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So my son wound up picking Black Geese: A Baba Yaga Story From Russia for his fairy tale book report. It is a quintessentially Russian story, but its subject matter makes it seem like the last book you would ever want to read to a child adopted from Russia.
The basic story of Baba Yaga–and there are literally hundreds of variations on it across Eastern Europe–is of an old woman who lives in a house that can move about on chicken legs. Sometimes she is cranky but benevolent; more often than not she is mean and interacting with her is dangerous. In the version my son read, Baba Yaga kidnaps an unattended baby so she can eat him. The baby has been left with an older sister while his parents go off to market. Abandonement, fear, monsters–sounds like great bedtime reading for two kids out of a Russian orphanage, right?
While I was in college, I had to read a book by Bruno Bettelheim for a psychology class. Bettelheim has fallen out of favor now because he had this really dumb theory that autism was caused by mothers who were uncaring and distant. But The Uses of Enchantment has helped me to think about why stories like Baba Yaga still have a place on the bookshelves at my house.
The Uses of Enchantment focuses on what fairy tales mean and why they are important. Bettelheim worked off the classic Brothers Grimm tales, and didn’t get into Baba Yaga at all. But his basic idea was that the heroes of fairy tales go through a series of challenges before they succeed, and that, when kids hear these kinds of stories, they can begin to envision ways to deal with the difficulties in their own lives. Carry it through to today’s children’s stories, and watching Finding Nemo will do your kids more good than reading about the Care Bears.
But back to Baba Yaga. In the version we have, the little boy’s older sister rescues him, but only after she aids a series of helpless creatures that slow her journey to Baba Yaga’s hut. Each of the creatures gives her a talisman that she eventually uses to thwart Baba Yaga as the witch comes after her after she rescues her brother.
Challenges–adopted kids have had them in spades. Maybe we can be the creatures that give them the lucky charms they need to succeed in a new life.
