A Fish That Can Talk

Since the birth of my grandchildren, I have spent considerable time researching and reading children’s books. My grandkids are still too young for many of the stories I want to share with them, but it won’t be long before they are ready for some of them. My greatest challenge is the physical distance that separates us. My grandchildren live in America; my wife and I live in Israel. I see my grandchildren once a year for about a week, though we speak by phone frequently. But talking by phone is different from sitting in Zayde’s lap. The situation is not likely to change. I will need to focus on the quality of what I read to them when we are together and depend upon their parents for a quantity of equal quality.

I’m old-fashioned about many things. One is my belief that a story should teach something meaningful and be well-written and entertaining, all at the same time. What is taught does not need to slap the listener in the face or bang them on the top of their head. It should be woven naturally into the story and deliver its lesson gently and lovingly. Heidi by Frau Johanna Spyri is a perfect example of the approach I encourage. The wonderful children’s stories of Oscar Wilder are another. I read all of Wilde’s children’s stories to my kids.

One of the traits common to most children is an intuitive sense of self-interest that manifests itself in some contexts as a kind of greediness. Put three kids and two cookies in one room to see what I’m saying. It’s not evil, nor particularly dangerous, for a child, at least initially. On the contrary, it’s very natural behavior. But if unchecked, it can become a serious problem. If you know any adults subject to repeated bouts of envy, jealousy, and greed, you may sometimes wish their parents had spent a little more time working with their child, now an adult, on this issue.

In Christianity, greed, also called avarice, is counted among the seven deadly or cardinal sins. In his book Morals on the Book of Job, a line-by-line commentary on the biblical book, Gregory the Great roots their common source in Pride. He writes:

Pride is the beginning of all sin. [Ecclus. 10, 1] But seven principal vices, as its first progeny, spring doubtless from this poisonous root, namely, vain glory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust.

St Gregory the Great. Morals on the Book of Job. Veritatis Splendor Publications. Kindle Edition. 

Here, we find greed labeled avarice. I am an Orthodox Jew; we do not have any list of seven deadly sins. However, at various points, we do address them independently. Here, for example, are four excerpts from the Hebrew Bible that address greed in its various guises. All quotes are from The Holy Scriptures, JPS 1917.

Exodus 20:14 (Commandment): “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.”

Proverbs 15:27: “He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house.”

Ecclesiastes 5:9: “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance, with increase.”

Jeremiah 6:13: “For from the least of them even unto the greatest of them / Every one is greedy for gain.”

Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that you sit down with your five or six-year-old child or grandchild and study these verses; far from it. But there is something you can read that covers the same ground in a more exciting and entertaining way for a child. It is a well-known fairy tale by the Grimm Brothers: The Fisherman and His Wife. Here’s how it starts.

THERE WAS once on a time a Fisherman who lived with his wife in a miserable hovel close by the sea, and every day he went out fishing. And once as he was sitting with his rod, looking at the clear water, his line suddenly went down, far down below, and when he drew it up again he brought out a large Flounder. Then the Flounder said to him, “Hark, you Fisherman, I pray you, let me live, I am no Flounder really, but an enchanted prince. What good will it do you to kill me? I should not be good to eat, put me in the water again, and let me go.” “Come,” said the Fisherman, “there is no need for so many words about it—a fish that can talk I should certainly let go, anyhow,” with that he put him back again into the clear water, and the Flounder went to the bottom, leaving a long streak of blood behind him. Then the Fisherman got up and went home to his wife in the hovel.

Grimm, Jacob; Grimm, Wilhelm. Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Dover Thrift Editions: SciFi/Fantasy) (p. 59). Dover Publications. Kindle Edition. 

When the husband gets home, he tells his wife what happened. She remonstrates with him about missing the opportunity to extract a gift of gratitude from the enchanted Prince and sends her husband back to ask the talking Flounder to replace their hovel with a small cottage. The man reluctantly does so. The Flounder swiftly and ungrudgingly grants the request. 

At this point, the story enters a cyclical narrative pattern with minor variations, the sort that children love to hear, memorize, and often repeat word for word to you: The wife makes a new, bigger demand, the husband reluctantly asks the fish for the new favor, and the fish grants it: a small cottage, a great stone castle. After the castle was granted, the request type changed from dwellings to roles: king, emperor, Pope. You get the idea. I will stop here and let you read the rest of the story yourself. 

The Fisherman and His Wife is the story you read right after your child snatches the last two ginger snaps from the neighbor kid’s hand and pops them into his mouth. The story teaches a moral in an interesting way.

In his 1891 Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. 

I’m not sure I agree with Wilde. There is no a priori reason that books can’t be moral and well-written. Indeed! They’re precisely the ones I’m looking for for my grandchildren.

All the best,
Gershon