By Word of Mouth
RIEMER, JACK
By Word of Mouth One People, Many Stories Abigail Yasgur, executive producer; Jerry Stiller, host Jewish Community Library of the Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education, 2002. SixCD boxed set,...
...But if there were no stories, how boring and empty God's life would be...
...My favorites from the collection include: "The Sabbath Lion," which comes from Algeria...
...And I believe that God must love stories, too...
...Sandy Sasso Eisenberg, Blu Greenberg, Howard Schwartz, Julius Lester, Cherie Karo Schwartz, and Penina Schram are among the contemporary storytellers and story creators who are included in this collection...
...the "Sound of Work," native to the Balkans...
...Raisel's Riddle," a Polish tale...
...Whenever children hear those words, they settle back and get ready to listen to a story...
...I don't know if we have done that yet, but judging by this collection of tales, we are well on the way to producing 100 first-rate storytellers...
...But a community that can create as many new tales as this is not as moribund as pessimists would claim...
...and "The Christmas Menorahs," the story of how one town fought anti-Semitism and hatred in Montana...
...I believe that this whole Jewish enterprise in which we are engaged is one great, still-unfinished story, a story to which our generation has its own chapter to contribute...
...Imaginative, original music has been arranged by Gordon Lustig...
...There are tales from Yemen and Morocco, Poland and Russia, Egypt and Iran, Czechoslovakia and the Balkans, and from the midrash and the Middle Ages...
...And so, because I love stories, I welcome this new collection of compact discs that the Jewish Community Library of Los Angeles has produced...
...Rabbi Jack Riemer is the editor of Jewish Insights Into Death and Mourning, recently published by Syracuse University Press, and coeditor of So That Your Values Live On—A Treasury of Ethical Wills, published by Jewish Lights...
...This collection also includes a number of prominent Hollywood celebrities who are the readers of these tales...
...If there were no world, there would be no stories...
...We constantly hear prophecies of gloom and doom about the American Jewish community...
...The stories come from all over the Jewish world...
...I am a storyteller...
...REVIEWED BY JACK RIEMER am not a philosopher or a theologian or a scholar...
...And what a varied and talented group they are...
...SixCD boxed set, S54...
...They know when they hear those words they are about to be transported, perhaps to some ancient time, perhaps to some faroff country, perhaps to never-never land...
...I wish that the collectors had included Peretz and Agnon, Roth and Malamud, Dan Jacobson and Nathan Englander, but I cannot point to many they included that I would have taken out to make room for them...
...Once upon a time" is one of the most beloved phrases in all of literature...
...For otherwise, why would he have created the world...
...I understand that the stories in this album are being aired on hundreds of public radio stations around the country...
...This collection will be a valuable resource for parents, educators, and librarians who seek to forge links between the worlds from which we came and the worlds in which our children will five...
...All anthologies are matters of taste...
...But what strikes me as most impressive is how many of these tales come from contemporary America...
...Among them are men like Mike Burstyn, Henry Winkler, Monty Hall, Leonard Nimoy, Al Franken, and Jerry Stiller, and women like Darryl Hannah, Doris Roberts, Sandra Bernhard, Alfre Woodard, and Sandra Tsing Loh...
...And when Jewish parents tell a story to their children, they are forging a link between all the past and all the future...
...Drawing the Wind," from Majorca...
...Salo Baron, the great Jewish historian, once said that he would have no fears for American Jewry's future if it could produce 100 first-rate Jewish scholars...
Vol. 27 • August 2002 • No. 4
