Babushka: A Christmas Tale

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This is the story of a “creature” who is loathed and feared, yet who is actually lonely and has strong maternal feelings and yearns for a relationship with a child. She finds a way to be a surrogate grandmother. The story’s meaning is captured by a line toward the end of the book: “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!” 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.” 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.

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. 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. 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!") 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. 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.

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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.” 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.” The rest of the message is lovely, especially knowing from reading other Polacco books, how much she treasured her relationship with her grandmother.

There was no deathbed confession, no tell-all letter, no smoking gun document left for the chronicler of her life. 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. 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. 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.

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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. Almost everybody has seen the Oliver Stone movie JFK,” she says, “and when I saw that movie [released in 1991] I came away thinking there’s probably a lot more to the story. I probably would have leaned – a lean, not a certainty – that there could be more to it. What that would look like I had no idea.” 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.