In 1955, Pro­fes­sor Dov Noy resist­ed the push for a homo­ge­neous new Israeli soci­ety that would down­play the tra­di­tions of immi­grants from the Dias­po­ra. With a team of his folk­lore stu­dents, he began col­lect­ing and pre­serv­ing sto­ries from new­com­ers and long­time res­i­dent Israelis under the aegis of the Muse­um of Eth­nol­o­gy and Folk­lore. Today, the Israel Folk­lore Archives, hold­ing 24,000 tales in Hebrew, con­tin­ues its work as part of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Haifa. Haya Bar-Itzhak, the long­time direc­tor, along with coor­di­na­tor and researcher Idit Pin­tel-Gins­berg, cel­e­brat­ed the fifti­eth anniver­sary of the many nar­ra­tive voic­es in the archive with the pub­li­ca­tion of The Pow­er of a Tale in Hebrew in 2008. Now in 2020, shep­herd­ed by Pro­fes­sor Dan Ben-Amos, comes the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of that jubilee collection.

With voic­es of fifty-one nar­ra­tors from twen­ty-five eth­nic groups, forty-one tran­scribers, and thir­ty-eight schol­ars from Israel and the Unit­ed States, The Pow­er of a Tale toasts the founder of the IFA and hon­ors his mem­o­ry. The book does not have one par­tic­u­lar audi­ence in mind, and not every entry or con­ver­sa­tion may offer indi­vid­ual insight or allure, but there is some­thing here for every­one—folk­lorists, anthro­pol­o­gists, sto­ry­tellers, aca­d­e­mics, psy­chol­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans, rab­bis, lit­er­ary and cul­tur­al appreciators.

The fifty-three very dif­fer­ent sto­ries here rep­re­sent tra­di­tions of Ashke­nazi, Sephardic, and Israeli Jews, along with Druze, Bedouins, Chris­t­ian Arabs, and Mus­lims. The great­est num­ber of eth­nic nar­ra­tives come from Poland and Moroc­co. Sto­ry gen­res and themes include leg­ends about place, his­to­ry, sacred peo­ple, and mirac­u­lous sal­va­tion of Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, plus myths, won­der tales, demon tales, real­is­tic nar­ra­tives, and moral and cau­tion­ary tales.

Reflect­ing the breadth of the col­lec­tion, the open­ing tale from Lithua­nia about a young woman who escapes mar­riage to a demon is fol­lowed by a set of three short leg­ends from Iraqi, Pol­ish, and Israeli Sephar­di cul­tures about sacred stones in and from the West­ern Wall. In a sur­pris­ing Druze tale, the gift fish deliv­ered by a fisherman’s daugh­ter spits tar at the queen; the sheikh advis­es her to tell the king that if the fish is forced to say why, the queen will be sor­ry. In oth­er con­tri­bu­tions, read­ers will dis­cov­er con­trast­ing views on how the vil­lage of Tarshi­ha was named, how the fly­ing camel became a sym­bol for the inter­na­tion­al Lev­ant trade fair of the 1920s and ​’30s, and a sym­pa­thet­ic sto­ry of the baby who became the leg­endary Carpathi­an Moun­tain rob­ber Dobush.

Nar­ra­tives arrive from many voic­es and range from four-sen­tence, out­line-like prose to pro­fes­sion­al­ly shaped, ready-to-share tales. Some of them may be known to read­ers: the Ethiopi­an woman who seeks the hair from a lion’s mus­tache in order to improve her rela­tion­ship with her hus­band; a bro­ken oath made by a woman res­cued from a well and wit­nessed by a weasel; and the tri­umph of a rid­dle-solv­ing daugh­ter over the stub­born arro­gance of her hus­band, the king. But most will be new to Eng­lish read­ers. Oth­ers, like the Moroc­can ver­sion of Rapun­zel, demon­strate how sto­ries jump across cultures.

Myr­i­ad approach­es to com­men­tary abound in the essays. These include Esther Scheely-Newman’s fem­i­nist analy­sis of the pos­i­tive female pro­tag­o­nist in ​“Mother’s Gift Is Bet­ter Than Father’s Gift” and Penin­nah Schram’s dis­cus­sion of the place of rid­dles in Jew­ish oral tra­di­tion in ​“The King and the Old Wood­cut­ter.” Oth­er schol­ars have ana­lyzed the tales they chose by their deep struc­ture and psy­chic impli­ca­tions. Many explain cus­toms, geo­graph­i­cal locales, and sto­ry sources. Some read more smooth­ly in Eng­lish than oth­ers. Exten­sive bib­li­ogra­phies and notes sup­port their interpretations.

In the sim­ple sto­ry of a Pol­ish immigrant’s encounter with a snake across the thresh­old of his rur­al set­tle­ment house, the recent direc­tor finds a uni­ver­sal truth about how resource­ful new­com­ers make use of what­ev­er is at hand to come to terms with their new worlds by turn­ing ​“chaos into cos­mos.” In the sim­ple sto­ry of a Pol­ish immigrant’s encounter with a snake across the thresh­old of his rur­al set­tle­ment house, the recent direc­tor finds uni­ver­sal truth about how resource­ful new­com­ers make use of what­ev­er is at hand to come to terms with their new worlds by turn­ing ​“chaos into cos­mos.” So it is with The Pow­er of a Tale itself. The mul­ti­tude of voic­es here tell, present, and ana­lyze fifty years of sto­ries from var­i­ous per­spec­tives. From ​“chaos into cos­mos”— the col­lec­tion chal­lenges and excites, bring­ing the read­er to a new home.