The Girl with a Brave Heart

Subtitled ‘a tale from Tehran’, this story is the work of an Israeli author and illustrator. The writer, Rita Jahanforuz, is better known as the Israeli Madonna (as in pop diva). She lived in Tehran as a young child, and has reworked a tale she heard first from her mother. Its folk tale roots are readily apparent. Orphaned Shiraz is treated as a drudge by her step-mother until, losing a ball of wool given to her by her dead mother, she follows it to the house of an old woman, who gives her three tasks. The old woman is smelly, unkempt and mean-looking. She instructs Shiraz to smash up the neglected and untidy kitchen with a hammer, cut down and uproot the overgrown garden and cut off the old woman’s tangled long white hair. Completing these tasks in her own way, Shiraz returns home so radiantly transformed that neither her step-mother nor step-sister recognises her. Monir, her step-sister, is then sent to the old woman’s house so that she may share in her sister’s good fortune, but such is her behaviour towards the old woman that she returns not radiant but hideous. The twist in the tale is that it is Shiraz’s disobedience that causes her transformation. She cleans and tidies the kitchen, replants and waters the garden and carefully washes, combs and plaits the old woman’s hair. She has seen beyond the old woman’s appearance and listened to the sad silent pleading of the old woman’s heart rather the cruelty and madness of her words. The unfortunate Monir, lacking her sister’s insight, does only what she is told to do. Jahanforuz tells her tale in a calm, quiet prose, adding no comment at the time about Shiraz’s decision to gently defy the old woman’s expressed wishes, and leaving it to the end to explain the significance of each sister’s actions. Vali Mintzi’s illustrations, inspired by the work of Bonnard, Matisse and Hockney, are warm and vibrant, lovingly detailing the idiosyncratic architecture and domestic life of a bygone small Middle Eastern town. Although the story takes place over two days, the illustration seems to move through a single day, with Monir wreaking havoc in the old woman’s house and garden as the light fades and returning home in the twilight. These are gorgeous pictures that bring tenderness to the story. However, attentive readers may very well wonder why, when the story claims that, after visiting the old woman, one girl is unrecognisably beautiful and the other unrecognisably hideous, the illustrations show only a more confident Shiraz and a crest-fallen Monir, both clearly recognisable in the same clothes that they left the house. Here Mintzi seems to be substituting psychological realism – the warmth of someone’s personality causes us to perceive them as beautiful – for the typical magical transformation of the folk tale. It creates opportunity for discussion.