On The Power of a Tale : Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives by Haya Bar-Itzhak and Idit Pintel-Ginsberg

Abstract

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2021), pp. 162–166. Copyright © 2022 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 B O O K R E V I E W On The Power of a Tale: Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives by Haya Bar-Itzhak and Idit Pintel-Ginsberg Corinne Stavish The Power of a Tale: Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives, edited by Haya Bar-Itzhak and Idit Pintel-Ginsberg. Wayne State University Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-0814342084. Peninnah Schram would stand in front of a group of storytellers at her workshops and reminisce about the Israel Folktales Archives (IFA) in Haifa. Howard Schwartz would do the same at his workshops. Peninnah and Howard, both scholars and storytellers, regaled us with stories of IFA’s renowned founder, folklorist Dov Noy, and the physical improbability of the archives. We saw the room clearly: cramped quarters with pieces of paper taped everywhere, like clues on a scavenger hunt, on the walls, each piece describing a story, narrator, and tale type. It seemed that Dov Noy and archivist Edna Hechal could locate anything among the scraps, with almost madcap antics. Without Dov Noy and without the archives, we never would have had the stories that have come to shape Jewish storytelling. On The Power of a Tale Stavish Stavish n 163 These were the decades of the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the Conference for Alternatives in Jewish Education (CAJE) met on college campuses throughout the country, assembling up to two thousand Jewish educators annually. Among those eager learners were budding storytellers, embracing the offerings of Peninnah Schram, founder of CAJE’s Jewish Storytelling Network, and renowned Jewish studies scholar, Howard Schwartz. There are Jewish storytellers who may have learned the substance of their material and craft elsewhere, but those who put Jewish storytelling in the foreground of the storytelling Renaissance grew because of seeds planted at CAJE workshops. Peninnah and Howard wrote the books that would become the foundation of most of those storytellers’ repertoire. They graciously told us to take their work and to tell those stories they collected from IFA, but always to honor the sources. For the storytellers of CAJE, Howard and Peninnah were the sources of the stories they collected, wrote, published, and shared. But for the collectors themselves, the source of many of those stories was the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA) founded by Dov Noy in 1955. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the IFA, a remarkable collection of fifty-three stories has been compiled. Unlike the IFA’s 1963 contribution to world folklore, Folktales of Israel, the anniversary edition The Power of a Tale features not only stories but also scholarly commentary for each one. It should be no surprise, and is most fitting, that those early adventurers, the scavengers who scaled the walls of the IFA, Peninnah Schram and Howard Schwartz, are two of the scholarly commentators. Once again, we storytellers are in their debt. The fiftieth anniversary collection was published in Hebrew in 2005. It took until 2019 for that collection to be translated into English and published by Wayne State University Press under the direction of editor Dan Ben-Amos. It was worth the wait for those still eager to trace a culture’s roots through folktales. The fifty-three stories are arranged in the order in which they were collected from 1955 to 2005, ascending from IFA 335 to IFA 23011. In the introduction, Haya Bar-Itzhak says, “The criterion for selection was that the tales had not previously appeared in an IFA publication. The editors also wanted to represent as many ethnic groups as possible among those with stories in the IFA” (xxix). She goes on to explain that the stories come from twenty-six different ethnic communities. Twenty-two are Jewish and four non-Jewish. For a storyteller, that variety offers a bounty of possibility. It is interesting that a few of the first stories deal with demons and the 164 n On The Power of a Tale supernatural, and the closing story is humorous. The 1963 collection Folktales of Israel by IFA, edited by Dov Noy, with an introduction by Richard Dorson, has fifty-one...