This is the second case in as many days that someone has mentioned Christian and Jewish tellings of the same story. I can add a third.
There is a Jorge Luis Borges tale (I don't have the title at hand) about a man who has a recurring dream showing him the location of a buried treasure in another city. His wife finally prevails on him to go find the treasure. When he gets to the site he is arrested for trespassing. When he tells his story, the policeman tells him, "I have a similar dream..." and proceeds to describe the first man's own home. When he's released, the man returns home and digs up the treasure in his own backyard. Nice story, no? A few years ago I came across the same story in a collection of Hasidic tales, I can't remember which. I suspect that there is a certain freedom with "intellectual property" between cultures esp. if there isn't a lot of material in translation. I've no reason to assert that it takes place more in one direction than the other. But we know that Yiddish playwrights regularly "adapted" English plays into Yiddish. (One reviewer seeing a Yiddish version of "Death of a Salesman" wrote that he'd just seen the original.) I can see Yiddish tales being mined by other writers for ideas. The Russian-Jewish-Argentine writer Alberto Gerchunoff was supposed to be very influential on Luis Borges, so it isn't impossible that there was some cultural cross-over. I was looking for a quote I remember as attributed to Picasso along the lines of "originally is directly proportional to the obscurity of your sources." Stealing from Yiddish writers would, at one time, have been a safe bet. Like Shakespeare stealing his plots from Italian writers before they were translated into English. -- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz p.s. I heard another variation on the Shammas story where two public figures told the same story. Bill Clinton claimed that while he was president, he and Hilary were stopped at gas-station and while they were waiting Hilary went into the shop. She was there a long time and when she returned she told Bill that the owner was her old high school sweetheart and they talked about old times. Bill remarked that had she not broken up with her old boyfriend, she might have ended up the wife of a gas station owner instead of first lady. To this, Hilary responded, "No, if I'd stayed with him, he'd be president and you'd own a gas station." It turns out that the story -- doubtful on many levels -- really belongs to Dan Rather, who claims this actually took place to him and his wife and he'd told the story to Bill. Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
