Jack Zipes technically retired from his position as professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota in 2008, but he hasn’t paused his prolific contributions to storytelling and radical children’s literature. Princeton University Press published Zipes’s Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales last month; PW’s review called it “a potent testament to the power of stories.” In addition, Zipes recently wrote prefaces for and edited a series of three Routledge fairy tale collections, originally arranged by British author Romer Wilson in the context of political upheaval in the early 20th century: Green Magic (1928), Silver Magic (1929), and Red Magic (1930).
On April 25, Zipes spoke about his career at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis, where many in the audience knew him from his work with children in the Twin Cities literacy organization he co-founded, Neighborhood Bridges. He introduced Buried Treasures to attendees and later spoke with PW about his ongoing research. The roots of Buried Treasures can be found in the book series Oddly Modern Fairy Tales, which he established with Princeton University Press. Notable children’s authors and critics including Philip Pullman, Michael Rosen, and Maria Tatar contributed to editions in the series, and Zipes served as translator on many of the volumes too.
“I wrote the introductions to many of the Oddly Modern books,” Zipes said, “and when I retired and had more time on my hands, I thought I should revise them.” He’d also founded an imprint, Little Mole and Honey Bear, and although he’d ceased publication (“you just can’t do a one-person publishing house”), he still wanted readers to learn about rediscoveries like German illustrator Christian Bärmann and French war veteran Paul Vaillant-Couturier (Johnny Breadless: A Pacifist Fairy Tale, 1921). Princeton publisher Anne Savarese gave him the go-ahead to create an essay collection, and the result was Buried Treasures, a literary education in radical fairy tales.
The collection’s most familiar entry might be the piece on Felix Salten. Zipes’s 2022 translation project, The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest, takes a fresh look at Salten’s famous 1923 novel about a European roe deer, which was published in English in 1928 and adapted by Disney in 1942. Zipes’s translation reveals the novel’s commentary on antisemitism, political persecution, and the rise of fascism that Salten, a Jewish man living in Austria, experienced in the early 20th century.
“The things I do have a serendipity,” Zipes said. “I am so curious, and I’ve spent quite a bit of my days in bookstores in Paris or London or Rome or New York. I sniff out significant, so-called antique books and breathe new life into them—and they breathe new life into me, so it’s sort of dialectical.” He described learning about Austrian Jewish illustrator and painter Mariette Lydis, whom he writes about in a chapter on daydreaming and creativity (“she escaped the Nazis, and her work in the 1930s and ’40s was absolutely brilliant; nobody’s done anything in the United States or England to give her the credit she deserves”). He also has unearthed lesser-known stories by Dadaist collagist Kurt Schwitters and Viennese author Hermynia Zur Mühlen.
Zipes remains especially committed to revolutionary Jewish storytellers of a century and more ago. “For 10 years, on and off, I’ve been collecting unusual tales by Jewish authors and illustrators starting in 1870, when Jews were allowed to be considered citizens and began publishing their own stories from Yiddish, from Hebrew, and so on,” he said. “Some of the stories are known, but a lot of them aren’t, and the way I’ve pieced them together they are making a statement about war and fascism” and political resistance.
“I did think for a while that I was going to retire for good,” he said, “but retirement has given me time to translate and write some stories.” At 85, he’s still unearthing stories that need to be retold.
