Although I don’t remember how or when I first came across “Hansel and Gretel,” I cannot recall a time when I did not know the tale. As a child, what I understood about the story was that a pair of young siblings, a brother and sister, were lost in the forest and needed to find their way home. There were bread crumbs, birds, and disastrously, the candy house. Inside lived the kind old lady who was in fact wretched, lost in a different way. All my life, I thought the story was about the importance of not being fooled by anything too good to be true. When I read it a couple of weeks ago, though, I discovered other layers: the world Hansel and Gretel inhabit is gravely unsympathetic to them, and every character in the story is either touched or motivated by hunger.
The Vocation 