Peninnah receives the 2017 Talking Leaves Award at the NSN Conference in July!

In case you were not able to attend, here are some gems from the conference. 

Below you will find: 

1.Doug Lipman's beautiful tribute to Peninnah that reflects the love of the JSC and so many others.

2.Peninnah's acceptance speech (which was read by Cherie because Peninnah was unable to attend this year's conference...see video.)

3. The link to the video that was taken of the event itself. 

(Wonderful!! Thank you Doug and Pam)

To Peninnah: A tribute story about a Wise Woman by Doug Lipman

Long ago and far away, in a humble village, there lived a wise woman.

She was an artist, but was also wise enough to know that, as important as art is, artists are even more important - for without artists, art dwells only among the dead. So she nurtured other artists the way a river nurtures a valley.

She was a teacher, but was also artist enough to know that the teacher cannot shape another's art - only welcome it. So she encouraged her students to honor each others’ work.

She was a writer, but was also teacher enough to know that she did not own her writings, only borrowed them from the future. So she encouraged others to tell her stories in their own ways.

She was a storyteller, but was also writer enough to preserve living words as flat leaves, that they might live beyond the valley in which they were first spoken. So she encouraged her stories to jump back and forth from mouth to page and back again.

She was a leader, but was also storyteller enough to know that the leader's job wasn't to tell all the stories, but to inspire those around her to tell their own.

She was humble, but was also leader enough to know that heartfelt praise gains its force from the hearts of those giving it.

She was wise, but was also humble enough to allow others the blessing of praising her. So when others praised her, she turned the praise back at them.

She was our mother, but she was also artist enough to praise even us, her children, with words of gold.

PENINNAH SCHRAM’S ACCEPTANCE OF TALKING LEAVES AWARD

Accepting on Peninnah’s behalf is Cherie Karo Schwartz

Folklorist Richard Chase has written about oral storytelling that, “you need to lift the words off the page in order to make them go right.” On the obverse side, the challenge is to write the folktales found in the oral tradition onto the page in a way that makes it possible to be “lifted off the page” so they can be spoken “trippingly on the tongue”.

When I first began retelling-in-writing Jewish folktales, several publishers rejected them because they were written in an “oral style.” In 1995, the Editor-in-Chief at Jason Aronson Publishing, Arthur Kurzweil, proposed that I compile an anthology of Jewish folktales in my voice. My response was, “I’ve already started.” Two years later, my first anthology, Jewish Stories One Generation Tells Another, was published. I am grateful to Arthur Kurzweil for offering me that opportunity to become a storyteller-in-print.

During the process of creating this book, I wanted to add a “Story-behind-the-Story” before each of the 65 stories. This page or two would include the sources, tale type and motifs, background about the story, and what, if anything, I changed or added to the story. However, my editor suggested I place this commentary as EndNotes. I insisted that, as a storyteller, I needed to put each story into a context and he agreed. In fact, many reviewers and readers highlighted the value of having such commentaries as introductions to the stories.

Writing a book of folktales is not solo work. Rather, as I was writing the stories, I would be telling them to myself in a voice that I could hear so that the orality of the tales was retained (with some compromises to the printed page).

I must acknowledge two other people who have been great friends and mentors encouraging me and sharing their wealth of knowledge and wisdom about Jewish folklore. The first is the Dean of Jewish Folklore, Professor Dov Noy. Dov Noy’s Doctoral Dissertation under Professor Stith Thompson put Jewish Folktales on the World Folklore Map! Dov Noy founded the Israel Folktale Archives in 1955 and this major treasure, now at the University of Haifa, has collected over 35,000 Jewish folktales from the various ethnic communities in Israel. I include many tales found in the Israel Folktale Archives in my 14 books, always with citations.

I want to also recognize Folklorist-Author Howard Schwartz for his generosity of heart in encouraging me in my storytelling – both oral and written - and sharing his vast knowledge and wisdom with me.

Reading this Acceptance Speech on my behalf has been my dear friend for about 30 years: Storyteller and Author Cherie Karo Schwartz with whom I have shared many programs, both in teaching storytelling workshops and as part of performance events. We often ‘talk story’ and brainstorm ideas for teaching and telling stories. I am grateful to have Cherie – along with Arthur Kurzweil, Dov Noy and Howard Schwartz – as we journey through a storytelling life.

