For my new piece on The Ostracon, “Portrait of an Anti-Fascist Gravedigger,” I profile Jack Zipes, perhaps the world’s leading expert on folk and fairytales and a retired German professor here in Minneapolis. We discuss the role of storytelling in social change, his response as a Jewish man to the January 6 Capitol insurrection, and his efforts to republish out-of-print antifascist children’s stories in the era of Trump:
“I am a gravedigger,” writes Jack Zipes in the preface to the book Yussuf the Ostrich. “I do not dig graves to bury the dead. I dig up graves to bring the dead back to life.” In the last portion of his own life, the 84-year-old folklorist and retired German professor is doing what he’s always done—studying, translating, adapting, and publishing folk tales from decades and centuries past, but with a new focus. Through Little Mole & Honey Bear, the imprint he founded in 2018, he’s unearthing anti-fascist and pacifist children’s books that have fallen out of circulation and republishing them for readers today. “I feel in my last days, in my old age, I’m doing what I can. In everything that I do, I want to resist what’s going on,” he recently told me. “I’m unburying these books before I’m buried.”
An illustration from Emery Kelen’s 1943 book Yussuf the Ostrich.