It Could Always Be... (Spinning Silver)

[starfishstar]

Fandom: Spinning Silver – Naomi Novik

Summary:

It had always been clear to me that people from throughout our quarter came to my grandfather for advice, knowing his reputation for wisdom and clear-eyed business sense. What took me longer to notice—because my eye wasn’t trained for it—was that people sought out my grandmother as well.

Characters: Miryem Mandelstam, Miryem's grandmother, other characters

Notes: The first of my Purimgifts fics for chestnut_pod, belatedly cross-posting here... Here are the original notes:

Happy Purim – chag Purim sameach – chestnut_filly! It’s been such fun to write for you. We actually matched on a different fandom, but I felt drawn to write something Jewish and fun for this fun Jewish holiday, so I veered over into the world of Spinning Silver instead. :-)

A few notes: I hope you don’t mind that I set this within the headcanon of the original, short-story version of Spinning Silver, rather than the novel. It shouldn’t matter if you haven’t read the short story, though; just consider this a canon-divergent AU in which Miryem outwits the Staryk instead of marrying him, and stays in Vysnia near her grandparents.

You’ll almost certainly recognize many other elements as well, because I set out here to fuse Miryem’s world with some classic Yiddish folktales. I’ll give the sources of those tales in the endnotes. (There’s also a brief Yiddish glossary at the end, for anyone not already familiar with the terms used here.)

Thank you to my friend A. for betareading!

Read on AO3, or here below:

 

IT COULD ALWAYS BE...

I was pleased with my new life in the city. My house stood near to my grandfather’s, only a few doors further past the red stables. I spent every Shabbos at my grandparents’ house and many other evenings as well, getting to know the cousins and extended family who had been strangers for most of my life.

It had always been clear to me that people from throughout our quarter came to my grandfather for advice, knowing his reputation for wisdom and clear-eyed business sense. What took me longer to notice—because my eye wasn’t trained for it—was that people sought out my grandmother as well.

Mothers and young wives and sometimes men, too, the craftsmen and laborers who made their living within our quarter, came and sat at my grandmother’s clean-scrubbed wooden table to savor a slice of one of her rich cakes and tell her what was on their minds.

My grandmother listened, never saying a word until they’d poured out all of their worry into her patient silence. When she did give her advice, she didn’t say very much: a few carefully chosen words, or perhaps a quotation from one of the great rabbis and thinkers of the past. People sometimes went away looking a little baffled by her words, but in the end they always seemed satisfied.

I first came to understand the depth of my grandmother’s wisdom that next winter, the winter after the year in which I’d met and outwitted the Staryk lord.

I was helping my grandmother chop carrots for tsimmes when a man knocked at the kitchen door. He politely stamped snow from his boots, then came to sit at the table when my grandmother offered him a seat.

“Rebbetzin, I don’t know what to do!” he cried. “Our house is so small and so crowded. We have six children; and now that my wife’s parents have come to live with us, there’s barely enough room to stand up from the table.”

My grandmother listened to the man pour out his woes as she served him a piece of plum cake. Then she asked, “Have you considered bringing your chickens inside the house?”

The man was surprised, to say the least, but my grandmother was respected in our community. So he did as she said: he went home and brought his chickens to roost inside the family’s small house.

Perhaps you’ve heard this tale before? I’m told it’s become quite well known, although in the usual way of folklore, my grandmother’s name has gotten lost from the telling of it. At any rate, the man came to see my grandmother several more times that winter, each time even more desperate at the noise and chaos in his home. And each time, my grandmother gave him an unlikely piece of advice, to bring the goat from the yard inside the house, or the cow.

As the spring thaw approached, and the man was near the end of his wits, my grandmother advised him, in her usual quiet way, to let all the animals out of his house and return them to his small plot of land outside.

The man came again a week later, but when my grandmother moved to set a plate and a piece of cake on the table for him, he shook his head. “I only came to wish you good Shabbos, rebbetzin,” he said. “And I wanted to thank you for your wonderful advice. My house is so peaceful! So quiet! No clucking and bleating and mooing, just the sweet voices of my beloved children as they play and the conversations of my kind in-laws as they help around the house. It’s paradise!” And he went away, beaming and waving back to my grandmother.

“But—” I began, looking at my grandmother. “But that’s only—”

She gave me a small smile, as she went to lift the Shabbos candles down from the high cabinet. “Sometimes people only need a little help to see the blessings they already have.”




End notes:

This is a classic Yiddish tale, retold in many times and ways! Specifically, I drew on the picture book version It Could Always Be Worse by Margot Zemach.

Next up: Miryem is called upon to dispense some wisdom of her own…

(the above short fic serves as something of a prequel for my main Purimgifts fic: MIRYEM AND THE PURIM GOBLINS)