I am sorry I cannot be here in person to give my personal thanks to the Committee of the Talking Leaves Award and to all of you in the NSN!

I bless you that you continue to tell and write the stories you share as you journey through a storytelling life! In our lives today, we need a tsunami of stories that will ripple out into the world to create a healthier world of love, hope, kindness, laughter and peace!

THANK YOU for this splendid TALKING LEAVES AWARD!

Links to the videos :

"https://player.vimeo.com/video/241086805

https://vimeo.com/241086805/

CONGRATULATIONS, 2017 NSN ORACLE AWARDEE!

Talking Leaves: Peninnah Schram

The Talking Leaves Award is presented to those members of our community who have made outstanding contributions to the literary body of storytelling as authors, editors or collectors.

We are so proud to share the news about the award from the National Storytelling Network!!
Way to go, Peninnah!! We refer to your books all the time and can even hear your voice. 
Love from the JSC!

The First Occasional Storytelling Swap at Havurat Shalom

The First Occasional Storytelling Swap at

Havurat Shalom

With a Special Invitation to The Jewish Storytelling Coalition

March 19, 2017 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

On Sunday, March 19, 2017 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM Havurat Shalom will be joined by some members of the Jewish Storytelling Coalition in a story swap. 

Nu? What’s a Story Swap?

Well some listeners (tales need listeners) and tellers gather to honor the teller and the tale. Some tellers will be experienced and others not at all. The leader asks who has a story to share, figures out a time limit (perhaps 5 minutes or 10) for each teller and decides who tells when.

 We ask that the tales come from what we learned from being Jewish. They can be from the centuries of lore from Midrash to Modern times; or original; or personal tales.  We invite persons of all ages.

 This will not be a pot luck dinner. But bringing nosh would be considered praiseworthy, and some ice cream would be considered an act of kindness.

 So, come, sit, listen, tell, enjoy.

We ask that you consider contributing a little to the Havurat for graciously hosting this.

Havurat Shalom

113 College Avenue

Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

Web: http://www.TheHav.org

Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=113+College+Ave,+Somerville+MA&spn=0.017733,0.022872&hl=en

The Jewish Storytelling Coalition
Web Page: http://www.jewishstorytelling.org/

Blog: http://jscnews.blogspot.com/

Peninnah Schram, YU Professor Emerita, co-authored an article that appears in the current Hadassah Magazine and presented a session at a recent Seminar on Education in Israel:

        JSC continues to be proud and inspired by Penninah's adventures!

1. Peninnah Schram, YU Professor Emerita, and Sandy Eisenberg Sasso co-authored the article, "The Way We Were: Love in Letters," that appears in the January-February 2017 issue of Hadassah Magazine, pp. 22-25. This article is based on the love letters section of their most recent book, Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage: Folktales, Legends and Letters, co-authored with Sandy Eisenberg Sasso (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

2. Peninnah Schram, YU Professor Emerita, was invited to present a talk about storytelling at a recent Seminar in Israel that was sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Education. She presented her talk, "Storytelling as a Tool for Promoting Speaking in a Classroom," on Thursday December 29, 2016 to an audience of 80 educators from English Departments who are involved with the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) in schools throughout Israel.Since the seminar's focus was on increasing dialogue in English from elementary through high schools in Israel, Peninnah's emphasis was on telling participatory stories in the classroom to inspire students to enter into the "dialogue" more actively and in more creative ways.

Scheherazade Schram!

Here is Peninnah's newest adventure in an exotic tent on an incredibleThrone at the Arabian Nights Fair that preceded the Newburgh NY January concert. After the Fair, the concert took place in the auditorium where she narrated Scheherazade to the Rimsky-Korsakov  Scheherazade Symphonic Suite with a 60 piece orchestra! Extraordinary and fun events! Brava, Peninnah!

Congratulations, Peninnah! on JEWISH STORIES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE!

A beautiful interview with our Peninnah!

To be able to sit alone with Peninnah Schram, to listen to her tell a story just to you, just for you, is to be transfixed.

Ms. Schram is a small, silver-haired woman, straight-backed, soft-voiced, and clear-eyed. She sits in her Upper West Side apartment, her home for decades, full of artwork and Judaica, a lived-in, personal place, and looks directly at you as she speaks.

