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Storytelling gets us past tough situations Shalini Verma Filed on May 3, 2021 | Last updated on May 3, 2021 at 12.35 am This was in the late 70s, when we lived in a dusty mining town called Dhanbad in Eastern India. When I was seven, my father would come home from work and read to me from the pages of King Solomon’s Mines. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but he painstakingly translated every sentence in Hindi. The book had no pictures. So, in his distinctive animated style, he brought Kukuanaland to life, even mimicking Captain Good with his chattering dentures. He took me to a book shop to buy my first book a beautiful picture book of bedtime stories. By then reading in English got easier. I read the fairy tales so many times that I knew them by heart. Stories had to be mastered before they were retold. ....
How many of the “1001 Nights” were Jewish ones? This month marks the bicentenary of the birth of Richard F. Burton, the Victorian translator of “The Arabian Nights,” or “1001 Nights,” the medieval compendium of tales in Arabic about the storyteller Scheherazade, Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sindbad. The stories date back over centuries across a wide range of national cultures, with the first trace printed in 9th century Iraq, so it is unsurprising that part of the lasting impact of “Alf Laylah wa-Laylah,” which Burton translated in 16 volumes as “The Thousand Nights and a Night,” should be its Yiddishkeit. Historians have suggested that Burton, an explorer and ethnologist, resented the Jews for thwarting his diplomatic career when he was stationed in Syria in the aftermath of The Damascus Blood Libel. ....