Babushka: A Christmas Tale

Product Information

I wish I would take more joy in this moment, I do take a sense of relief and satisfaction that I’m at the end, but it wasn’t something I relished. I just felt an obligation to tell a difficult story.” Like so many before her though, she found herself in the irresistible tractor beam of the Kennedy assassination, and the unanswered questions about what happened on that sunny day in Dealey Plaza that still affect attitudes to government to this day.

It would have made for fascinating viewing, but the more time she spent with Cobb the more she began to suspect that something about her story didn’t add up. Look her up on Wikipedia and you will find a lengthy entry about her extraordinary life as a pioneer, adventurer and champion of women’s rights. A number of people fell down the JFK assassination rabbit hole never to return,” she writes, “and I wasn’t in a hurry to become one of them.”Darn! I just hate books where wolves are made out (as they are in many fairy tales, and this is a sort of fairy tale) as aggressive against humans and as vicious/bad/evil. Unfortunately, that’s what happens in a part of this story. Although I have nothing to say against the moral Patricia Polacco seeks to inculcate in her young readers, with this revisionist tale - "Those who judge one another on what they hear or see, and not on what they know of them in their hearts, are fools indeed!" declares one old woman, after the happy reunion of Baba Yaga and Victor - I wish she has used some other folk-figure to illustrate it. Baba Yaga is meant to be fearsome, but also ambiguous. She's a villain - except when she isn't, and is helping (sometimes reluctantly) the hero and/or heroine. She's the figure of the old woman, both feared and respected - a figure of power: dangerous, but not always adversarial. To make her into a cozy old grandmother - a character whose sole desire is to be involved with child-rearing - is like a slap in the face, whether Polacco intended it or not, to all those readers, of whatever gender, who need to see a range of feminine characters in their stories. This has not been an easy process,” she says. “It was a reluctant process for me. It’s not an easy story to tell or one that I enjoy telling, frankly. It’s a tough story to talk about America and a woman I know and show what I found out about her and publicly say it.

Her answers were bizarre, off the rails,” she says. “She seemed first of all thrilled that I had found June Cobb. I expected her to walk out in a huff that I was looking into this or I had come up with a wild theory. Her book even builds a convincing case for Jerrie being a CIA agent with the cryptonym QJWIN, whose role was to recruit killers for an assassination squad that originally targeted Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. In this book Baba Yaga is represented as Babushka. The story starts with the explanation of her loneliness because she lives alone and other babushkas avoid her because they consider her an evil creature. Baba Yaga wants to have a grandson and comes to one house to live with them and help with a child named by Victor free of charge. She loves Victor and spends all of time in the forest with him. One day she has to leave him with tears in her eyes. Later Victor comes to the forest missing his new Babushka and gets surrounded by wolves. Baba Yaga rescues him. Everyone becomes grateful to her. “From that time on, she was known as Babushka Baba Yaga.” “For the rest of her days she kissed many eyes and held scores of hearts in her good keeping”. The rest of the message is lovely, especially knowing from reading other Polacco books, how much she treasured her relationship with her grandmother.One woman did come forward years later to say she was the Babushka Lady, and that two men claiming to work for the government took her camera away, but her claim was largely dismissed because the camera she said she was using was not invented at the time. A woman called Babushka (although she appears youngish in the early panels) who is famous for her housekeeping smells cinnamon one night and steps outside to see the Three Wise Men on their way to find baby Jesus. They invite her to come with them. Naturally she doesn't know what they're talking about so she declines and goes to bed. The next morning she is overcome with an obsessive desire to follow them and goes running off down the road. Naturally she doesn't and ends up wandering the earth for all eternity, dispensing the occasional treat to a tot to make up for never giving a gift to the Christ Child. This book can be used with students ages K-3. Because of its high lexile level and adult directed code (AD570L-AD670L), I would recommend it as a read-aloud. Educational concepts that can be taught are characters, plot, main events and summarizing. Topics to explore with students include endangered species, prejudice (judging people based on their appearance), grandparents and extended family (who don’t necessarily have to be blood relations), diversity in family structure and society, and foreign culture and language. Intriguing! This story of an old woman eternally searching for the Christ Child whom she passed up the opportunity to see at the nativity is new to me, and apparently subject to debate. The cover claims it is a "Russian folktale" but Russian reviewers are unfamiliar with it and suggest it is Polish or perhaps made up by Mikolaycak. I'm more inclined to believe the doubters as the story didn't seem to quite work for me, but that may be a flaw in the retelling.

The author's surname is Polish which makes sense because the Poles are mainly Catholics, and Nativity legends play a big role in the Catholic culture, so my educated guess would be that he either reworked an original Polish tale (possibly, sincerely believing it was Russian although the difference between the two cultures is huge) or simply made it all up as a conscious case of literary mystification. However, Nativity stories, including the Three Wise Men, don't make part of the Russian Christian Orthodox culture, and there are definitely no Babushkas bringing gifts to Russian kids, we have Father Frost to do that! Jerrie’s explanation for what she was doing there stretched credibility to the limit: she said she had been hired by Life magazine to fly a reporting team to Dallas to cover the presidential visit, but that when they heard he had been assassinated they abandoned the assignment and left.

Shipping Terms

In this book the character of Baba Yaga is good and kind. She loves children and doesn’t want to eat them. She becomes a true Russian babushka. Students should notice this fact. The text is authorial and it doesn’t relate to a Russian folktale. Therefore I would call it unauthentic. This is a remake of an old Russian folk tale. It includes elements of Russian folklore (including Russian expressions), a creature of legends and a moral lesson. ("Those who judge one another on what they hear or see, and not on what they know of them in their hearts, are fools indeed!")

If that were not startling enough, she also came to suspect that Cobb was a mysterious character known to Kennedy investigators as the Babushka Lady, who was the closest person filming the president at the moment he was shot, but who vanished after the assassination, along with her all-important footage. Finding the Babushka Lady (so called because of her triangular ‘babushka’ headscarf) and her close-quarters film of the fatal moment has been something of a holy grail for JFK investigators for the past 60 years. I felt that she presented a facade, some of which was true. She was a pioneering woman, that was true, she was a very capable woman, but there is an enigma that is almost impossible to pin down.” She says that while she cannot be certain who the Babushka Lady is: “I am certain that the Babushka [Lady] is an under-researched character, that she was completely overlooked. If that happened today there would be a manhunt for her and you would expect to see the footage.” But she was happy; she technically denied being June, then proceeded to tell me lots of things about June that no one would know unless they worked closely with June or were June. By the way, the book cover says that the author is also the illustrator, and I absolutely love the cover illustration with this adorable old lady, but the fact remains that what she wears is NOT Russian national dress (although it could be Polish, I'm no expert), her hair is done in a way no Russian village woman would wear it, she is portrayed next to a stove which is not Russian, and she's holding a broom of a kind totally unknown-of in Russia before 1991.

Terms of Sale

The story's great, just please don't assume Russian kids know it or believe in non-existent magical Babushkas. This "legend" has in fact been the subject of much ridicule by the Russian Internet community lately as a fine example of how little the Westerners know about the Russian culture that they're prepared to believe any unrelated old tale.