff". And they're like, "What are all these witches and ogres doing here?" They're like, "Oh, they're here to celebrate Christmas". I'm like, "That makes zero sense". What are you talking about? I promise you they're not, why, why would they be?
VERONICA: I love that story. But yes, you're absolutely right. It's sort of jammed in there and you're like, "No, no, why would they do that?"
JULIA: And talking about another story that, like, doesn't really have a very clear cut moral, you know, like, Tatterhood becomes beautiful at the end after, like, doing a bunch of this other stuff. And it's, it's a wild story. I've just been thinking about that as you were speaking to it. So.
VERONICA: I have a reading of Tatterhood because I teach that story quite frequently-
JULIA: Yes, please.
VERONICA: -in one of my classes, where it's about Tatterhood's power, not just her physical and magical power, but about her narrative power. Right at the end, she remakes herself and she remakes herself through the power of speaking and to the power of narrative. She needs an interlocutor. So, she keeps saying to the prince, like, "Why don't you ask me why I'm riding on this goat? Doofus." And he's like, "Why are you riding on the goat?". She says, "Is this a goat? Of course it's not. It's the most beautiful milk white steed that ever bore a bride" And immediately it is. It's all about her speaking her truth into being. So at the end when she becomes beautiful, right? That's also about her agency and her ability to make herself beautiful, right? She could have to ask somebody to ask why she wasn't beautiful the whole time and she didn't, right?
JULIA: Mmh-hmm.
VERONICA: She does it at the end, after she's shown how much she can achieve without being beautiful, right? It's all about her narrative power at the end and I think that's just brilliant. I, I love that story.
JULIA: It's great. Yeah, it's one of our favorites.
AMANDA: Absolutely. Veronica, you're absolutely welcome to decline to talk about this. But I wonder in describing kind of sorcery, magic, and other I think qualities or, I don't know, like, lenses on Jewish people in Judaism that are, that are twisted in an anti-semitic way. How you kind of hold those two things at the same time when you're looking back at history, folklore, and magic tales?
VERONICA: That's a really interesting question. I do not decline to answer it at all.
AMANDA: Yeah, yeah.
VERONICA: It's something I've been thinking a lot about a lot lately, because of course, the image of the sorceress wicked Jew in league with the devil working magic is one that has been used against Jewish people for, you know, centuries has caused a lot of damage. At the same time, I can't help sort of thinking, you know, what does it mean that in my mind as a child who loved fairy tales. I read through the Grimm's. I read through my mother's collection of Andrew Lang, Rainbow Fairy Tale Books when I was a kid. She has since given me that collection, I love it. That it never occurred to me. It just did not occur to me that that was something that coexisted in even the same world as Jewishness, right? Does the anti-semitism of Europe mean that we have to give up access to magic and fantasy and give up that part of our heritage? Because of course, right. Every, every culture, every tradition has a practice of, of magic. And I don't think it's right that we should, I think about, I thought about, I've been thinking about that a lot recently when I wrote Among the Thorns and when I read it now, in term, because you know, The Jew in the Thornbush is a pretty obscure story. People don't know it anymore unless they are scholars. It was not always that way. It was one of the first stories. One of the first 25, 50 stories, I can't remember how many now, translated from the German into English in 1823 by Edgar Taylor. But you know, since, since the Holocaust, basically, it has not been in wide circulation, as I hoped that I demonstrated in my first academic book. Revising something is not about replacing it, or effacing it, or writing over it. It is also about reviving it.
AMANDA: Mmh-hmm.
VERONICA: Right? When you revise something, when you go back and rewrite it and re-publish it, you are giving it new life, right? And keeping it in circulation, keeping it in mind, and in awareness. And I thought about that as I was writing Among the Thorns, I think about it now, "Would it have been better not to write that story and just let the Jew in the Thornbush die?" On the other hand, I was so angry.
JULIA: Yeah.
VERONICA: I was so angry that this story was in the collection. There had been a version they collected with a monk in the place of the Jewish man, they could have gone with that version. They did not. It felt like a betrayal because I love fairy tales so much. I wanted to answer it. And at the end of Among the Thorns, it opens with a lot of, it opens with a lot of anti-semitic legends and tales that the Grimm's collected not only in, not only in The Jew in the Thornbush, but in their other books, right? German legends and sagas and things like that. And it opens with the main character saying like, "Who are these people who sell their children?" Right? All these stories about Jews buying Christian children to do evil things with them. What are you doing selling your children? Who does that? But it also ends with her taking on, I'm spoilering it so, you know. It ends with her taking the baby daughter of the man who murdered her father after she kills him and taking her away to raise as her own. So, it sort of, ends with that, that trope again, right? With, with the, with the Jew, the Jewish woman taking the child. And I felt ambivalent about it when I wrote it. I feel ambivalent about it now. Nobody has ever called me out on it, you know, and I think about Naomi Novik, redeeming the figure of the Jewish Moneylender in Spinning Silver.
AMANDA: Mmh-hmm
JULIA: Hmm.
VERONICA: And I wonder if there's something about these stories, these narratives, these tropes that have dogged us for so long, that even when we don't mean to address them. I, I didn't start out writing Among the Thorns thinking like, "Yeah, I'm going to have her take the baby at the end, right? They're there. They're sort of always hovering in the edges. And at some point, you have to turn and take them on directly. But I am ambivalent. I, I don't think there's an easy answer to your question.
