Story Analysis Homework Help

Story Analysis

I will be sending copies of these stories to
Please read these stories

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Stories for Children (this is a stand-alone book). Read at least these specific stories:
"Menaseh’s Dream"
"When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw"
"The Elders of Chelm and Genendel’s Key"
"Zlateh the Goat"
"Tsirtsur and Peziza"
"Utzel and His Daughter, Poverty"
"Shrewd Todie and Lyzer the Miser"
"Mazel and Shlimazel" [a YiIDish Cinderella tale?]
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Nobel banquet speech and lecture. These two documents are available via the “Course Documents” link on the left side of the main screen of this course.
Joe Hayes, The Day It Snowed Tortillas, another story collection. All the stories by Joe Hayes are here: http://www.sfaol.com/life/hayes.html.
"La Llorona," available at

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/lxl01

Joe Hayes, "The Day After It Snowed Tortillas," and Ruth MacDonald, "The Day It Snowed Tortillas and the Hispanic Fairy Tale in New Mexico," both in Sitting at the Feet of the Past: Retelling the North American Folktale for Children, ed. Gary D. Schmidt and Donald R. Hettinga. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992.

Please answer these questions after reading the stories.

1 How would you describe the humor in Singer’s stories? 2 What adjectives would you use? This is a short answer that need not take 6 sentences.
Singer’s defense of literature for children in his Nobel speeches is impassioned and extreme–he probably did not really have a list of 500 reasons to write for children. His real claim to the Nobel rests on his adult novels and short stories, less on the books he wrote for children later in his career.3 How much belief do you have in his defense of children’s literature so late in his career?4 Is he just being defensive about his output in his later years?5 Please consider the Nobel speech audience as you think about this question.
You see in Singer’s collection of stories the culture of the oppressed Jews, living at the edge of Polish village life. But you don’t see the Christians. 7What do you suppose the culture of the Polish Christians was like, the dominant majority whom you rarely see in these stories? What kinds of material comforts would they likely have had?8 What kind of knowledge of Jews, either as a group or as individuals, would those from the dominant culture have had?

Joe Hayes is an English teacher in Albuquerque, and a storyteller in his spare time. He does speak Spanish, but is a member of the dominant majority [maybe it’s a dominant minority in Albuquerque, where only about 40% of the culture is white and "Anglo," as folks refer to the dominant culture there]. Racial and ethnic differences can run deep in such a cultural mix.

9 What evidence do you see in the stories of his Anglo influence? If you were Hayes, how would you go about getting these stories, and getting a reliable retelling? Please go beyond the influences cited in the articles that you have read.

10 If you were in Hayes’s position, living as an outsider to the culture you were trying to collect, physically different in a noticeable way, what changes would you make to the stories you found?11 What evidence do you see in the stories that Hayes has made changes to what you might have expected to find in a Mexican story?