Reading ‘The Jewish Maiden’ after the Holocaust, By Lorraine Schein

Editor’s note: I have long been aware of the virulent antisemitism that sometimes appears in fairy tales. Example: Maria Tatar’s splendid The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales has a section on it, featuring, “The Jew in the Brambles.” I’m pleased to be offering Lorraine Schein’s take on this important issue.

I recently read this 1855 story, one of Andersen’s less well-known ones. I thought about it from my perspective as a child of Holocaust survivors. Articles I found online about it note that Andersen’s portrayal of Jews in it was sympathetic for his time. Indeed I read online at the site Scandinavian Jewish Forum (HERE) that he was friends with a Jewish family, the Melchiors, and a frequent guest to their house. He was even given his own room there, and stayed there often, especially after he became ill. 

“The Jewish Maiden” is about a Jewish girl, Sarah, a student at a Christian charity school, brought there by her poor father after her mother’s death. Her mother’s dying wish had been that Sarah remain “a daughter of Israel” (without Christian baptism).

But though Sarah was given a book to study during the school’s religious-teachings classes, she began paying more attention to the Scripture lessons than to the book. Andersen tells us, “And the teacher soon noticed that she listened more intently than any of the rest.”

Reading this, one might wonder: Why didn’t the teacher simply send her to another area where she couldn’t hear the lesson?  But the usual sensitivity of Andersen toward his characters is shown here, as he explains: “But to send her from the room during the Scripture lesson might have given offense and raised various thoughts in the minds of the other children in the class, and so she remained.”

Sarah’s father, seeing her interest in Christianity, in order to be true to his deathbed promise, transfers his daughter out of the Christian school. Years later, Sarah has become a maid in a small town. Since the house she worked in was right across the street from the church, Sarah would listen to the Sunday hymns as eagerly as she once listened to the Scripture lessons.

Her mistress becomes very ill, but Sarah does not leave her and continues working as well as helping the sick woman. The woman asks her to read from the Bible, and Sarah is overcome with the truth of Christianity in her heart, though she struggles to stay true to her mother’s wish.

One evening, while at her mistress’s bedside, she faints, and becomes very ill. Neighbors carry her to the hospital for the poor but she dies.

Andersen ends the story with:

… and they bore her to her resting-place in the earth, but not to the churchyard of the Christians. There was no place for the Jewish girl; but they dug a grave for her outside the wall. And God’s sun, which shines upon the graves of the churchyard of the Christians, also throws its beams on the grave of the Jewish maiden beyond the wall. And when the psalms of the Christians sound across the churchyard, their echo reaches her lonely resting-place; and she who sleeps there will be counted worthy at the resurrection, through the name of Christ the Lord, who said to His disciples, “John baptized you with water, but I will baptize you with the Holy Ghost.”

Sarah’s inner love of Christianity is shown as deserving of baptism, so in the afterlife Sarah becomes a Christian, though she resisted it when alive. Andersen equates this with Christ’s disciples being baptized by the Holy Spirit.

This is dismaying, but was a common practice even in America. In some old cemeteries in the South, Jews were buried in a different section, if not outside the walls of the cemetery as here. I have seen this in a small town in New Orleans.

It is also dismaying to me that Sarah never completes her education and becomes a servant, though probably an education for poor women in those days didn’t lead to much. In contrast to “The Jewish Maiden” is the portrayal of Jews in Grimm—such as in “The Jew in the Thorns” which is plainly anti-Semitic, using stereotypical anti-Semitic physical descriptions and showing physical abuse of its Jewish character.

One thing that always has struck me about Andersen’s tales is the sympathy which he shows not only to people and animals but to things as well, as shown by the titles of many of his stories: “The Teapot,” “The Shilling,” “The Tin Soldier,” “ The Pen and the Ink Stand,” and “What the Moon Saw” (which personifies the Moon!).

