uses its fairy tale not as a false reassurance that everything's going to turn out okay but as a look at the way we use stories to structure our lives and the way highly symbolic stories can resonate deeply with us.
Yes, this. And also Yolen knows that fairy tales, which can be extremely dark, can make more sense as a framework for extreme situations than stories we consider "realistic." The people who survived the Holocaust, more often than not, only did so because of a long sequence of coincidences, unlikely escapes, and weird events; everyone who didn't get those, or who had only five skin-of-their-teeth escapes rather than six, became one of the 6 million. That's especially brought home in Yolen's chilling afterward, where she notes that in real life, of the 300,000 people at Chelmno, only seven survived.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-10 05:39 pm (UTC)uses its fairy tale not as a false reassurance that everything's going to turn out okay but as a look at the way we use stories to structure our lives and the way highly symbolic stories can resonate deeply with us.
Yes, this. And also Yolen knows that fairy tales, which can be extremely dark, can make more sense as a framework for extreme situations than stories we consider "realistic." The people who survived the Holocaust, more often than not, only did so because of a long sequence of coincidences, unlikely escapes, and weird events; everyone who didn't get those, or who had only five skin-of-their-teeth escapes rather than six, became one of the 6 million. That's especially brought home in Yolen's chilling afterward, where she notes that in real life, of the 300,000 people at Chelmno, only seven survived.