“I Showed Him an Open Hand, He Showed me a Fist”: Iconicity, Ostension, and Cross-Modal Integration in a Yiddish Folktale

This essay offers a multimodal performance analysis of a widely documented international folktale. The emergent unfolding of the tale plot, which turns on constrasting interpretations of a series of thematized gestures, illuminates the dynamic tension between iconicity and ostension in performance.