I do not feel this same identification with the poor, the sad, or the inanimate in Grimms’ fairy tales. This is a generalization, but some of Andersen’s stories make me cry or saddened, but in a moving, sublime way that exalts and transcends, and are almost Buddhist in jtheir feeling for the suffering of all creatures and things; the Grimms’ are entertaining, sometimes horrifying but keep their characters at a distance. In addition, Andersen’s stories usually have a gentle, satirical humor that the Grimms’ lack.

My mother and aunt were taken to a hospital to convalesce in neutral Sweden after the war, and this story reflects the more tolerant attitude of Scandinavians, and certainly Andersen even then towards Jews. Though historically there had been anti-Semitism there as well, it was not as virulent.

Poor Sarah! All the Christianity in her heart would not have saved her had she been born in the Nazi era.

***

Lorraine Schein is a New York writer. Her work has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Truancy, and Little Blue Marble, and in the anthologies Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath, and Eighteen. The Futurist’s Mistress, her poetry book, is available from Mayapplepress.com Her work has also previously appeared in Enchanted Conversation.

***

I

Image: Young Jewish Girl in Tangier, by Charles Landelle.

'The Little Match Girl' Happy New Year

Did you ever think about the fact that "The Little Match Girl" is a not-very-happy new year story? It's also my least-favorite Hans Christian Andersen tale. Such a bring down. His penchant for torturing his beautiful, young heroines has been well noted by scholars for some time, yet Andersen was unlucky in love and said he identified most with another suffering beauty, "The Little Mermaid." Who can ever say what motivates a writer? His own story? His anger at the pretty people (and unpretty ones) who rejected him?

Andersen was also a religious man, if not always dogmatic. Many, if not most of his fairy tales contain religious or moral messages. "The Little Match Girl" is no different. His ending clearly calls people out for ignoring the poor and homeless, and an explicitly Christian heaven is invoked in this story. By showing the suffering of "The Little Match Girl," is he merely strengthening his message about the importance of charity?

SPOILER ALERT*: However, the big question of "The Little Match Girl" is whether she is simply a victim of poverty and exposure or is a passive suicide--or even an active suicide, That's up to the reader. Whatever your answer, there's no question that although Andersen's tale is a miserable one, it lends itself to beautiful imagery. That's why I've included three of  my favorite illustrations with the tale.

*The story is well over 100 years old, and you've probably read it. I have little patience with the "spoiler alert" crowd. Is the ending of a story really that important? Don't all the only elements count? But this is the Internet, and I am bound by its mob conventions. Bah! Humbug!

So, with these questions in mind, without further ado, "The Little Match Girl."

Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening-- the last evening of the year. In this cold and darkness there went along the street a poor little girl, bareheaded, and with naked feet. When she left home she had slippers on, it is true; but what was the good of that? They were very large slippers, which her mother had hitherto worn; so large were they; and the poor little thing lost them as she scuffled away across the street, because of two carriages that rolled by dreadfully fast.

One slipper was nowhere to be found; the other had been laid hold of by an urchin, and off he ran with it; he thought it would do capitally for a cradle when he some day or other should have children himself. So the little maiden walked on with her tiny naked feet, that were quite red and blue from cold. She carried a quantity of matches in an old apron, and she held a bundle of them in her hand. Nobody had bought anything of her the whole livelong day; no one had given her a single farthing.
She crept along trembling with cold and hunger--a very picture of sorrow, the poor little thing!

The flakes of snow covered her long fair hair, which fell in beautiful curls around her neck; but of that, of course, she never once now thought. From all the windows the candles were gleaming, and it smelt so deliciously of roast goose, for you know it was New Year's Eve; yes, of that she thought.
In a corner formed by two houses, of which one advanced more than the other, she seated herself down and cowered together. Her little feet she had drawn close up to her, but she grew colder and colder, and to go home she did not venture, for she had not sold any matches and could not bring a farthing of money: from her father she would certainly get blows, and at home it was cold too, for above her she had only the roof, through which the wind whistled, even though the largest cracks were stopped up with straw and rags.

