Eeveryone reading this probably knows the incredible famous German folk legend "The Pied Piper of Hamelin". It was already known during the Middle Ages and widespread in the Western world in hundreds of versions. One can find it in fiction, poetry, plays, music and dozens of visual performances.

What is the known version of this story? Hamelin, a German city, was hit by a rat infestation. The locals attempt to get rid of the rats, but their efforts are unsuccessful. A mysterious piper appears and offers to get rid of the rats for a large sum of money. The town council representatives initially ridicule him, but they eventually accept his offer after the epidemic continues. The piper played his instrument, leading the rats out of the city and into a river where they drowned. However, the city officials reneged on their agreement, refusing to pay him what they promised. This causes him to lead all the children of the city with his magical flute into a mountain where they vanished forever, never to return. As mentioned, this legend has hundreds of versions. In some of them an attempt was made to soften her terrible end with a comforting afterword. For example there is the epilogue of Charles Perrault, the author of the classic Tales of Mother Goose. In his version, one boy, lame, drags behind, and, because he did not have time to enter the mountain, remains behind and is spared. One day he finds a flute, plays the piper's music on it, and the mountain opens and all teh children return to their parents.

The English poet Robert Browning followed in Peru's footsteps. In his lyrical version, which has a pronounced comic tone, one rat, deaf, did not hear the melody and therefore did not enter the river with his kind. His role was to act as a witness and tell what happened to the mice tribe. Browning also spared one boy, handicapped, who did not even enter the mountain, because he couldn't get there on time, and he was also tasked to serve as a witness and tell what happened to the community of people. 

