When we came to America, we brought anger and socialism and hunger. We also brought our demons.
In Burning Girls and Other Stories, Veronica Schanoes crosses borders and genres with stories of fierce women at the margins of society burning their way toward the center. This debut collection introduces readers to a fantasist in the vein of Karen Russell and Kelly Link, with a voice all her own.
Emma Goldman—yes, that Emma Goldman—takes tea with the Baba Yaga and truths unfold inside of exquisitely crafted lies. In "Among the Thorns," a young woman in seventeenth century Germany is intent on avenging the brutal murder of her peddler father, but discovers that vengeance may consume all that it touches. In the showstopping, awards finalist title story, "Burning Girls," Schanoes invests the immigrant narrative with a fearsome fairytale quality that tells a story about America we may not want—but need—to hear.
Dreamy, dangerous, and precise, with the weight of the very oldest tales we tell, Burning Girls and Other Stories introduces a writer pushing the boundaries of both fantasy and contemporary fiction.
Release date:
March 2, 2021
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
336
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They made my father dance in thorns before they killed him.
I used to think that this was a metaphor, that they beat him with thorny vines, perhaps. But I was wrong about that.
They made him dance.
* * *
Just over 150 years ago, in 1515, as the Christians count, on a bright and clear September morning, they chained a Jewish man named Johann Pfefferkorn to a column in our cemetery. They left enough length for him to be able to walk around the column. Then they surrounded him with coals and set them aflame, raking them ever closer to Herr Pfefferkorn, until he was roasted alive.
They said that Herr Pfefferkorn had confessed to stealing, selling, and mutilating their Eucharist, planning to poison all the Christians in Magdeburg and Halberstadt combined and then to set fire to their homes, kidnapping two of their children in order to kill them and use their blood for ritual purposes, poisoning wells, and practicing sorcery.
I readily believe that poor Herr Pfefferkorn confessed to all of that.
A man will confess to anything when he is being tortured.
They say that, at the last, my father confessed to stealing every taler he had ever possessed.
But I don’t believe that. Not my father.
* * *
They say that in their year 1462, in the village of Pinn, several of us bought the child of a farmer and tortured it to death. They also say that in their 1267, in Pforzheim, an old woman sold her granddaughter to us, and we tortured her to death and threw her body into the River Enz.
* * *
Who are these people who trade away their children for gold?
My parents would not have given away me or any of my brothers for all the gold in Hesse. Are gentiles so depraved that at last, they cannot love even their own children?
* * *
I was seven when my father disappeared. At first we did not worry. My parents were pawnbrokers in Hoechst; my mother ran the business out of our house and my father traveled the countryside of Hesse, peddling the stock she thus obtained, and trading with customers in nearby towns, during the week. He tried to be with us for Shabbos, but it was not so unusual for the candles to burn down without him.
It was almost always only a matter of days before he came back, looming large in our doorway, and swept me into the air in a hug redolent of the world outside Hoechst. I was the youngest and the only girl, and though fathers and mothers both are said to rejoice more greatly in their sons than in their daughters, I do believe that my father preferred me above all my brothers.
My father was a tall man, and I am like him in that, as in other things. I have his thick black hair and his blue eyes. But my father’s eyes laughed at the world, and I have instead my mother’s temperament, so I was a solemn child.
When my father lifted me in his arms and kissed me, his beard stroked my cheek. I was proud of my father’s beard, and he took such care of it: so neat and trim it was, not like my zeyde’s beard had been, all scraggly and going every which way. And white. My mother’s father’s beard was white, too. My father’s was black as ink, and I never saw a white hair in it.
* * *
We had a nice house, not too small and not too big, and we lived in a nice area of Hoechst, but not too nice. My parents grew up in the ghetto of Frankfurt am Main, but the ghetto in Frankfurt is but a few streets, and there are so many of us. So we Jews are mobile by necessity.
Even though it is dangerous on the road.
And Hoechst is a nice place, and we had a nice home. But not too nice. My mother had selected it when she was already pregnant with my eldest brother. “Too nice and they are jealous,” she told me, “so not too nice. But not nice enough, and they won’t come and do business. And,” she added, “I wanted clean grounds for my children to play on.”
We had some Jewish neighbors, and it was their children I mostly played with. The Christian children were nice enough, but they were scared of us sometimes, or scorned us, and I never knew what to expect. I had a friend named Inge for a while, but when her older sister saw us together, she turned red and smashed my dolly’s head against a tree. Then she got to her feet and ran home, and her sister glared at me.
I was less friendly after that, although my father fixed my dolly when he came home that week and put a bandage on my head to match hers when I asked him to.
Some feel there is safety in numbers and in closeness, but my mother thought differently. “Too many of us, too close together,” she said, “and they think we’re plotting against them. Of course, they don’t like it when we move too far into their places, either. I do what I can to strike the right balance, liebchen,” she said.
This was my mother, following the teachings of Maimonides, who wrote that we should never draw near any extreme, but keep to the way of the righteous, the golden mean. In this way, she sought to protect her family.
Perhaps she was successful, for the Angel of Death did not overtake us at home.
* * *
Death caught up with my father when he was on the road, but we did not worry overmuch at first. My mother had already begun to worry when he was still not home for the second Shabbos, but even that was not the first time, and I did not worry at all. Indeed, I grew happier, for the farther away my father traveled, the more exciting his gifts for me were when he arrived home.
But Mama sat with my uncle Leyb, who lived with us, fretting, their heads together like brother and sister. Even though Uncle Leyb was my father’s younger brother, he was fair-haired, like my mother. I loved him very much, though not in the way I loved my parents. Uncle Leyb was my playmate, my friend, my eldest brother, if my brothers had spent time with a baby like me. But Uncle Leyb was also old enough to be my parents’ confidant. Sometimes he went with my father, and sometimes he stayed and helped my mother.
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