Her little hands were almost numbed with cold. Oh! a match might afford her a world of comfort, if she only dared take a single one out of the bundle, draw it against the wall, and warm her fingers by it. She drew one out. "Rischt!" how it blazed, how it burnt! It was a warm, bright flame, like a candle, as she held her hands over it: it was a wonderful light. It seemed really to the little maiden as though she were sitting before a large iron stove, with burnished brass feet and a brass ornament at top. The fire burned with such blessed influence; it warmed so delightfully. The little girl had already stretched out her feet to warm them too; but--the small flame went out, the stove vanished: she had only the remains of the burnt-out match in her hand.

She rubbed another against the wall: it burned brightly, and where the light fell on the wall, there the wall became transparent like a veil, so that she could see into the room. On the table was spread a snow-white tablecloth; upon it was a splendid porcelain service, and the roast goose was steaming famously with its stuffing of apple and dried plums. And what was still more capital to behold was, the goose hopped down from the dish, reeled about on the floor with knife and fork in its breast, till it came up to the poor little girl; when--the match went out and nothing but the thick, cold, damp wall was left behind. She lighted another match. Now there she was sitting under the most magnificent Christmas tree: it was still larger, and more decorated than the one which she had seen through the glass door in the rich merchant's house.

Thousands of lights were burning on the green branches, and gaily-colored pictures, such as she had seen in the shop-windows, looked down upon her. The little maiden stretched out her hands towards them when--the match went out. The lights of the Christmas tree rose higher and higher, she saw them now as stars in heaven; one fell down and formed a long trail of fire.

"Someone is just dead!" said the little girl; for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now no more, had told her, that when a star falls, a soul ascends to God.
She drew another match against the wall: it was again light, and in the lustre there stood the old grandmother, so bright and radiant, so mild, and with such an expression of love.

"Grandmother!" cried the little one. "Oh, take me with you! You go away when the match burns out; you vanish like the warm stove, like the delicious roast goose, and like the magnificent Christmas tree!" And she rubbed the whole bundle of matches quickly against the wall, for she wanted to be quite sure of keeping her grandmother near her. And the matches gave such a brilliant light that it was brighter than at noon-day: never formerly had the grandmother been so beautiful and so tall. She took the little maiden, on her arm, and both flew in brightness and in joy so high, so very high, and then above was neither cold, nor hunger, nor anxiety--they were with God.

But in the corner, at the cold hour of dawn, sat the poor girl, with rosy cheeks and with a smiling mouth, leaning against the wall--frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. Stiff and stark sat the child there with her matches, of which one bundle had been burnt. "She wanted to warm herself," people said. No one had the slightest suspicion of what beautiful things she had seen; no one even dreamed of the splendor in which, with her grandmother she had entered on the joys of a new year.

Hope your 2016 is a good one. Don't forget that the submissions window is open for the Valentine's Day Fairy Tale issue.

Illustrators, in order, are Anne Anderson, Arthur Rackham and Willy Pogany.

Matches and Races, By Teresa Robeson

Editor's note: Teresa Robeson's take on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl," mashes up the chill of New Year's Eve with ... the dog track. The unlikely pairing is well worth a read.

Her parents slammed the door behind her with a decisive thunk. She was not to return until she had sold all the matches in her apron pocket. It didn’t matter that it was New Year’s Eve and the cruel chill of winter had a stranglehold on the town.


There was to be no celebration in the house anyway. Being dirt poor meant there was hardly ever enough food on a daily basis, let alone on special occasions. What little money they occasionally had was gambled away by Papa, who always swore, “I have a good feeling about this one.”


When the girl was old enough to accompany her siblings to town to sell matches, she saw other girls her age whose smiling parents held their hands, and who wore velvet or silk pinafores. Her own parents certainly never held her hand or smiled at her. The only time her parents’ hands touched her at all was when they reprimanded her for not following orders quickly enough. And her pinafore was a hand-me down, fashioned from an old bed sheet.


