Jacob Thomson Official Website

Everyone is afraid of something. For my parents, it was the sound of the Russian language. Like most shtetl Jews living in the Pale, they spoke only Yiddish, never bothering to learn the language of their neighbors. And why should they? Their neighbors hated them. The first language other than their mother tongue they took the trouble to learn was English, after they had arrived in the United States.

It has been argued that you could gauge the degree of tolerance—acceptance would have been too much to ask of any European until very recently—of the Christian community for the Jewish minority by what languages those Jews spoke. In the German principalities, Austria and Hungary, most Jews spoke the national language. In Poland and Russia, they spoke Yiddish almost exclusively, for those were the lands where tolerance was never more than tentative, and the threat of a pogrom always hung over the community.

For my parents, obviously, the Russian language was associated with their Christian neighbors, who were a bit short on religous tolerance. My parents left Russia is 1907, following yet another pogrom, which had left about half of their little shtetl burned to the ground and two dozen of their Jewish neighbors dead. Russian was frightening to them, for they mostly heard it when someone was coming to attack them. The scene in my novel, The Alukam, when the citizens of Kapelskof observe Easter by going to church, listening to the priest's homily, and then hurrying to the ghetto to kill any Jews they could catch, is firmly based on a reality that continued well into the 20th Century in certain parts of eastern Europe.

Personally, Russian doesn't frighten me. I was born in this country, in a part of Manhattan that was then mostly Jewish. The threat wasn't of being killed, but merely of being beaten up if you couldn't defend yourself, and the language those threats were issued in was mostly English, with a fair bit of Italian mixed in. I was a fairly tough little kid for a Yeshiva bochur, and it didn't take the bad guys very long to figure out that they'd be better off just leaving me alone. I learned something back then that has served me well in virtually every physically threatening situation since. If you can't talk your way out of it, fight dirty.

I suppose, for some elderly men who used to be the bullies in that area, a mean little Jewish kid with a tendency to bite and use every illegal punch in the book, along with pointed shoes and a good aim, may trigger some scary memories. As I said, everyone is afraid of something. There are no completely fearless people, mostly because anyone who is generally doesn't live very long.

However, this article is really about the use of fear in literature, not real life. And fear, or horror, has been an element of literature and story telling from ancient times. If we go back to the very roots of English literature we find that Beowulf is very much a horror story, and presents the archetype of the genre. There is the monstrous Grendel, and his even more monstrous mother, wreaking havoc among the sleeping warriors in Hrothgar's mead hall.. It is a story, an epic poem, perhaps best appreciated in translation today, old English being much more akin to Danish or German than to modern English.

Traditional children's stories are also remarkably violent, though sometimes it's hard to recognize this today, after Disney and Sesame Street have finished with them. My great grandchildren were quite surprised when, as we recited "Three Blind Mice," they heard me conclude with "she cut off their tails with a carving knife." They were quite sure it was supposed to be "she cut up some cheese..."

Look at the fate of Cinderella's wicked step-sisters in the old Grimm Brothers telling of the story. One cuts off her toe in an attempt to fit her foot into the slipper, and the other cuts off part of her heel. Then, following the wedding, both have their eyes pecked out by pigeons. Not at all like what Disney presented in his cartoon.

In the versions of the classic fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, little children shove cannibalistic witches into hot ovens, parents routinely abandon their children, and the characters causing problems for the hero usually come to a bad end, the gorier the better.

In Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," Quasimodo is a decent, though deformed fellow, much put upon by the citizens of Paris. Esmeralda is poor but noble, and Phoebus is a gem of a hero. And, of course, you have cute gargoyles and a happy ending. In Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, conversely, Phoebus is a lecherous scoundrel who could care less if Esmeralda is hanged once he's had his way with her, Quasimodo is a jealous—sometimes murderous—brute, and damned near everyone dies at the end, including the goat.

This novel is, of course, French, rather than English literature and, to be honest, isn't very good by modern standards. I suspect that the majority of readers fall into one of two categories. The first, having seen one or another of the film adaptations, are curious and buy the thing, giving up before reading very far. The others have to read it because it's been assigned by a teacher. Most of those probably take the Cliff's Notes route, or read an old "Classics Illustrated" comic. How many people, today, will work their way through an entire chapter consisting of little more than a house by house description of the entire city of Paris?

My point in all this is that horror has a value. There is something deep inside each of us that delights in being frightened—particularly when there is little or no chance of actually being harmed. The monster in the book or film does terrible things, but he's doing them to someone else, providing a vicarious thrill, but causing no harm. The monster in the closet personifies childhood fear, but is vanquished by nothing more than turning on the light, or calling in the nearest hero, Mom or Dad.

So we love horror stories. There is something primitive inside the civilized man, something that delights in being frightened. People take real risks simply for the thrill of it. What sane person would jump out of a perfectly good airplane? I certainly wouldn't, though I came very close to jumping out of a badly shot-up B-17 once. Considering we were over Germany at the time, in retrospect I'm quite glad our pilot managed to get us back in one piece. More than a few American Jewish POWs ended up in a concentration camp instead of a proper POW camp. They didn't all come back.

That's another element of horror. Some of it is real. But literary horror is not. We are frightened, but not harmed. Perhaps we learn something about the world or, perhaps, about ourselves. Dracula can't really harm us. He merely gives us a vicarious thrill.

Back to Articles & Stories