100 Books Like Folktales of the Canadian Sephardim

During a plague that killed a quarter of Florence’s citizens, Boccaccio crafted an exuberant, entertaining, death-defying work of literature. In this book, seven young women and three young men taking refuge in a country villa swap 100 tales of love, lust, mischief, and treachery. 

I read a translation of The Decameron during a sabbatical in Italy and was swept back in time. In every village, I’d look around a piazza and see characters straight from its pages: wily merchants, corrupt politicians, clever wives, henpecked husbands, bumbling fools. This book still resonates in the 21st century—a tribute to Boccaccio’s skill as a spell-weaver. Some of his stories are shamelessly, laughably bawdy. But all remind us that, even as everything changes, our shared humanity remains the same.

Stories come alive when people tell them to each other.

In my mid-20s, I happened upon a weekly gathering in Toronto, “1001 Friday Nights of Storytelling.” In a former synagogue turned art school – with candlelight shining on works in progress – people told old tales, by heart and with heart. This was the beginning of many things in my life, and this is the community that folklorist Kay Stone has written about.

She shows that the Toronto storytelling circle is part of a worldwide movement. She talks with great storytellers and explores favourite stories with them. And she shares her own struggle with a witch story from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and how, as she told it again and again, she changed the story and the story changed her.

Stories can be dangerous. People who love storytelling are fascinated by Newfoundland, where isolation nourished a rich oral culture (in a distinct English dialect).

Barbara Rieti introduces many colourful Newfoundlanders and the stories they have to tell – but not about long-ago times. These stories are about witches who live among us, or who are dead but well-remembered.

You can imagine how dangerous it might be to be called a witch, even with witch-burning gone out of fashion. (In its place, people cast spells to give witches the burning pain of bladder infections.) But “witches” could also use their reputations to get things they needed.

The author is very scholarly and does not believe there is any real witchcraft or magic behind these stories – but some of them left me wondering!

This is a book about stories of the land I live on.

My home is in Winnipeg, on the edge of the flatland called “the Prairies” in Canada and “the Great Plains” in the United States. But the land doesn’t care about the Canada-US border. And that border is nothing but an imposition on the older nations whose territory I live in: the Red River Métis, and the Anishinaabeg.

These Indigenous Peoples have ancient living traditions of oral storytelling, and this book, by Anishinaabeg scholars, celebrates their stories’ spiritual, practical, and political power.

A teaching shared by storyteller Kathleen Delores Westcott tells us “the story is a living being. It’s alive.” That teaching has helped me to understand how stories attract us, get inside us, change, and move across boundaries. 

Alma Heckman’s The Sultan’s Communists uses the life stories of five prominent Moroccan Jewish communists to paint a complex picture of Jewish identity in twentieth-century Morocco. By documenting their struggles, Heckman details the often surprising ways in which Moroccan Jews negotiated their political environment and mediated between Moroccan patriotism, French colonialism, radical politics, Arab and Jewish identity, and Zionism. She also describes the ways in which the Moroccan sultan reimagined his relationship with the country’s Jews and the surprising history of how and why he ultimately came to embrace Jewish communists, who, to begin with, had been the subject of severe repression, including imprisonment and exile. 

This is an amazing book!

Ben Jelloun was a political prisoner in Morocco for several years and was imprisoned in a dark cell in the ground in unimaginably horrific conditions. This book demonstrates politics gone wrong and the extent of the brutality that can be ravaged on other human beings in a system lacking justice or any sense of human rights and dignity.

Despite the intensely inhumane conditions of imprisonment, Ben Jelloun carries us along his journey and offers his readers an inspiring account of endurance and courage.

This book needs to be read by people in an era of democratic backsliding because it helps to demonstrate some of the things that are at stake when electorates become tempted by authoritarian leaders.

Far too many foreigners, myself included, have rocked up in Morocco and set to work recording versions of traditional tales for an outside audience. Almost all of them have realized that, what they imagined would be a straightforward exercise, was a near-impossible feat. One of the few European writers who have succeeded, and succeeded exceptionally well, is BBC reporter Richard Hamilton. As I read The Last Storytellers, I marvelled at how well he succeeded where so many others failed. The reason is that Hamilton has two qualities in abundance: patience and sensitivity. Reading the stories he presents takes me to the central square in Marrakech, Jma al Fna. I can see it, feel it, smell it, and, most importantly, I can hear the storytellers there recounting tales that pre-date A Thousand and One Nights.

Two American housewives—sisters—are on vacation in Morocco (a place I’ve really enjoyed visiting) and one of them disappears. Her sister is determined to find her, but neither has any preparation for the dangers they face. A foreign setting is mysterious, exotic, and always holds unknown possibilities. Finding themselves in a rural area, the women don’t know whom to trust, and they cannot rely on the usual social safeguards. The police and military are actually a threat. For me, a standalone thriller like this packs extra tension because you can’t be certain the characters will survive!

Jane Green is an icon in every sense, and this is my absolute favorite of her many bestselling books. I love stories with a strong sense of place, stories that transport me. This book does just that, whisking the reader to a forgotten scene from the Swinging 60s, an ex-pat community in Marrakesh once frequented in real life by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Yves Saint Laurent, and other luminaries of the era.

The narrator is an outsider who falls under the spell of Talitha Getty, a magnetic actress and model who presides over the whole swirling scene. This novel feels like the literary equivalent of a starry summer night. 

This book is so intelligent that it gave me chills, but it’s also a literary page-turner. I adored the married couple at the center of the story for trying to use their very big brains to solve the problem of the emptiness they were feeling, which, spoiler alert, didn’t work, but it did lead to clever dialogue and some profound observations.

One of the themes in the book has to do with time, and the quote that haunts me the most is, “How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” Somehow, this nihilistic book left me marveling at the preciousness of life.