Her grandmother had been the one good thing in her life, slipping her extra morsels of food, and brushing her hair with old, gnarled hand before bedtime. While caressing the little girl’s straw-colored curls, Oma would share some words of wisdom, such as “a bird in hand is worth eating quickly,” “it’s better to be ignored than to receive,” and “life is a dog, and then there’s death.”  She never knew what Oma meant; she just kept quiet, contented to be loved.


But Oma died during the long, hard winter last year. A deep chest cold hit everyone in the family. With a draughty house and not enough food, Oma and the baby, the oldest and the youngest in the household, could not recover. They coughed up blood and their lives.


The little match girl trudged to the center of town, all the streets she was so familiar with during the day strangely aglow with gas lamps. She had never been out this late before, and if she weren’t numb with cold, she might appreciate the beauty of the frosty nightscape.


Laughter drifted out of houses, sounds of people enjoying their dinner parties. The smells of roasted meats and hot breads tantalized her along the way. Nobody wished the waif in torn clothing a Happy New Year. The people she passed by barely glanced at her as she gave them her most winsome smile and said, “Matches? Do you need some matches?”


When she became too tired to walk, she sat down against the wall of the tailor’s shop, tucking her legs beneath her as much as she could. She hadn’t had any food all day. Her stomach growled a reminder, as if she could forget.


Snowflakes began to fall, twinkling like falling stars among the backdrop of lamplight. The girl hugged herself, trying to fend off the cold that pricked her skin under her thin clothing.


What she wanted was the warmth a match could give her, even if temporarily. Her mother and father probably didn’t know how many matches were in her pocket so lighting one couldn’t hurt, could it?


She fought a shiver, pulled a single match out of her pocket and struck it against the wall.


Pshsssss!  The match hissed before catching hold, steadfast and brilliant.


The girl stared at the flame; it seemed to fan out and fill a fireplace. The air about her felt warmer, and the light wind that had played with her apron was gone.  As she continued to stare, she saw that the fireplace sported an ornate grating, with swirls and curls that she recognized as fine ironwork even though she had never seen the likes of it before. A dog lay on an oval braided rug in front of the fireplace, gazing at the fire.  Then it turned its head to look at her. The match burned down to her finger. She gasped and dropped it.


The scene vanished. The chill returned to nip at her fingers and nose, and the wind tugged on her apron again.


Was it hunger or the cold that made her see the vision so clearly? It didn’t matter; what mattered was that she wanted to see it again, to feel warm and safe in the room with the roaring fire.


Surely she could light a second match. It’s only a second match. Her parents wouldn’t miss that one either.


She struck another match on the wall. As it sputtered and sizzled to life, the fireplace appeared before her once more. This time, the dog was not alone. Oma was next to it, smiling at the girl.


“Little one,” she said, holding out her hand. The dog stood up.


“Oma?” said the girl. “I have missed you.”


Oma walked toward her; the dog kept pace.

“I have missed you too,” said Oma.


“Is that your dog?” asked the girl, puzzled since they had never had a dog before.


“Yes, dear,” said Oma.


“What’s its name?”


“Her name is Life,” said Oma.


“Oh,” said the girl, and thought for a moment, remembering the sayings that her grandmother used to tell her. “Does this mean I’m going to die?”


Oma cocked her head. “Something needs to die,” she said and laughed. It sounded so odd; Oma never laughed when she was alive.


The dog came up to the girl and nudged her foot with its nose. She looked down at it, wondering what it wanted from her. 


“Oma, why is your dog doing that?” she said, looking back up at her grandmother. But Oma wasn’t there anymore.


The dog nudged her foot again, harder this time.


“Hey,” it said.


The girl started.


“Hey!”


She blinked and saw that it was not the dog, but a stranger, tapping at her foot with his cane.


