ABSTRACT
A consideration of The Silver Thread of Fear, one of the major tales of the sub-cycle of The Ruby Tree, part of the Cycle of Manasseh of the Marks-Khymberg Jewish women’s storytelling tradition. Transmitted by the women of an Anglo-Dutch Jewish family, the Marks-Khymberg tradition contains examples and variants of many rare and well-known international folktales, folktale motifs, legends and religious tales in its aesthetic. The Silver Thread of Fear is a rare and unusual tale, published here for the first time. Along with the many hundreds of other stories in the Marks-Khymberg repertoire, The Silver Thread of Fear was almost consigned to oblivion in the Holocaust, but survived to emerge from the silence today among present-day custodians of the family tradition. The application of annotated transcripts from live telling of the tale and commentary are used to show the recovery of a Jewish women’s tradition, almost silenced by genocide, which restores an often-suppressed female perspective to well-known folktale motifs. This brings a long-neglected story out of its historical silence and shows how the content of the story seems to prefigure the contexts of its telling.
