Epigraphs are like little appetizers to the great entrée of a story. They illuminate important aspects of the story, and they get us headed in the right direction.
Epigraph
Both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors. –Jack Zipes, Spells of Enchantment
What's up with the epigraph?
The epigraph is by Jack Zipes, a fancy-shmancy academic who's an expert on fairy tales. One of his big fancy thoughts is that fairy tales help people process terrible things that happen in the real world.
Zipes' quote is the perfect opener for Gemma's story because she's the living (or, er, recently dead) embodiment of what he's talking about. The way that she transformed her trauma from the Holocaust into a bedtime story…that's Zipes' theory about fairy tales in a nutshell.