THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Monday, October 7, 1996               TAG: 9610030026
SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A8   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Opinion 
SOURCE: By PEGGY DEAN EARLE 
                                            LENGTH:   45 lines

DON'T BAN BOOKS, BUT STEREOTYPES HURT

I'm reading a book called Poison by Kathryn Harrison. It's quite good. In it, two young women, one a silkworm farmer's daughter, the other a queen, are persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition. Early in the book, the farmer's daughter reflects on the preference for local silk in Spain because ``people who bought imported silk cloth complained that it smelled of the Orient - a smell, they said, almost as bad as that of Jews.''

When I got to that point, I stopped. While I knew intellectually that the phrase was in the context of a time when Jews were so despised they were being tortured and murdered by the Spanish, I couldn't read on for quite a while. The words hurt.

They hurt in the same way Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock in ``The Merchant of Venice'' did the first time I saw the play. They hurt in the same way it hurts when people, not realizing I am Jewish, tell me an anti-Semitic joke.

Now, I've never been persecuted for being Jewish. When, as an adolescent I first read The Diary of Anne Frank and thought ``that could have been me,'' it was from the luxurious safety of my parents' Brooklyn home. I was brought up as a so-called ``secular Jew,'' by nonbelievers. I never went to synagogue or observed the high holy days. But that didn't make me feel any less Jewish.

So when I heard that Barnes & Noble was reissuing an old book Gypsy Folk Tales that includes a story titled ``The Lucky Simpleton,'' it hurt me. Why? Because the story tells of an evil Jewish innkeeper who cheats and steals and is ultimately punished by being beaten and his children killed. This is the ``happy ending.''

Do I want Gypsy Folk Tales censored or banned? As a librarian and firm believer in freedom of expression, never.

I only wish there were a way to convey to those who have never experienced it how a seemingly casual or contextual ethnic or racial stereotype always hurts. And to acknowledge the possibility that a parent somewhere, while reading ``The Lucky Simpleton'' aloud to his children, may neglect to put the story in context.

And that could really hurt.

All of us. MEMO: Peggy Dean Earle is a librarian for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB