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The Sisters of the Winter Wood Is a Transformative Fairy Tale
While I enjoy fairy tales set in the vagueness of the long ago and faraway, I truly love when they are situated in a specific place and time. The fairy story—the folk tale—exists outside of history in a way; it imparts morals that seek to be beyond a place and time. When that esoteric message gets pinned to a culture, a people, that’s when all its possible meanings are really put the to the test. The meaning of stories change according to their tellers, and their audiences. Rena Rossner’s The Sisters of the Winter Wood takes place in Dubossary, a small town on the Ukraine/Moldova border, in the late 19th century. If my history of the region were better, I’m sure I could pinpoint an exact date, so specific is its historical context.
Liba and Laya Lieb live with their parents in the woods outside of Dubossary. The family is uncomfortably embedded in the community; both central members, and something without. Their mother converted to Judaism when she married their father, and though she is careful in her observance, she’s always muttered about, called an outsider. Their father, by contrast, is so strict in his observance he won’t even accept the meat of the local kosher butchers. This puts him outside the community in his own way, even while it marks him as man of indelible religious conviction. They are both central, and on the edges.
Early in the novel, the girls receive word that their father’s father—a Rebbe in a town a province and half a world away—is dying. Their parents leave them in the winter wood outside of Dubossary, but not without first imparting to the teenagers a life-shattering revelation: Liba and Laya’s mother and father are shape-changers, a swan and a bear who met, and fell in love, despite their natures, people, and religions. Liba and Leya themselves are inheritors of their parents’ separate natures, and each is told in turn by their mother and father to look out for one another in the parental absence.
Their parents gone, Liba is made anxious by the lack of routine, and by Laya’s flitting off to wander the dark woods. She is troubled by the sharpening of her nails and teeth, by the sound of wings on the roof that may take her sister away. For her part, Laya is itchy and driven out into the blue, pricked by the feeling of enclosure. Liba is the bear; Laya the swan. In their excursions into town, they learn there have been disappearances (most notably, the family which was to check in on them in their parents’ absence), and there are whispers of violence against Jews in neighboring towns. This could never happen in Dubossary, everyone tells themselves; Jew and gentile are too neighborly and familiar.
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Liba begins something like a courtship with the butcher’s son (the same butcher her father refused to patronize), and Laya, well, Laya has wings, even if they haven’t quite manifested. She is entranced by one of the Hovlin brothers, fruit merchants who have set up shop in Dubossary just as the whispers began, just as the disappearances started. The Hovlins are seductive strangers, and Laya becomes drunk on fruit and kisses. Liba wanders the woods trying to call her sister home, but the lure of forbidden fruit is too strong. The novel opens with a quote from Christina Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market,” and the Hovlins resonate as the goblins.
In Rossetti’s poem, the goblins are something like sexual temptation, the impulse to societal transgression. They are that, in Rossner’s novel, but also something else. Both Liba and Laya are warned of changing bodies and inevitable temptation—the swan and bear of their natures stand as metaphor for their different ways of approaching adolescence. But their story doesn’t just take place in the winter wood; it also takes place in Dubossary in the late 19th century, when pogroms burned through towns as well integrated as Dubossary, decimating Jewish communities. The Hovlins are also the whispers that can lead to violence, poisoning a town against itself.
Liba must come to terms with her bear-nature, in order both to ground her sister’s swan-nature, and to save her fragile community. The Sisters of the Winter Wood is a fairy tale, with prose that tends toward the lyrical or the literally poetic (alternate chapters are written in verse). It is a story of enchantments both dangerous and integral, about goblin fruit that corrupts, and wings and claws that transform. Come buy…