By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
For as long as people have been able to communicate, there have been storytellers.
Language may not have been invented for the telling of tales around the primordial campfires, but that has surely been one of its most enduring uses. Even today, when we have books, television, movies and video games among the endless sources of entertainment and information available to us, the single voice creating images from spoken words casts a lure that catches our attention and pulls us in.
This is a story of one of those storytellers.
Peninnah Schramm came to the Seattle area last month in honor of Jewish day school teachers, in particular Bobbi Bridge, at an event titled “Honoring Our Teachers; Telling Their Stories” held at Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Bellevue.
A diminutive woman with short, silver hair, she uses her entrancing eyes during performances to make contact with audience members and draw them into her world of words.
For more than 30 years, Schramm has been taking time out from her career to paint verbal rainbows in the minds of listeners around the world. As a professional storyteller, Schramm says she has toured the United States, Canada, Israel, England and Australia, telling stories and giving storytelling workshops for groups of all ages and in every venue imaginable, “just everywhere where people are interested in hearing stories and wanting to learn more about [them].” At the same time, she holds a day job as associate professor of Speech and Drama at Yeshiva University’s Stern College in New York City, where she has been for the last 34 years.
“What I’m doing is different from a theater performance,” she notes. “I’m using all the same performance skills — the tools of voice, body and imagination. I’m working with images, not just with words memorized from a page. I need to make those words feel right in my mouth, in my heart, in my head and the way that I’m telling. I’m telling directly as a dialogue with the audience, so I may go in and out of the story.”
She says that while some parts of the telling become standardized by the repetition over time, she does not memorize her tales, because “if I do, then it’s only by rote, and I don’t tell by rote. I tell by heart. It is traditional storytelling where I am telling directly, interactively with eye contact, with my voice, with my heart, to the audience.”
A graduate of the University of Connecticut and Columbia University, she is also the author of seven books of Jewish folktales and has recorded a CD titled The Minstrel and the Storyteller. Schramm emphasizes the distinction of being a professional storyteller, or as she puts it, “cross my palm with silver and I’ll tell you a story.” Yet whether she does it for money or not, Schramm says she has been a storyteller her entire life.
“I was blessed by parents who told me stories,” says Schramm. “I listened to stories when I was a child. That’s really how you become a storyteller, by listening to stories — then I told stories to my own two children.”
The breakthrough that led her to turning pro came as a result of her work with the Jewish Braille Institute, where she recorded books for the blind in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.
“When I was asked to record Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first book of children’s stories, called Zlateh the Goat, it just suddenly inspired me to say, ‘I want to tell stories beyond my home and beyond the microphone,’” she explains. “That inspiration hit me to start telling stories without knowing other storytellers.
“I didn’t know anything about storytellers,” she adds. “I thought I had invented it.”
Schramm did not know exactly what she would do with her inspiration, but with a full repertoire of tales to tell and the speech and drama training to carry it off, so she approached the 92nd St. Y and asked them if she could do a storytelling performance.
“Happily,” she says, “the director of education at the Y at that time said, ‘Fine. Set up a program.’”
By the mid-‘70s, a national organization of storytellers — headquartered in Jonesboro, Tenn. — had formed, and Schramm found herself part of a major renaissance of what had almost become a lost art in much of the country.
“Everything has fed into my life in such a way that I’ve been able to pull it all together to use my talents and my heart-passions,” Schramm says. “I was, again, blessed to have a father who was a cantor, so I grew up hearing a magnificent voice with the clarity of the words – the articulation. So I had this great opportunity all through my growing years, without being conscious of it.”
One outgrowth of her early involvement with the 92nd St. Y was the founding of the Jewish Storytelling Center, in which she remains active to this day. Every year she teaches a four-week class in storytelling, and performs as part of their annual performance series about once every other year.
“I don’t want to dominate it. I really want other people to participate,” she says.
“I now tell, primarily, stories that I have collected from the Israel Folktale Archives, from the midrashim, from the Talmud, from medieval texts. I’m always searching for stories. Then I retell them, I re-tailor them in my style — the way I feel them, the way I can tell them.”
This month, at their national convention in Chicago, Schramm will receive one of several Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National Storytelling Network, “given to an elder who has devoted herself to spreading stories everywhere.”
“I’m not quite sure I can wear that hat,” she says of being called an elder. “When you hear about elders you think, ‘Wise Elders,’ experience should come with [being] elders. I think it’s just by the blessing of years, and I don’t think I’m quite in the range of elder because that’s for someone else. As one of the other marvelous people — whom I consider an elder — says, she considers herself more ‘experienced’ than being an elder.”