“Are you selling matches or sleeping?” the stranger asked. His companion stifled a smile. They both smelled of wine, and maybe something harder.


She got to her feet. “Yes, sir. I am selling matches.”


“Well, good; the general store is closed and I would hate to run out of matches for my festen later this evening.”


“How many would you like, sir?” the girl asked.


“I’ll take the lot,” the man said.


She pulled all the matches from her pocket and placed them in the drawstring pouch the woman companion was holding out toward her.


The man put a number of coins into the girl’s hands in return.


“That’s mighty generous of you,” the woman said to the man.


“Don’t spend it all on candy now, little girl,” he said.


“As if spending it on dog racing is so much better,” said the woman with a smirk.


“Dog racing?” said the girl.


“Last run of the year!” said the man. “No finer way to finish off the old and ring in the new.” He pulled his lady friend close and they both laughed heartily at a joke the girl didn’t get.


As the couple went about their way, the girl stared at the coins in her hand. She thought of Oma and the dog. Dumping the money into her apron pocket, she hurried after the couple, but kept out of their sight.


The racetrack was well lit and glowed with a festive halo, as though God Himself approved of gambling.


The couple greeted their friends as they arrived. When their chatter faded after they entered the tracks and there was no one else about, the girl approached the hut by the gate. The man in the hut was muttering to himself and shuffling something in his hands. She cleared her throat. He didn’t notice.


“Excuse me, sir!” she said.


He looked up and didn’t see anyone. “Who’s there?” he asked.


“I’m down here,” she replied.


The man peered over the edge of the small window. “What’re you doing here, little girl? You should be home.” His voice was gruff as he glanced around. “I don’t want officers to see children loitering about.”


“I’ve not run into any officers of the law all evening,” she said. “They’re probably home celebrating.”


The man grunted. “That may be. That may be.”


“I would like to bet on the race,” she said.


He surveyed her tattered clothing. “You need money to bet.”


“I have money,” she said. She pulled out the coins from her apron pocket.


He raised his bushy brows.


“What dogs are in this race?” she asked.


The man shrugged and pointed to the piece of paper posted next to him. “Snowflake, Fjord, Tulip, Zephyr, Coal, and Life.”


The girl smiled. “I’ll bet everything on Life,” she said as she reached up and dumped all her coins on the ledge. “I have a good feeling about this one.”


Having grown up under the influence of Chinese and Western fairy tales, Teresa still believes, in her late 40s, that foxes turn into people and there are faeries hiding behind toadstools. She’s on Twitter as @INwriter.

Essential Books About Fairy Tales -- For Grown Ups

As we all know, many fairy tales were not written primarily for children. Some of them are clearly too violent or racy for kids. Yet the sanitized versions of fairy tales, while still entertaining, leave adults without the full story.

It is certainly true that no one owns fairy tales, so cleaning them up for younger readers is as valid as the more recent versions of fairy tales -- some of which are very adult indeed. (Note to would-be submitters to EC: We are aimed at an age 13 and up audience. All work published here is parent friendly.) Anyway, the original, "real" versions of fairy tales are available, as are a huge variety of excellent books by scholars that are fun to read and enlightening. To find our top favorites, see the "10 Favorite Fairy Tale Books" Amazon slide show at left. A few of the books there are aimed at children, but were chosen for their classic status and lovely illustrations. The Uses of Enchantment, by the ever controversial Bruno Bettelheim was chosen for its influential status, even though much of his ideas have been questioned, discredited or damned as plagiarized.

The Amazon widget at the top of our page has even more books about and including fairy tales and I've read all or nearly all of them. And yes, there is nail polish, jewelry, etc., because fairy tales and commerce really are connected. Fairy tales abound with stuff!

However you acquire these books, please do so. They are worth the reading, the joy, the knowledge.

The illustration above is by Adrienne Segur, who illustrated the Golden Book we have included in our favorite book list. The image is from "The Tinder Box,"one of my favorite Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales.

Kate Wolford, Editor