Jane Yolen - Granny Rumple

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Granny Rumple

Jane Yolen

SHE WAS KNOWN AS GRANNY RUMPLE BECAUSE HER dress and face

were masses of wrinkles, or at least that's what my father's father's mother used to

say. Of course, the Yolens being notorious liars, it might not have been so. It might

simply have been a bad translation from the Yiddish. Or jealousy, Granny Rumple

having been a great beauty in her day.

Like my great-grandmother, Granny Rumple was a moneylender, one of the few

jobs a Jew could have in the Ukraine that brought them into daily contact with the

goyim. She could have had one of the many traditional women's roles—a

matchmaker, perhaps, or an opshprekherin giving advice and remedies, or an herb

vendor. But she was a moneylender because her husband had been one, and they

had no children to take over his business. My great-grandmother, on the other hand,

had learned her trade from her father and when he died and she was a widow with a

single son to raise, she followed in her father's footsteps. A sakh melokhes un veynik

brokhes: Many trades and little profit. It was a good choice for both of them.

If Granny Rumple's story sounds a bit like another you have heard, I am not

surprised. My father's father used to entertain customers at his wife's inn with a

rendition of Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish, passing it off as a story of his own

invention. And what is folklore, after all, but the recounting of old tales? We Yolens

have always borrowed from the best.

Great-grandmother's story of Granny Rumple was always told in an odd mixture

of English and Yiddish, but I am of the generation of Jew who never learned the old

tongue. Our parents were ashamed of it, the language of the ghetto. They used it

sparingly, for punchlines of off-color jokes or to commiserate with one another at

funerals. So my telling of Granny Rumple's odd history is necessarily my own. If I

have left anything out, it is due neither to the censorship of commerce nor art, but

the inability to get the whole thing straight from my aging relatives. As a Yolen ages,

he or she remembers less and invents more. It is lucky none of us is an historian.

As a girl, Granny Rumple's name was Shana and she had been pursued by all the

local boys. Even a Cossack or two had knocked loudly at her door of an evening.

Such was her beauty, she managed to turn even them away with a smile. When she

was finally led under the wedding canopy, the entire village was surprised, for she

married neither the chief rabbi's son, a dark-eyed scholar named Lev, nor the local

butcher, who was a fat, ribald widower, nor the half dozen others who had asked

her. Instead she chose Shmuel Zvi Bar Michael, the moneychanger. No one was

more surprised than he, for he was small, skinny, and extremely ugly, with his

father's large nose spread liberally across his face. Like many ugly people, though,

he was also gentle, kind, and intensely interested in the happiness of others.

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Jane Yolen - Granny Rumple

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