Shonaleigh- possibly the last Drut’syla

Shonaleigh is a drut’syla; a storyteller in a Jewish tradition inherited from her late grand-mother, Edith Marks (d.1988), by whom she was trained from childhood onwards.

The drut’syla repertoire comprises twelve interlinked cycles, each of several hundred tales. Training also involves a complex system of oral memorisation, visualisation and interpretation (midrash) of tales.

Historically, following training, each drut’syla (cf. Yiddish dertseyler, “storyteller”) would act as hereditary storyteller-in-residence to her own immediate community. However, the tradition was uprooted, and came close to extinction, in the mid-twentieth century.

Shonaleigh has been active mainly as a professional storyteller to a secular public. By contrast with rabbinical and official Jewish narrative tradition, documentation of the oral drut’syla tradition is sparse, and much about it remains obscure.

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