There’s magic in the way she tells the story — the rhythm she uses, the way she varies her voice, the way she looks directly at you and responds to you as you react to her.

Although Ms. Schram tells stories that have descended through the oral tradition, she also has written books. (She also has a distinguished academic career; before she retired last year she spent four decades teaching speech and drama at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, and in 1995 she won the Covenant award, given to outstanding Jewish educators.) Her most recent book, “Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage,” co-written with Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, is just out, and she loves talking about it.

There are differences between telling stories aloud and reading them, Ms. Schram said, and Jewish culture reveres both. Much of our tradition is oral; the center of religious services on Shabbat, holidays, and Mondays and Thursdays — the point toward which they aim and from which they reverentially retreat, with pomp and velvet and silver and parades — is when the Torah is unscrolled and read aloud. For many centuries many Jews were barely or not at all literate; even when they were able to read in their vernaculars, for much of our history only a small group could read Hebrew. Oral transmission was paramount.

And, of course, we read aloud from other texts as well — the haftarah on Shabbat, the megillot on holidays, the Hagaddah on Passover. The written is transformed into the oral; each retelling is slightly different, filtered through the tropes and melodies and inflections of its teller and the teller’s culture.

“Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage,” like Ms. Schram’s other books, is a compilation of Jewish folk tales from around the world.

The book is divided into three sections. The first looks at biblical and rabbinic love stories, the stories that formed the background understanding of love for centuries of Jews. The second is folktales, still very old but dating from after the rabbinic period. The third is love letters, ranging from one from medieval India to correspondence between Ms. Schram’s own parents, Cantor Samuel E. Manchester and Dora Markman. The fourth is contemporary love stories, and the fifth is instructions on how to write your own love story. (Of course, instructions for finding love are not included. Those instructions, for readers wise enough to recognize them, are in the book’s earlier sections.)

There are many themes from Jewish tales that have made their way around the world, and others, from outside, that have made their way into Jewish stories. “It is hard to trace them, but sometimes you can tell by the ending,” Ms. Schram said. She told one of her favorites, which appears in this book as “The Man and Woman From Sidon.”

For much of our history only a small group could read Hebrew.Oral transmission was paramount.

In the story, which comes from the midrash — Pesikta de Rab Kahana, to be specific — a man and woman who have been married for 10 years, are happy with each other, in fact genuinely love one another and have many material goods — but no children — reluctantly decide to divorce. That way, they figure, either or both can remarry and maybe be blessed with children. Reluctantly but with great resolve, they ask their rabbi for permission to divorce.

You may do so, Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai said, but only if they end the marriage as they began it, with a celebration. Then the wife could retreat to her father’s house. Puzzled and unhappy but obedient, they comply. Drowning his sorrows, the man drank until he was drunk. Just before he passed out, he told his not-yet-ex-wife, “My beloved, choose anything in my house that you desire and take it with you to your father’s house.”

Once he was dead to the world, his wife instructed her servants to carry him to her father’s house. When he awoke, puzzled, asking why he was there, his wife told him that she had followed his demand. “There is nothing in the world I desire more than you,” she told him.

That story that has traveled and returned to the Jewish world; “what marks it as having come under the Jewish influence or filter” — what marks it as a Jewish story — “is the ending,” she said.

At the end of the story, the couple returns to the rabbi, telling him that they love each other far too much to separate. And then, it concludes, “The rabbi prayed for them, and before long the woman became pregnant and gave birth to a child.”

This story, Ms. Schram said, is a prime example of “the clever young woman” and a “quintessential Jewish love story.” (It might even sound particularly familiar to close readers of this newspaper; in July, Zalmen Mlotek of Teaneck and his company, National Yiddish Theatre — Folksbiene, in partnership with Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, put on a one-night-only performance of “Di Goldene Kale.” The golden bride in question was the very smart — albeit adopted, but still it counts — daughter of an innkeeper. And the trope is so powerful that the opera soon will reopen off Broadway, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan.)

Ms. Schram came to storytelling through her own parents. She grew up in New London, Connecticut, where her father, the community’s cantor, saw to all its needs, physical and spiritual; also was New London’s mohel, who did circumcisions; its shochet, who was in charge of its ritual slaughter and therefore much of its food, and a composer of classical music.

