
Scholarly “scavenger and excavator” as he calls himself, a multi-language translator, editor, progressive educator, and literary, cultural, and social critic Jack Zipes, recently came out with a collection of essays called Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales it’s worth reading, even if most of the stories, Eastern European in origin, by authors relatively unknown, allegorically reference 19th and early 20th-century history.
As Zipes persuasively argues, the dozen treasures, some of which he just happened upon in libraries, book shops, nooks, and crannies, in his lifelong pursuit of political fairy tales he believes may help readers, “build a more humane, utopian world”.
The book is part biography, part cultural criticism, all admiration. Written years ago with some expressionist-type illustrations, the tales Zipes unburies, he hopes may encourage readers to care about nature, communities, neighbors, especially those who live on the edge of societies, “the discarded, the marginal and the dispossessed.”
Although obscure, many of the authors he features were known in their day and accomplished in multiple art forms. What did they, at critical, erratic times do? They offered provocative, sly, fantasy worlds of how to get by, if not oppose, political threats.
Zipes opens his book with a tale of his own: “Once upon a time…” in 1943 a 6-year-old boy and his immigrant grandmother came upon Albert Einstein walking home from the Institute of Advanced Studies. She asks the great man what her grandson should do to become a famous scientist. His answer? “Fairy tales. He should read fairy tales.”
Zipes was that boy and the spell took. Fairy tales became his passion, his religion. He points out that the tales he has unburied are not didactic nor free of contradiction in their authors’ lives. An opposition artist may try out different fantasies. Day dreams he calls them.
His research is impressive as endnotes and bibliography attest. Women appear alongside of men, often members of the same political circles. Many were Austrian-Hungarian Jews and wrote non-fiction and poetry also rich in irony and profound critiques of totalitarianism. In time, however, their stories were buried by the opposition or could not keep up with the more popular and non-political tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, some of which were resurrected by psychoanalysts more interested in following Freud than fighting fascism.
Although it’s impossible to detail all the tales here one stands out because of its subject which became the 1942 Walt Disney sentimental blockbuster - Bambi. Zipes’ essay, which also forms the introduction to his 2022 translation of the original 1923 German book: Bambi, A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten, is a knockout of information and significance. Called “Born to be Killed: Bambi’s Courage and Felix Salten’s Dilemma,” it hauntingly notes the conflicted life of its Jewish author, a leading journalist of Viennese café society.
A “compassionate animal rights advocate” who hunted animals but differentiated between killing and murder, and whose need for fame drove him to eccentric behavior. Salten clearly saw what was happening around him to Jews. As Zipes writes, Salten’s Bambi is “a brilliant and profound study of how animals and minority groups throughout the world have been brutally treated” and, absent peace, an implicit, existentialist plea to go it alone. Hardly the movie. I'm Joan Baum.