SAN DIEGO — Who doesn’t love to listen to a good story? For many of us, stories were an essential part of bedtime. And podcasts like Story Corps, The Moth and This American Life just go to show that our desire to hear stories doesn’t end with childhood.
This week, I tuned in to two live story broadcasts by local artists. The first was a picture book reading from YAAANA (Yiddish Arts and Academics Association of North America). The second was Read, Imagine, Create, a presentation of student works by Write Out Loud.
Local Klezmer and ethnomusicologist Yale Strom read a picture book of an old Jewish story, The Wedding That Saved A Town. There’s an old Ashkenazi superstition that a Shvartseh Chaseneh, a “black plague” can be abated when two orphans get married in a cemetery. One such wedding was held in New York in 1918 during the Spanish Flu. Another was held in Hebron (in then British Palestine) under a black chuppah during an outbreak of cholera. Choléra was so rampant in those days that it became a Yiddish curse-word and is still used as such in Polish to this day.
So in the story, everything is ready for this “black wedding” except the groom. So Yiske the klezmer goes on a quest to find a suitable, eligible, orphaned man to marry the waiting bride. Given the cholera, orphaned males are not hard to find. Eligible, there’s a few. But suitable is the hardest bill to fill as Yiske is looking for a man with the right values. It’s a very sweet story to read to your children. And of course, Yale is just not Yale without his violin. So the story was followed by some lively klezmer wedding tunes.
Yale is always fun to listen to. But rather than holding a picture book up to a camera with movement and glare, I recommend scanning the pages into a power point and sharing the screen on Zoom. This will make things a lot easier for the audience.
Read, Imagine, Create
Write Out Loud received a grant from the NEA for its current initiative, The Big Read. Middle and high school students read A Small Story About the Sky, a book of poems by Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s Poet Laureate, inspiring them to create literary, visual and musical works of their own. Ríos grew up in a Spanish-speaking home and learned English at school. While his poems are in English, the music of Spanish permeates his work. As a community on the Mexican border, his works seem a perfect fit.
Working remotely from their own homes, actors Rachel van Wormer, Brian Mackey, Sandra Ruiz and others read the students’ poems and prose with crystal clear diction, humor and great heart in the video.I was particularly charmed by Rachel’s comic “witch voice.”
The Artistic Director’s Choice Award went to 12-year old Grace Howard who put together The Twist of a Tongue, a cookbook filled with recipes and illustrations inspired by Rios’ poems.
The 1st Place Prize for Literature went to 10-year old Jedd Li for his story, Korona 2020. He cleverly wrote from the point of view of a young snake who is disappointed when his Slithering Class is interrupted by another “human drill.” He’s weary of these drills until one fateful day when it’s not a drill.
I thoroughly enjoyed the creative works of these young people, rough edges and all, for their poignance and depth of feeling. I find that young people are often smarter and more insightful than we give them credit for. All they need is encouragement. Thank you, Write Out Loud for renewing my faith in the future.
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Eric George Tauber is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts. He may be contacted via eric.tauber@sdjewishworld.com