The Silver Fox and other Stories
A collection of short
stories
by Luz Lancha de Bairacli Levy
daughter of Juliette de Bairacli Levy.
Published online by Ash Tree Publishing
The Silver Fox and other Stories
A collection of short stories
by Luz Lancha de Bairacli Levy
daughter of Juliette de Bairacli Levy.
Published online by Ash Tree Publishing
Luz Lancha de Bairacli Levy lives in Switzerland with her husband, Gunter, her daughter, Adaya, her mother, Juliette, one dog, four cats, and two Guinea pigs. Like her mother, she is a champion of animals and natural living.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Gypsy in New York
Author: Juliette de Bairacli Levy.In this richly detailed memoir, Juliette de Bairacli Levy – one of the founders of American herbalism – offers us a rare documentary. It is at once an herbal, a travel book and a compendium of Gypsy lore and Gypsy ways. 210 pages, index, illustrations.
Retails for $21.95buy A Gypsy in New York in our Bookshop
Spanish Mountain Life
Author: Juliette de Bairacli Levy.This jewel-like memoir by noted herbalist and traveler Juliette de Bairacli Levy details her personal struggle against typhus fever, during which she gave birth to her second child, Luz, who had to be suckled by a nanny goat. As ever we are embraced by Juliette's love of nature and animals, and welcomed onlookers as she relates with people whose lives are far different from ours. 114 pages, index, illustrations.
Retails for $16.95buy Spanish Mountain Life in our Bookshop
Summer in GALILEE
Author: Juliette de Bairacli Levy.Join Juliette de Bairacli Levy – Gypsy herbal veterinarian and mother of two toddlers – as she spends an eventful summer swimming in the waters, and the history, of the Sea of Galilee, in the modern state of Israel. Juliette trains her observant eyes, and lovely descriptive prose, on the people, places, plants and animals around her. 240 pages, index, illustrations.
Retails for $24.95buy Summer in GALILEE in our Bookshop
Common Herbs for Natural Health
by Juliette de Bairacli Levy.
Re-indexed, re-designed, and expanded. Lore and uses for 200 herbs including cosmetic, culinary, and medical recipes.
Juliette de Bairacli Levy is famed for her mastery of herbal lore and her many books on living in tune with nature.
Foreword by Rosemary Gladstar. 236 pages, index, illustrations. Retails for $15.95buy Common Herbs for Natural Health in our Bookshop
Traveler's Joy
by Juliette de Bairacli Levy.
Explore the free wandering life of this enchant-ing guide by a legendary teacher who lives in tune with the rhythms of nature. Lots of herbal lore. 256 pages, index, illustrations.
Retails for $11.95buy Traveler's Joy in our Bookshop
Nature's Children
by Juliette de Bairacli Levy. The classic text for natural child rearing, now revised and expanded. Back in print at last! Remedies, recipes, and fascinating lore on nourishing and healing children naturally. Introduction by Helen Nearing.
196 pages, index, 14 classic photographs.
Retails for $15.95buy Nature's Children in our Bookshop
Juliette de Bairacli Levy is not only the mother of the reawakened American herbal tradition, she is also the mother of two children.
In her memoir Spanish Mountain Life, her second child, Luz, is born. Luz accompanies Juliette to Manhattan in Gypsy in New York, and to Israel in Summer in Galilee. Then, as children will when they grow to maturity, she creates her own life — one both apart from her mother's life and a part of her mother's life — and we hear no more about her.
But Luz is still her mother’s daughter. And Luz learned from her mother how to open her heart to the human drama around her and how to enter into that drama as both participant and observer. And, perhaps, Juliette also gifted Luz with the skill and desire to write about what she sees.
Luz’s stories — published here for the first time ever — are in a voice very different from that of her mother. She is a child of post-Hemingway literature; her syntax and structure are spare and to-the-point. While Juliette’s style seems more archaic to us: She strings together thoughts in convoluted sentences more reminiscent of Proust.
Yet their voices are clearly linked, mother to daughter, generation to generation. After reading Juliette's account of her daredevil bathing in the no-man’s land of the Jordan River boundary in Summer in Galilee, Luz’s story, “Adventure,” gave me a literary deja vu. Luz’s imagined connection between ancient and modern women in Israel in “The Whispering Wind” surely has its basis in her mother’s fascination with antiquities, a fascination she shared with her children as they traveled. And perhaps it is a childhood vision of her mother as a martyr, or herself as a child with typhus, that fired Luz’s imagination in A Vow.
Juliette’s prized Afghan hounds were forever being accused of eating chickens in the small villages in Greece where she preferred to live. Chicken lovers, country dwellers, and anyone who has spent time in a rural neighborhood will surely be as delighted as I was with Luz’s tale of one solution to this problem in “A Chicken from Heaven.”
“Compensation” also centers on the repercussions that follow the actions of another “bad dog.” Every owner of a dog, and everyone who fears dog bites, will be swept into the true-to-life fantasy that Luz spins from an ordinary incident and an extraordinary wound.
As a child, Luz was loved and entertained by Gypsies. As a grown-up, Luz longs to connect with them again, but it isn’t that easy, as we discover in “The Gypsy Children.”
Juliette loves animals. Their health and well-being has always been the focus of her life; and Luz, suckled by a goat as a babe, sustains her mother’s love of all creatures. Her story “The Silver Fox” is an eerie reminder that the spirits of animals are powerful and extraordinary.
As I read Luz’s stories, images from Juliette’s life circle in my mind: Afghan hounds and chickens, children and gypsies, herbal lore and the beauties of nature. If you have heard Juliette speak, or read her books, or watched her in Trish Streeten’s beautiful video Juliette of the Herbs, you may find this happening to you, too, as you turn these pages.Susun S Weed, Laughing Rock Farm, June 2006