He also was a storyteller, whose voice, rhythms, and deep passion for the stories of our people formed some of his daughter’s earlier memories. “The stories told, read, and heard in childhood fill the storehouse of memories from which a person can draw the needed wisdom, perhaps many years later,” Ms. Schram wrote. Peninnah’s mother told stories too; while Chazan Manchester’s were more inspirational, Ms. Manchester’s were practical life lessons. She often minded them at the time, Ms. Schram said, “but she was always right, even if I often didn’t realize it until much later.”

Through both her parents, she drew the “nourishment and stimulation that a creative imagination needs,” she said. “Images stay in your mind longer than lessons taught in other ways manage to do.”

Ms. Schram graduated from the University of Connecticut and then from Columbia, and began working in Jewish theater, creating plays for children, teaching college students, and recording books for the Jewish Braille Institute. Soon, she developed her interest in Jewish storytelling into a career, trailblazing a new field into which other storytellers have followed her.

Like her parents and now her own son and daughter, she was married happily, but unlike them she was widowed young. Her daughter, Rebecca, married an Israeli and made aliyah; she is now the mother of three children. Her son, Mordechai, a cantor like his grandfather, and his wife have a son as well.

There are so many stories there! (In fact, Sonia Gordon-Walinsky tells the story of her marriage to Mordechai in visual images in her mother-in-law’s book.)

Sometimes stories can be told without words. Here and on the cover, Peninnah Schram’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Gordon-Walinsky, draws the very Jewish love story that united her and her husband, Mordechai Schram. (Sonia Gordon-Walinsky, Sukkat Shalom: A Micrographic Love Story, 2014, Ink and paper, 7×5, Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage.)

In the end, though, despite the lure and very real value of written or drawn or danced or filmed or sung stories, “there is no substitute for a human voice telling a story,” Ms. Schram said.

It is with great sadness that we inform you of the death of Larry Schwartz, loving husband of Cherie Karo Schwartz. She writes:

Shalom dear friends and family of my heart,

I wish I could have spoken with all of you, but time and energy prevent this now.

It is with my heart breaking that I let you know that Larry died yesterday, November 22nd, at 5:36 PM.

It all came so fast, in less than a day, yet Larry’s passing was such a peaceful, calm, sacred time, filled with peace. He had a clarity, a presence and dignity that belied all he had been through since the attack three months ago that left him in such a traumatic brain and functioning loss.  

It was  a peaceful miracle.

I want you all to know what blessings you were in his life, from family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, dance partners, neighbors, and so many more.

Here is the information so you will know.

Thank you from my heart for making Larry’s life more joyful , fulfilling, funny, strong, supported, and all.

Larry passed away peacefully last night, November 22nd, at the Aspen Siesta nursing home.  In addition to his loving wife Cherie, who never left his side, Larry was surrounded by loving friends and neighbors. 

Larry is survived by his lifelong friend, partner and wife,  Cherie Karo Schwartz, his daughter-in-law, Robyn Mayer, and grandchildren Zakaria, Lucy and Aaron Schwartz.  To his great sorrow Larry was preceded in death by both of his children, Ronda Schwartz z”l, and Daran Schwartz, z”l.

Larry was born in New York City and raised in New York and California.  He obtained his masters degree from MIT, and went on to obtain a PhD from UCLA.  Larry, an Aerospace Engineer, became Chief Scientist and Top Fellow for Hughes, which became Raytheon, for 43 years.  Larry loved his work and he was magnificent at it, creating software for the gigantic white satellite dishes at Buckley AFB by DIA.

Larry was a true renaissance man:  he designed the house that he and Cherie lived in, Cherie’s wedding ring and dress.  He ran a marathon at the age of 42, and had his bar mitzvah at B’nai Havurah seven years ago.  Larry was a wonderful artist, drawing and painting.  He loved Greece, Greek dancing and all forms of travel.

Larry’s most salient quality was always giving people joy through his amazing mind, beamish smile and incredibly pun-ish-ing sense of humor.  Larry was always loving ,  kind zeisen neshamah.  He will be missed.

Contributions in Larry’s memory may be made to B’nai Havurah, where Larry and Cherie have belonged for three decades, or to the Alzheimer’s Association. 

Larry had Alzheimer’s for many years, and yet enjoyed full, joyful life. 

Zichrono livracha – may Larry’s memory be for a blessing always.