Briar Rose
Not having had a traditional childhood, my familiarity with fairy tales is somewhat limited. I remember buying large fancy illustrated books for my daughter, and then for my grandaughters, and being surprised that so many fairy tales were rather grim (no pun intended).
Briar Rose, by Jane Yolen, is one of our required readings in the Holocaust class I'm taking at Ferrum College. It is fiction; it was written as Young Adult literature but fits into Adult catagories by the nature of it's story. Based on Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose is a fascinating mystery the central character, Becca, eventually resolves. All Becca's life, her grandmother has told her the story of Briar Rose over and over again, but has never revealed her own story, her own background, her own Holocaust horror, not even to Becca's mother who is her grown daughter.
I had to Google Sleeping Beauty because all I could bring to mind was a story of a beautiful princess sleeping in a glass coffin (Disney?) after eating a poisoned apple, and not waking until she was kissed by a prince. Apparently, there were vines full of sharp briars that grew up and hid the castle from view.
In Grandmother Gemma's story, the briars symbolized barbed wire.
Apparently, Jane Yolen had great emotional difficulty doing the research to write Briar Rose, particularly when she interviewed survivors of the death camps. Prior to writing BR, she wrote The Devil's Arithmetic in 1988, about a young girl who rushes out of her family's Passover Seder to find herself in a small village in Nazi-occupied Poland, and then in a concentration camp where she learns about her family's history. Kirsten Dunst starred in a cable TV adaptation of The Devil's Arithmetic and the story was changed a bit.
Both books are in local libraries, or available via inter-library loan.
Briar Rose, by Jane Yolen, is one of our required readings in the Holocaust class I'm taking at Ferrum College. It is fiction; it was written as Young Adult literature but fits into Adult catagories by the nature of it's story. Based on Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose is a fascinating mystery the central character, Becca, eventually resolves. All Becca's life, her grandmother has told her the story of Briar Rose over and over again, but has never revealed her own story, her own background, her own Holocaust horror, not even to Becca's mother who is her grown daughter.
I had to Google Sleeping Beauty because all I could bring to mind was a story of a beautiful princess sleeping in a glass coffin (Disney?) after eating a poisoned apple, and not waking until she was kissed by a prince. Apparently, there were vines full of sharp briars that grew up and hid the castle from view.
In Grandmother Gemma's story, the briars symbolized barbed wire.
Apparently, Jane Yolen had great emotional difficulty doing the research to write Briar Rose, particularly when she interviewed survivors of the death camps. Prior to writing BR, she wrote The Devil's Arithmetic in 1988, about a young girl who rushes out of her family's Passover Seder to find herself in a small village in Nazi-occupied Poland, and then in a concentration camp where she learns about her family's history. Kirsten Dunst starred in a cable TV adaptation of The Devil's Arithmetic and the story was changed a bit.
Both books are in local libraries, or available via inter-library loan.
posted by Marion | 8:44 PM
2 Comments:
Although I've not read Jane Yolen, I know she's a powerful and well respected writer - I'll look out for Briar Rose. The realities of the holocaust are so dark and grisly, it must be hard for anyone writing about it to do so with any kind of ease - so much pain, inhumanity and suffering can but only tear at our souls. All respect to you for doing this course, Marion.
Thanks, Vanilla. I am absolutely stunned as I realize how little I knew about the Holocaust until I signed up for this course. If you haven't read "Sarah's Key" by Tatiana de Rosnay (published in 20 languages now) that's the book that started this quest for me. It is a shattering fictional story based on true facts about the Holocaust roundup in Paris. We all need to learn and remember, so it never happens again.
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