I realize I should have gotten this up earlier in the day, but between church, Sunday school, baseball practice, checking in on a sick family member and going to a movie, the day got away from me.

I opened a box of books the other day, and out tumbled a Russian folktale, The Night It Rained Pancakes. It's a wonderful tale about fooling the political authorities, which Russians even to this day take on like an Olympic sport. (Word to the wise: Never pass up a tag sale at a library; you never know what bit of culture you will find to pass along to the children you have adopted from Russia.)

As rendered in English by Mirra Ginsburg, the tale involves two brothers, Ivan and Stepan, in a classic Russian set-up of a shrewd character and a simpleton. Ivan, the more cunning of the two, unearths a pot of gold and immediately begins to worry about what he will do to keep his brother from blabbing the find around town. And especially from letting word of the discovery leak back to the local lord, who would surely confiscate the treasure.

And so Ivan sets up a little scheme that plays on his brother's gullibility: He strews mixed-up clues across the village-- including pancakes on a tree--and leads Stepan to discover them. Predictably, Stepan quickly spills the beans about the gold. But when he is called in front of the lord to talk about it, he tells a tale so full of outlandish events like pancakes raining down from the sky, fish caught in rabbit traps and rabbits in fish traps that the lord kicks him out of the manor (not without beating him first).

Mirra Ginsburg, I discovered, made something of a career re-telling classic Russian folktales. Born in 1909 in what is now Belarus, she was captivated by the tales early on, telling one interviewer: "I opened one of the books, and was captured for life. The magical world has stayed with me ever since."

Pancakes is not one of her better known works; in fact you'll probably have a hard time finding a copy through most e-commerce book sites. Ginsburg, who died in 2000, is better known for Chick and the Duckling, Mushroom in the Rain and Clay Boy, all based on Russian folk tales. But Russian literature scholars may also know her as the translator of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a dystopian tale that forshadowed George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and of Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

I wish she were still here, so I could ask her questions about the folktales and build a bridge to a new generation of readers. I guess I'll just have to find a way to make it out of pancakes.