From the Forvertz (The Forward newspaper our Bubbies/Zaidies read every day! I subscribe!)
Peninnah's World: A Jewish Life in Stories, authored by Caren Schnur Neile
Review by Mikhail Krutikov in Forverts, July 21, 2022
Translated by Mikhl Yashinsky, August 3, 2022
For Peninnah Schram, subject of the biography
Title:
“Dos lebn fun a dertseylerin, aleyn dertseylt vi a mayse”
(“The Life of a Storyteller, Itself Told as a Story”)
Subtitle:
Peninnah Schram helped to revive a tradition of telling Jewish stories here in America.
When the first Jewish immigrants came from the German-speaking countries to America in the middle of the nineteenth century, they brought along the Reform movement of Judaism, with its temples and “Reverend” rabbis, which fit well with the American Protestant doctrine of Christianity.
Consequently, the new wave of Jewish immigrants, which came from Russia and Poland a half-century later, had to conform to this “Yekkish” (German-Jewish) Judaism, in order to become true-blue Americans. They left behind in the Old Country those beliefs and customs that seemed antiquated and primitive to the “civilized” Americans.
Jewish folklore, all sorts of songs, spells, and stories, also formed a part of this abandoned inheritance. True, the immigrants were themselves very familiar with this inheritance, but they kept it to their homes, in accordance with the well-known principle, “Be a Jew at home, and a human being on the street.” Peninnah Schram grew up in just such a home. She would later gain a reputation as a masterful storyteller of Jewish tales.
Her father, Samuel (Shmuel) Manchester (he received that name when already in America), was a cantor, a kosher slaughterer, and a performer of circumcisions in the city New London, Connecticut, where he served the Jewish residents of the surrounding towns. Her mother, Dora (Dvoyre) earned a living from all kinds of work, as was the custom among Jews in the old shtetls.
Both of her parents grew up in Lithuania, but the family got along very nicely among the “Yankees.” Peninnah, who was born in 1934, went to college, and later married a lawyer whom she had met in New York. She had theatrical talent, and successfully produced a play based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Gimpel the Fool,” which her small troupe played in various synagogues. Meeting with the famous Yiddish writer made a strong impression on her, but her career in theatre did not go further. Singer was very friendly, but his agent demanded a great deal of money for performances of his work on professional stages.
Nine years after her wedding, her husband died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and she was left a young widow with two small children. A friend invited her to teach the arts of drama and storytelling at Iona College, a small Christian university in New Rochelle, New York, and a new career took off for her. A couple of years later, she received a similar position at Yeshiva University in New York, where she would teach for a span of 46 years, from 1969 to 2015. During that time, she published dozens of recordings and collections of Jewish stories for children and adults. She draws her material from many different sources: the Hebrew Bible, legends, Chassidic stories, and Yiddish folktales, then adapts them to the tastes of contemporary readers.
Peninnah Schram has now herself become the heroine of a storybook with the title Peninnah’s World: A Jewish Life in Stories. The author, Dr. Caren Schnur Neile, herself a professional teller of Jewish stories, has a great deal of respect for Peninnah Schram. She conducted a number of interviews with Schram and afterwards “dramatized” them into 25 chapters, which are styled like stories, with lively dialogues and theatrical effects. The goal of this approach, the author explains, is to allow the reader to better understand the connections between the events and the emotions that play out in the course of the heroine’s life. “In this way, I was able to transform the treasure of factual information into images, which will hopefully stick in people’s memories,” writes Caren Schnur Neile in the introduction.
What does Peninnah’s World tell us about its heroine, her life, and the society that surrounds her? Of a pattern with other books in its genre, the great social questions and political conflicts of the day remain outside the book’s purview. Here is charted the success of a Jewish woman in the “goldene medine,” the golden land of America. She is possessed of a strong character, a creative talent, and a sound upbringing. The images that the author builds upon the groundwork of facts in the 25 story-chapters are homey and full of charm, written with love and imbued with many lively details of the lifestyles of the Jewish middle class in and around New York. One meets within the pages of the book well-known personalities like Singer, Eli Wiesel, and Molly PIcon, and peeks into pretty parlors, dining rooms, and the wings of theatres. At times these pictures remind one of episodes of Mad Men, and other times The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
The reader follows Peninnah’s life from childhood on. Every story contains an episode that uncovers a distinct facet of her personality. Raised in a pious Jewish home, she later had to adapt herself to various unexpected situations. In Paris, she and her husband were invited to dinner as guests of a highly-respected French family, where, with great fear, she caught sight of a lobster on the table. She succeeded at politely wriggling free of having to eat the treif creature. Yet another temptation lay in wait for her in Haifa, when she went there to meet distant relatives. In order to honor the distinguished American guests, the Israelis proudly offered them pieces of white meat which turned out to be pork. Her husband found it delicious, Peninnah asked for fish instead. Such details are interesting, but sometimes they get in the way of offering a greater picture of the historical period, which was full of momentous events for the Jewish people and the wider world.
Professor Dan Ben-Amos, an expert of Jewish folklore, comments that Peninnah Schram transplanted the art of storytelling from its traditional religious context to the domain of general education and communal activity. In German, one would say that Peninnah made the genre of the Jewish story “salonfähig,” or socially acceptable, in America, for both Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. In that sense, she has continued the tradition of Sh. An-ski, I. L. Peretz, Martin Buber, and other Yiddish and Hebrew people of letters who at the threshold of the 20th century in Europe undertook to remake folkloric material in their own works. At the same time, the various Jewish national movements endeavored to make use of folklore in order to attract wide swaths of the Jewish masses.
In this country, this cultural legacy has for many years remained on the outskirts of American Jewishness. Only with the greater emergence of interest in Americans’ own various ethnic roots, which was connected to the social protest movements of the 1960s, did Jews here also begin to dig up their own forgotten inheritance. Peninnah Schram’s life and work are a part of that history.
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