AMANDA: Yeah. No, totally and it's so unfair, that you have to navigate, like, four layers of other people's expectations and baggage in order to say, like, what is, you know, like Christians? I don't think most of us don't have to do that, of, of, you know, deciding what is interesting and how you're going to put a spin on it. And it's absolutely, you know, I think an unfair burden, but that also sounds like an act of charity at the end of saving a life and not of, you know, maybe that to me as a reader, I think that would challenge me to ask myself about the context of those assumptions, stereotypes, and what rewriting went into making that. The canon versus asking questions or having an open mind or not having an active agenda against Jewish people in how you apparently collected this one gigantic platter of anti-semitism and as your, you know, first 25 or 50 stories in, in translation.
VERONICA: It's interesting because I only found this out recently. I, you know, I've picked and chosen, dived into Calvino's Italian folktales before but I never read the whole thing straight through. And my, my son's babysitter has and at one point, I came out and she was there was a tale called Olive. It's, it's an armless maiden variant. Only in this version, the maiden is the daughter of a Jewish man, whose wife has died and he brings the baby to his Christian neighbors and says, "I'm going to go off and look for work. I'll be back in 10 years. If I don't come back in 10 years, raise her as you see fit. 10 years goes by, he doesn't come back. So, they then begin to raise her as a Christian, he comes back 10 years later, and he's like, "I want her back" and is super angry that she's a Christian. And eventually cuts off her, her hands because she won't give up Christian practice, right? You know, in the context of, you know, it was not, it was not an unheard of eventua-, event for, say, Christian servants in a Jewish household to baptize a Jewish baby and then take it, right? To raise it, because it had been baptized. No, it still had been saved. So, of course, now it had to be raised Christianly, this happened and I think I want to say, 19th century Italy and, you know, the courts ruled in favor of the Christian, of the Christian family. The, the Jewish family never saw their child again. In the context of that, that the presence of that story in Calvino's book took my breath away, because that story is very clearly to me a justification, right? Where like-
AMANDA: Yeah.
VERONICA: -the Jewish father gave up the child and then he went away and he didn't come back. And look at how badly he treats her now that he's back. And it's, it's such a reversal right? And so, it's so, it's a projection and so it ends up to me feeling like that the, the Blood libel is a projection on, on, on who's taking who's children and doing what to them.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Totally. Is there any, anything that you haven't talked about that you want to share or any, you know, recommendations? You know, I'd, I'd love to end not on anti-semitism, but on you know, Jewishness. And I wonder if there's anything that you want to share to close up the episode?
VERONICA: Oh, my Goodness. Okay. Yes. There are so many wonderful books out there that I think are amazing. And of course, do I have any of the names right in front of me? There's one by Barbara Krasnoff. K r a s n o f f called, I believe, The Journey of Soul 2061? Or 2031?
AMANDA: 2065. I just looked it up.
VERONICA: 2065. Thank you. Yes. Which is a beautiful, sort of, magical realist book about Jewish family and lineage through the ages. We talked about Spinning Silver, which obviously, you know, and I'm really excited to read. I don't think it's come out yet. I think it's Rena Rossner's book.
AMANDA: Yeah, we interviewed her earlier this year and yeah, the newest book is called The Light of the Midnight Stars, which I really enjoyed and all about, like, inserting women into fairy tales, and like women scribes. And it was, it was awesome.
VERONICA: I am very excited to read that. I haven't read it yet. But I'm super excited about it. I'm glad that she was here. I'm following in her footsteps.
AMANDA: And I'm sure by following you and your work online, our listeners can continue to get great recommendations, perspectives, celebrations of fairytales. So, if you would, please let everybody know how they can find you and your work online.
VERONICA: I do have a website. It's a very, you know, basic one, because I am not, as we discovered at the beginning of the hour, I am not a very competent tech-person. But I have a website, it's schanoes.wordpress.com. And Schanoes is S c h a n o e s. I'm also on Twitter under my last name, and it's, it's a very political and foul mouth Twitter. So, if that's, if that's likely to be upsetting to a person, they should not look for me on Twitter. But you know, it's also, it's I'm also there, actually, now that we're talking about recommendations, I think I have a piece on Books of Jewish Magic that's going up at Electric Literature.
AMANDA: Amazing.
VERONICA: In a week or so. Next week.
AMANDA: We love Jess Zimmerman and that's a very fun overlap.
VERONICA: And I had this piece come out on Electric Literature, about just sort of, you know, like seven books about Jewish magic that are well worth exploring, and it's up there. And it's, I'm excited about it. So, and I was able to look up people's names and titles when I wrote it. So, it will just be me stuttering about trying to remember things.
AMANDA: Amazing.
JULIA: You'll be able to find all of those links in the show notes of this episode. So you just click, click, click.
AMANDA: And I find out about, about Reena in a list on heyoma.com, all about, like, debuts of they, they tend to say, like, Jewish books and books that these Jewish people love. And so it's just, like, a, a roundup of kind of all things that the curators find interesting. And I always find amazing authors there. So, we'll link to the most recent example of that as well.
VERONICA: Great, that's wonderful. Burning Girls was on one of, one of their lists.
AMANDA: Yeah, it was.
VERONICA: I am very excited. I was very excited and, and honored because they're very cool.
AMANDA: That's awesome. Well, Veronica, thank you so much for your time, for your energy, for your interpretation, for sharing so much with us. I think this is going to be a really exciting episode for people to hear and we couldn't thank you enough.
VERONICA: Well, thank you so much for having me. This has been a pleasure, so much fun. And so wonderful to meet both of you.
AMANDA: Aw, you too.
JULIA: We’re so glad.
AMANDA: Well, everybody remember.
JULIA: Stay creepy.
AMANDA: Stay cool.
AMANDA: Spirits was created by Amanda McLoughlin, Julia Schifini and Eric Schneider with music by Kevin MacLeod and visual design by Alison Wakeman.
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JULIA: Thank you so much for listening. Till next time.
Transcribed by: John Matthew Sarong
Edited by: Krizia Marrie Casil