A short story by S Y Agnon from 1943, I came across this particular story when it was mentioned by Melissa Weininger in her essay From Dracula to the Motmindam: The Evolution of the Jewish Vampire in the Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. The story does not mention the vampire but the tropes are there in the form of Helena, a woman who lives off flesh and blood. Weininger argues that Helena is Christian and this subverts the antisemitic trope that might paint the vampire as Jewish, though Tala Bar argues that her “behavior has nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with ancient paganism”. I am not versed in Jewish literature enough to comment on this with any authority, but I can look at the vampiric element.
Joseph is a peddler who comes across a lone house in a wooded area and tries to sell his wears to the lady within. Eventually she consents to buy a hunting knife but, by the time he leaves, the sun is setting and he becomes lost in the woods, eventually circling back to the house. He asks to be allowed to wait until the moon comes out to give light and is allowed to stay in her barn. Unfortunately there are heavy rains that night but Joseph is about to brave the swampy lands when she asks his to mend her roof. He agrees but asks for no money in return and so she feeds him breakfast. He offers to do more odd jobs and they speak – her telling him of her husband who was murdered but, about the killer, she says ““They won't find them,” she said, “they won't find them. Not every murderer is meant to be caught.”” Eventually he ends up staying, and in her husband’s bed, wearing his clothes and being fed, though the food is not kosher. The relationship is fine, but he realises he has never seen her eat or drink. He questions her and eventually she retorts, “You want to know what I eat and what I drink? I drink men's blood and I eat human flesh.”
That should, one guesses, have been a warning to him but he takes her words as something that noblewomen say to be romantic. The relationship stales, however, and he begins to discover she had a lot of husbands and has a bad dream that forces him to sleep in another room. One night he decides he must recite the shema and goes outside to do so, returning to discover that his bedsheets have been stabbed and then finds her on the floor of the room, holding the hunting knife he sold her. He bends down to her and she bites his throat and sucks his blood but then declares his blood to be like icewater, thus undrinkable. He tries to care for her “But whatever food she tried to eat she would throw up, for she had already forgotten the science of eating ordinary human food, as it was her practice to eat the flesh of her husbands whom she slaughtered and to drink their blood”. After 5 days she dies and, no priest being found and the ground too frozen to dig, he buries her coffin in snow on the roof and resumes his former life.
It is a really interesting story. The lack of eating did remind me somewhat of The History of Sidi Nu’uman, from the Arabian Nights but the story itself is quite different and this is worth tracking down. I’ve linked below a book on Amazon that contains the tale, I understand, but you can also find it here, noting that the name Helena is changed to Hilni.
In Hardback @ Amazon US
In Hardback @ Amazon UK
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