GennaRose Nethercott uses folklore to explore a painful, and personal, history
A new novel reimagines Baba Yaga — a crone figure in Slavic folklore — as a Jewish woman living in an Eastern European town during a time of pogroms.
For centuries, the crone Baba Yaga has been a figure in Slavic folklore — the kind of character who might lend you a magical candle or kill you and use your skull to decorate her house on chicken legs.
In her debut novel, Thistlefoot, author and folklorist GennaRose Nethercott reimagines Baba Yaga as a Jewish woman living in an Eastern European shtetl in 1919, during a time of civil war and pogroms. Through the crone and her story, Nethercott explores the idea of folklore as a retelling of a memory too painful to talk plainly about.
"Stories allow us to grapple, but it also allows
