skygiants

Yuletide reveals!

It will probably not surprise many people to learn that I, a person with many swirling feelings about the Yiddish language and queer Judaism and complicated sibling relationships and problematic revolutions, wrote un mir zenen ale shvester, a Fiddler on the Roof fic for the 2018 Yiddish Folksbiene production. Way early in the Yuletide season, when sovay (with whom I saw the original production) asked if I'd happened to get this assignment, I joked that I could probably combine a bunch of reconditarmonia's fantastic prompts by writing lesbian Shprintze as a socialist journalist going back to Russia to write about the October Revolution and meeting her sisters there, but I wasn't going to do that because I absolutely didn't have time to go on the required Russian Revolution research dive before deadline .... well. Anyway. Here we are!

To Avoid Stagnation, The Romance Must Progress! is a pinch-hit I picked up for Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-Kun. As soon as I saw the prompt asking about how Sakura and Nozaki-kun finally get together I realized I'd had a fairly clear idea about this in my head since I first watched the anime in 2014 or so. So I sat down and wrote this out more or less in one night ... and then realized my recipient was also almost entirely caught up on the manga, which I had never actually read, and zoomed through 100 chapters of scanlations in a panic on December 31st to make sure that none of it outright contradicted anything I'd written. A nice last-minute 11-volume boost to my 2020 reading list! Anyway this was extremely fun to write and gave me an outlet for all the screwball energy that wasn't going into un mir zenen ale shvester.

For the first time in a couple years, I also managed to post a Yuletide treat, that which is worth waiting for. Back when people were posting their letters, which also happened to be square in the middle of my Queen's Thief spiral, I'd also written a couple of bits and pieces of a Kamet/Costis fic with the vague intention of bulking them out into something much longer and more thoughtful as a treat for lirazel's prompt later in the Yuletide cycle .... as it turned out, that did not happen! What did happen is that three hours or so before Yuletide go-live, after finally completing all edits to my two assignment fics (and reading 100 chapters of Nozaki-kun), I looked at my bits and pieces once again and decided I probably had just enough time to write the connecting tissue that would pull them together into something coherent. (I did not, however, have enough time to come up with a good title.)

Thank you to genarti, saramily, gramarye1971, and Roommate M for all the extremely useful and reassuring beta reads, and to everyone who sniped me repeatedly by writing such INCREDIBLE gifts that I have barely had any opportunity to read anything else in the collection yet because I just keep going back to the things that were written for me instead!

A friend of mine diagnosed, correctly, that I was the correct audience for In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times and passed me on her copy -- it's a collection of Yiddish-language short stories, translated and aimed at kids.

The stories are broken down into three sections - "Bravery," "Rebellion," "Justice," and "Wonder" - so, I mean, there is very clearly an agenda (that I approve of!) at work here in the selections. This made it no less hilarious to me when I hit the story titled The Wise Hat, about a magical hat that confers wisdom on a king's advisors, which concludes as follows:

By the next day, a revolution began. King Yuhavit was decapitated. The former fool, who remained a fool, was hanged. The former sage, who had now also become a fool, was shot. Their clothing and their hats were destroyed. And now everything is as it should be.

I MEAN, OKAY.

Of the eighteen stories in the collection, I would estimate that only three or four are really actively Jacobin, but they definitely add a zesty punch to a collection that is otherwise full of, like, Some Pretty Leaves Travel From Autumn Land To Green Land and The Diary Of An Adorable Young Squirrel.

From another story, about identical twin brothers:

Because aside from a healthy chunk of real estate, the brothers had also inherited some bad blood -- blue blood, their parents had called it. The parents were even proud of it, and this in itself was enough to show the kinds of brains they had, not knowing that healthy people's blood is red and not blue!

...actually, now that I'm looking, it seems like all of the really revolutionary ones are by Moyshe Nadir, an author and Yiddish theater critic who was so rude in his reviews that he started having to attend the theater in disguise to avoid getting thrown out. Clearly, an author to investigate!

Other turn-of-the-century authors in the anthology include Leon Elbe (airy little folktales about leaves and kites and the moon), Jacob Kreplak (elliptical and somewhat melancholy child's-eye-view realism), Jacob Reisfader (folktales about virtuous children), Rachel Shabad (folktales about virtuous adults) and Sonia Kantor (Daily Lives of Animals; no biographical details known! a mystery!)