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Lilith's Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural
| Title | Lilith's Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2025-07-09 21:34:07 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
Once upon a time in the city of Tunis, a flirtatious young girl was drawn into Lilith's dangerous web by glancing repeatedly at herself in the mirror. It seems that a demon daughter of the legendary Lilith had made her home in the mirror and would soon completely possess the unsuspecting girl. Such tales of terror and the supernatural occupy an honored position in the Jewish folkloric tradition.Howard Schwartz has superbly translated and retold fifty of the best of these folktales, now collected into one volume for the first time. Gathered from countless sources ranging from the ancient Middle East to twelfth-century Germany and later Eastern European oral tradition, these captivating stories include Jewish variants of the Pandora and Persephone myths and of such famous folktales as "The Fisherman and His Wife," "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," and "Bluebeard," as well as several tales from the Middle Ages that have never before been published.Focusing on crucial turning points in life--birth, marriage, and death--the tales feature wandering spirits, marriage with demons, werewolves, speaking heads, possession by dybbuks (souls of the dead who enter the bodies of the living), and every other kind of supernatural adversary. Readers will encounter a carpenter who is haunted when he makes a violin from the wood of a coffin; a wife who saves herself from the demoness her husband has inadvertently married by agreeing to share him for an hour each day; and the age-old tale of Lilith, Adam's first wife, who refused to submit to him and instead banished herself from the Garden of Eden to give birth to the demons of the world.Drawn from Rabbinic sources, medieval Jewish folklore, Hasidic texts, and oral tradition, these stories will equally entrance readers of Jewish literature and those with an affection for fantasy and the supernatural.
Review
I read this voraciously when I was a teen, but rereading it now, I'm less enamored. What I liked about it originally was how the supernatural was interwoven with the everyday: the locked cellar door or garden gate might be a portal to hell; the bedroom mirror might be a source of enchantment.Rereading it as an adult, though, the book feels problematic on several levels. Each tale is told three times: once in a brief, spoilery summary for no reason in the introduction, once in the book itself, in better prose, and then a third recap with annotations and commentary in the notes section--I think the book would have been stronger with little or no introduction. I would also have loved some clearer arrangement of stories: Hungarian tales from one century are interspersed with Tunisian stories from another. It would have been interesting to see stories from the same region and era together and see patterns, get a sense of the fears and tensions of each distinct culture. It feels like a missed opportunity.In terms of content, most of the stories chosen focus on men's strengths and flaws, with women mainly present as victims and temptresses, with very few exceptions. My sense that this was Schwartz's choice rather than purely an issue of source material is strengthened by the illustrations, which mainly feature men bundled in traditional coats and furs confronting naked women. It makes me wonder what fascinating women's tales were left out of this eclectic collection.
