A Day With Grandma

By Kathy Bloomfield

 

MY GRANDMOTHER'S STORIES
A Collection of Jewish Folk Tales
By Adele Geras
Illustrated by Anita Lobel
88 pages. Knopf. $19.95.
All ages

At grandma’s house, one can always be sure of two things: delicious food to eat and wonderful stories to hear. In My Grandmother’s Stories, we can almost taste the lovingly prepared traditional food, and the ten stories, derived from Russian Jewish folktales, are truly worth savoring.

Adele Geras is a master storyteller. In this marvelous collection, she describes how King Solomon teaches a miser about hunger, how a poor Jewish farmer outwits the Czar, and how an angel helps a woman to stop complaining.  A touching ghost story and two tales about the silly town of Chelm round out the book. Throughout, the stories are interspersed with grandma’s own wit and wisdom.

One of my favorite stories, representative of Geras's storytelling talent, is titled, "The Tablecloth." In it, a wise rabbi solves a neighborhood dispute with the help of his clever wife. Pnina, a “kind and thoughtful and loving and friendly” woman, and Malka, whose “whole life was spoiled by envying others their good fortune and by moaning constantly about her dreadful luck,” live directly across from one another. Pnina owns a beautiful white tablecloth, “huge and white and shining.” Wind blows the tablecloth onto Malka's doorstep, and when Pnina runs over to reclaim her tablecloth, Malka stubbornly asserts that it belongs to her. The women bring their dispute to Rabbi Samuels. He listens patiently to the women's story, as does his wife Rivka. Seeing that the rabbi has no easy solution to the problem, Rivka calls him to the kitchen where she says, loud enough to be overheard, “What a magnificent tablecloth! Such a pity about this tiny, tiny stain of red wine here in this corner.” When the rabbi returns to the living room to ask the women which of them had a tablecloth with a stain, Malka tells an elaborate story about how the stain got on the cloth. Pnina sadly admits that the cloth must be Malka’s, “because of one thing I am quite certain: there are no wine stains on my tablecloth.” With that the rabbi spreads the cloth out in front of him and pronounces the stain-free cloth to belong to Pnina. “Malka was disgraced,” and “Pnina continued to serve her Sabbath dinner on the beautiful tablecloth till the day she died.”

My Grandmother's Stories was excellent when first published in 1990 with illustrations by Jael Jordan. Now, after being out of print for many years, it returns with gorgeous new illustrations by Caldecott Award-winner Anita Lobel.  Ms. Lobel manages with her artwork to create just the right mood for each story, while giving us a sense of what spending a day in Grandma’s house must have been like.

I highly recommend this story collection to parents who are looking for bedtime reading or a story to tell at the Shabbat table. It will not fail to delight every member of the family.