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Traveling group performs an original Yiddish tale, with folklore roots, in Scranton

Weaver, left, narrates 'Shterna & The Lost Voice' while Kiah Raymond operates a crankie theater at the Jewish Community Center in Scranton. They are members of The Magid Ensemble.
Aimee Dilger
/
WVIA News
Weaver, left, narrates 'Shterna & The Lost Voice' while Kiah Raymond operates a crankie theater at the Jewish Community Center in Scranton. They are members of The Magid Ensemble.

The audience at the Jewish Community Center in Scranton squeezed in around a "crankie" theater — a wooden box that frames a moving panorama.

Artist Kiah Raymond, a member of the Magid Ensemble, turned two large spools as a visual version of the original story "Shterna & The Lost Voice" flowed through the frame.

The only light in the auditorium backlit the story told on parchment-color butcher paper layered with cut outs of characters, towns and nature made from brown tracing paper. Raymond was inspired by Jewish paper cut folk art.

The narrator, known as Weaver, stood next to the box to tell their original story while a trio of klezmer musicians on violin, accordion and cello played original music. Klezmer is an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.

Raymond, Weaver and the musicians make up the ensemble. The group is based mostly in New England. Rabbi Daniel Swartz, spiritual leader of Temple Hesed, met the Magid Ensemble during a training for the Yiddish Book Center’s Yiddish Arts and Culture Initiative. He invited them to Scranton.

Magid is a Yiddish word for storyteller. Weaver's story is inspired by Yiddish folklore.

It follows Shterna, a healer, whose best friend loses his beautiful voice after recovering from the plague. Before he fell ill, each day he sung the morning prayers to wake up the town. At night his voice lulled them to sleep.

But without his singing: "they barely woke and they barely slept and they barely worked and they never played. They lived in unlife, a gray haze of empty time," Weaver narrated.

Then a stranger comes to Shterna’s home wrapped in bandages. It was the prophet Elijah, known to help the underdog.

Elijah tells Shterna, her friend, now in a deep depression, won't get his voice back but rather something else. The prophet sets her on a journey to return the music.

Raymond's art takes the audience through Shterna's journey through three worlds — the here and now, the underworld and the Garden of Eden. The music swelled at tense moments and mimicked earthly sounds at others.

In the end, Shterna succeeds.

Weaver created the story during the pandemic. They were witnessing people become disabled.

"And had to kind of find a new way to be in the world that was, like, life-affirming and allowed them to be creative and allowed them to live," they said. "You lose something and it's not coming back, but you find another way to give you access to life as being sort of a theme of the story."

Weaver said they feel connected to the Ashkenazi diaspora culture in their work as an artist.

"And so that is definitely the soil in which the story came to be," they said.

Different people take different things from the story, said Weaver.

For Swartz, the story was a reminder that there are people to help. Even the performance served that reminder.

"It wouldn't have been the same if it didn't have all of those parts together, the three musicians interacting with each other, that interacting with the art, that interacting with the story. And you need the audience too. So all of us helped create something together ... and that really ... sort of this metaphor unfolding of what it means to be to help each other," he said.

The stop in the city also brought something else to mind for Swartz.

"I need to tell the group that there's this old history in Scranton of in the days of vaudeville, that acts would come here first before going to New York City," he said.

The ensemble went on to play in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Kat Bolus is the community reporter for the WVIA News Team. She is a former reporter and columnist at The Times-Tribune, a Scrantonian and cat mom.

You can email Kat at katbolus@wvia.org