Jewish Storytelling Coalition

Monday, December 30, 2019

Great way to start 2020! Happy New Year. Congratulations, Howard and Peninnah!!


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The Power of a Tale
Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives
Edited by Haya Bar-Itzhak and Idit Pintel-Ginsberg
Here is the link to ORDERING this NEW IFA Book:


Use the CODE :Holiday Sale! Save 40% on every order with coupon code HOL9!

PRINTED PAPER CASED
Published: November 2019
ISBN: 9780814342084
Pages: 464 Size: 7x10
Illustrations: 45 black-and-white images        PRICE: $64.99
$64.99 
EBOOK
Published: November 2019
ISBN: 9780814342091
In The Power of a Tale: Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives, editors Haya Bar-Itzhak and Idit Pintel-Ginsberg bring together a collection of fifty-three folktales in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA) at the University of Haifa. Established by the folklorist Dov Noy in the 1950s, the IFA is the only archive of its kind in Israel and serves as a center for knowledge and information concerning the cultural heritage of the many ethnic communities in Israel.
For this jubilee volume, contributors each selected a story—the narrators of which vary in ethnic background, education level, gender, and length of time in Israel—from the more than 24,000 preserved in the archives and wrote an accompanying analytic essay. The folk narrative is anchored in tradition, but it is modified and renewed by each narrator as they tell it to assorted audiences and in different performance contexts. The stories they tell encompass a myriad of genres and themes, including mythical tales, demon legends, märchen of various sorts, and personal narratives. Contributors employ diverse approaches to analyze and interpret the stories, such as the classic comparative approach, which looks at tale types, oikotypes, and motifs; formalism, which considers narrative roles and narrative functions; structuralism, which aims to uncover a story’s deep structure and its binary oppositions; and more.
Translated for the first time into English, the stories and accompanying essays are evidence of the lively research being conducted today on folk literature. Scholars and students interested in Jewish folklore and literature will appreciate this diverse collection as well as readers interested in Jewish and Israeli culture.

The above annotation of this volume is from Wayne State University Press as a Press Release. This is additional info by Peninnah Schram.
     This anthology, The Power of a Tale: Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives, includes two American storytellers and authors known to many of the Jewish-American storytelling communities and to the Israeli folklorists at the Israel Folktale Archives: Howard Schwartz and Peninnah Schram. Howard and Peninnah had been invited by the editors to write folkloristic commentary to a story chosen from the IFA tales. 
    Howard Schwartz chose “Death as a Godfather” and Peninnah Schram chose “The King and the Old Woodcutter.”

This volume is a treasure of folktales collected by the IFA from the various ethnic communities in Israel.