Look her up on Wikipedia and you will find a lengthy entry about her extraordinary life as a pioneer, adventurer and champion of women’s rights. Although I have nothing to say against the moral Patricia Polacco seeks to inculcate in her young readers, with this revisionist tale - "Those who judge one another on what they hear or see, and not on what they know of them in their hearts, are fools indeed!" declares one old woman, after the happy reunion of Baba Yaga and Victor - I wish she has used some other folk-figure to illustrate it. Baba Yaga is meant to be fearsome, but also ambiguous. She's a villain - except when she isn't, and is helping (sometimes reluctantly) the hero and/or heroine. She's the figure of the old woman, both feared and respected - a figure of power: dangerous, but not always adversarial. To make her into a cozy old grandmother - a character whose sole desire is to be involved with child-rearing - is like a slap in the face, whether Polacco intended it or not, to all those readers, of whatever gender, who need to see a range of feminine characters in their stories. Intriguing! This story of an old woman eternally searching for the Christ Child whom she passed up the opportunity to see at the nativity is new to me, and apparently subject to debate. The cover claims it is a "Russian folktale" but Russian reviewers are unfamiliar with it and suggest it is Polish or perhaps made up by Mikolaycak. I'm more inclined to believe the doubters as the story didn't seem to quite work for me, but that may be a flaw in the retelling. She says that while she cannot be certain who the Babushka Lady is: “I am certain that the Babushka [Lady] is an under-researched character, that she was completely overlooked. If that happened today there would be a manhunt for her and you would expect to see the footage.”

In this book the character of Baba Yaga is good and kind. She loves children and doesn’t want to eat them. She becomes a true Russian babushka. Students should notice this fact. The text is authorial and it doesn’t relate to a Russian folktale. Therefore I would call it unauthentic. One woman did come forward years later to say she was the Babushka Lady, and that two men claiming to work for the government took her camera away, but her claim was largely dismissed because the camera she said she was using was not invented at the time. Her book even builds a convincing case for Jerrie being a CIA agent with the cryptonym QJWIN, whose role was to recruit killers for an assassination squad that originally targeted Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. This has not been an easy process,” she says. “It was a reluctant process for me. It’s not an easy story to tell or one that I enjoy telling, frankly. It’s a tough story to talk about America and a woman I know and show what I found out about her and publicly say it.Her answers were bizarre, off the rails,” she says. “She seemed first of all thrilled that I had found June Cobb. I expected her to walk out in a huff that I was looking into this or I had come up with a wild theory. By the way, the book cover says that the author is also the illustrator, and I absolutely love the cover illustration with this adorable old lady, but the fact remains that what she wears is NOT Russian national dress (although it could be Polish, I'm no expert), her hair is done in a way no Russian village woman would wear it, she is portrayed next to a stove which is not Russian, and she's holding a broom of a kind totally unknown-of in Russia before 1991.

The story's great, just please don't assume Russian kids know it or believe in non-existent magical Babushkas. This "legend" has in fact been the subject of much ridicule by the Russian Internet community lately as a fine example of how little the Westerners know about the Russian culture that they're prepared to believe any unrelated old tale. Jerrie’s explanation for what she was doing there stretched credibility to the limit: she said she had been hired by Life magazine to fly a reporting team to Dallas to cover the presidential visit, but that when they heard he had been assassinated they abandoned the assignment and left. Almost everybody has seen the Oliver Stone movie JFK,” she says, “and when I saw that movie [released in 1991] I came away thinking there’s probably a lot more to the story. I probably would have leaned – a lean, not a certainty – that there could be more to it. What that would look like I had no idea.”The rest of the message is lovely, especially knowing from reading other Polacco books, how much she treasured her relationship with her grandmother. I was worried enough that the Babushka Lady could be Jerrie that I confronted Jerrie,” she says. “It took me a while to be able to work up to the conversation with Jerrie and her answers to that conversation were not particularly reassuring to me.” The author's surname is Polish which makes sense because the Poles are mainly Catholics, and Nativity legends play a big role in the Catholic culture, so my educated guess would be that he either reworked an original Polish tale (possibly, sincerely believing it was Russian although the difference between the two cultures is huge) or simply made it all up as a conscious case of literary mystification. However, Nativity stories, including the Three Wise Men, don't make part of the Russian Christian Orthodox culture, and there are definitely no Babushkas bringing gifts to Russian kids, we have Father Frost to do that!