Most versions of the legend include an epilogue that has a clear and universal moral interpretation - that failing to fulfill obligations will result in severe punishment. While this interpretation is legitimate, it does not fully explore the potential meanings of the legend's complex and rich setting, which includes references to magicians, flutes, plagues, rats, crossing rivers, climbing mountains, opening and closing tunnels, and the differences between children and adults, as well as the role of money. This limited/universal lesson could have been conveyed without the need for such a detailed and multifaceted story. The interpretation of the story should consider its historical context, which is crucial for understanding the horror it conveys. The horror lingers on even after finishing the story, similar to the aftermath of a nuclear warhead.  Without context, the story is often perceived as a parable with a clear moral, but a certain historical context and lack of a clear moral would make the story difficult to interpret as a parable. If one chooses to view the story as a result of its historical context, then it should be understood as an etiological story. This type of story belongs to a genre that seeks to explain natural or social phenomena, such as the "basic stories" subgenre that pertains to myths about the origin of the world. Etiological stories may also be presented in the form of parables, as a means of making them universally applicable. The story of the flute player from Hamelin is apparently based on a historical event, although the details are blurred, the main point of which was the displacement and migration of a large group of boys and girls from their hometown, Hamelin, to a distant place - beyond the mountains of darkness - where they were destined to settle and establish a new community. This assumption has legs because the Germans repeatedly carried out acts of "resettlement" of residents in "separ areas" (such as the Sudeten Germans), and also because this German legend has versions in other European nations, which explicitly describe a course of resettlement in the region distant. For example: the Saxon-Transylvanian legend that tells of a group of children who followed one, the flute player from Melin, entered a deep cave, and after an exhausting journey underground, came out into the open air in the Brasov Vashem area, pay attention to the following detail, the importance of which should not be exaggerated: they founded the first settlement! That is, the legend before us is a legend that is relied upon to mention the establishment of a new community in a new place. The author proposes that the story in question is not solely about paying back a monetary or other type of debt, but rather about a more extensive concept: the consequences a community faces when some of its members migrate or immigrate from their birthplace to another location. This is a significant cost that cannot be measured in financial terms, and in the context of the narrative, the parents were unable to fulfill their obligation. The story allows this narrative to be read in at least two ways. The first, simpler way, adheres to the order of events as it appears in the story and accepts it as it is, as the testimony of a reliable witness - let's say the disabled child, the only survivor of the trauma, who was left to describe the event that he was a part of and saw its end with his own eyes and up close. This reading focuses on the story of the children of the city of Hamlin who were kidnapped from their parents for no wrongdoing on their part, and maybe not even on their parents' part; After all, all the negotiations with the piper and the breach of the agreement with him were done within the four walls of the city council building. The second, more complex way, assumes that the narrator manipulated the order of things and expected us to resolve this, correct the narrative injustice, and then resolve the human injustice we have done - to the parents. This way of seeing reveals the enormous innovation inherent in the legend before us, and it is the source of the tremendous effect it leaves behind The story being discussed, which has been analyzed in Shlomit Zaror's doctoral thesis, is unique in that it is not told from the perspective of young immigrants like most immigration stories. Instead, it is narrated from the viewpoint of the parents who were left behind and abandoned, which is a literary aspect that will be further explored. Consider the rarity of this perspective in relation to the new Hebrew fiction, which largely consists of stories about immigration to Israel and the USA. Most of these stories are written from the viewpoint of young immigrants. The fiction division covers the stories of various towns, including Barditz Besky, Brenner's, Barron's, Leah Goldberg's, Reuveni's, and Ha'Zez's, as well as novels from the second and third Aliyah. If we imagine Yesterday and Yesterday told from the perspective of his father or brother Yitzhak Komar's little one, who remained in Bochetz, or Reuveni's Jerusalem witness told from the point of view of his father, Zvi Shemsilevich, who was "stuck" in Siberia for over twenty years, we can see the significance of this rare vantage point. This allowed his eldest son, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, to immigrate to Israel. When considering contemporary Israeli immigrant writers such as Maya Arad, Reuven Namdar, Mati Shmoelof, Tali Okbi, Anton Shamas, Seyed Kashua, and others, it's important not to omit the perspective of their families in Israel. While Tovia the milkman's story, where his daughters abandon him and his wife one after the other, is a text written from the point of view of those left behind, the book of Job also offers a vantage point to consider. The focus will be on the innovative reading that follows the perspective of the parents who were left behind, but it's worth mentioning the children's point of view and the intertexts present in the story. These intertexts are also present in the more innovative reading version. The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin contains most of the elements that appear in the story of building a new community or a first settlement - just as it is presented, as I have already mentioned, in the Saxon-Transylvanian legend. There is no establishment of a new or renewed community without a plague (Oedipus the King, Exodus); The establishment of a new or renewed community always involves a dramatic/experimental crossing of a river/seas (the Iliad and the Odyssey, crossing the Red Sea, the Rubicon); Crossing the sea (or desert) in which all those who are unworthy to enter the new place drown (or die), for the rest see the promised land on the other side (Mount Nebo). The good news about the new world should be announced at least once in a very impressive ceremonial event that takes place on Mount Nisha or at its foot. This mountain marks the vertical axis of the world (the (axis mundi, it is the connection between our world and the upper worlds, to the Creator). The vertical axis is constant and it corresponds with the horizontal axis, which is marked by the river, which represents the constantly flowing/changing life . Every step of establishing a community also includes walking "blindly" after a charismatic leader with a stick, a flute, etc. in his hand; instruments that almost always correspond to a snake, which, again, almost always, serves as a bridge between the old world (the innocent/archaic) and the new world ( The sober, the open-eyed, is the one who is already aware of the difference between naked and clothed and between a face and a mask). And every ceremony celebrating the creation of a community requires a human sacrifice, real or symbolic. This is the case in all the myths of the ancient peoples and so it is in the new religions, including Judaism and Christianity (a ritual The binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah and the crucifixion of Jesus on Golgotha ​​are the cornerstones of modern monotheistic Western culture.) All these elements, including the event of the sacrifice of the children (for they are buried on the mountain - or, according to one version, they are found inside it in Arcadia/Heaven; That is, in a regressive reality from a developmental-cultural point of view - a parallel process occurs in the wonderful children's story The Children of the Water), found in the story before us The disabled child, who is yet to give testimony, has a disability that is seen as a connection to the divine, a belief present in many cultures. This raises an intriguing question about whether his disability existed prior to the traumatic event or emerged as a result of it, similar to the case of Moses' stuttering. This question delves into the relationship between historical events and the narrative presented by the author and leads to a second interpretation that suggests the author of the story deviated from the chronological order of events. In order to give real visibility to the perspective of the parents who were left behind, we need to reconstruct the "real story" from the story in front of us. The story before us is, according to my understanding, a product of the late construction of the parents, who had to explain to themselves how what happened could have happened. The grieving parents explained the catastrophe of the children's migration to themselves in several ways. First, they introduced a magical factor into the story, the flute player, who was probably a leader with tremendous charisma, who with his rhetorical-spiritual power (a flute is an instrument that signifies air and wind) was able to convince the group of children/boys to follow him to a distant land. Think, in this context, for example, of Moses with the stick/snake/flute (Aharon). Secondly, they also introduced a natural disaster into the story: the rat plague - or if you will, a type of thing, an event that stands alone or is part of a series of events that rely on stories of massive immigration; And think in this context, again, about the plagues of Egypt The connection between the rats drowning in the water due to the flute's music played by the flutist on the riverbank and the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea along with their chariots after Moses raised his staff in the air is hard to ignore when discussing the plagues of Egypt. Moreover, the parents of the children who left them and their homeland to settle in a distant place did not find the two explanations, i.e., the magical piper and the dreadful plague, convincing enough to justify their abandonment. Consequently, they held themselves responsible for their children's departure. The accusation that the parents blame themselves - that they did not take the power of the flutist/charismatic leader seriously enough - is the motive for the disruption of the order of actions of the original story (the historical fable). This order of things, which we assume existed in reality, was disrupted by the parents. These created the new order, the one presented in the legend (the Souzet) before our eyes, as a narrative tool to deal with the trauma of the mass abandonment of their descendants. What "really" happened, happened like this: at the beginning of things, the piper arrived in the city - an ideologue, a representative of the new regime, a messiah at the time of Mitzvah - and convinced the young people to follow him. Only then did the parents invent the whole story so that they could deal with the situation: either through claims of a trick by the so-called God or a natural disaster - that is, while trying to avoid responsibility - or, probably at a later stage, through an admission of guilt and beating for what took the form of A sin for which there is no atonement. In any case, it is clear that this is an attempt to deal with a colossal abandonment trauma . Why colossal? Because sin and punishment are paved in the same pattern. The symmetry between the rats drowning in the river and the children disappearing in the mountain creates a tremendous intensification of abandonment. What's more, in retrospect, the disappearance of the children on the mountain (which was the opening event in the historical fabula and is presented as the last event in the narrative Suzette) cannot help but be perceived - against the background of the mass death of the mice, which precedes and foreshadows it - as the end of the road-death-destruction; And not as the construction of a first settlement (the Transylvanian version) in a new place - as emerges from hundreds, and in fact from thousands of etiological, "normative" stories, told from the point of view of the new immigrants/immigrants. And finally, I still think that this fable has a moral - but not a thematic one, but a poetic one. Take the legends seriously, especially the ones that survive generations upon generations. They are always complex, multi-layered, much more than it seems at first glance, and especially when you look at them in relation to the soil of their growth.