It's the way she tells 'em

A Jewish storyteller visits Cape Clear this week, writes Cleo Murphy

Drut'syla. It's the Yiddish word for storyteller, the name by which Jewish "seanchaís" are known. Shonaleigh is a Drut'syla, but she's no ageing granny sitting by fire. She's a vibrant, funny performer who has made a career out of her creativity. She tells stories with her hands, using fingers, clad in silver jewellery, right down to her lengthy painted nails. She also uses her dark eyes and a flick of her black hair. The overall effect is bewitching.

Last year when she performed at the Cape Clear Storytelling Festival in Co Cork, she thrilled the audience with a risqué story of infatuation, infidelity and a man's obsession with a Queen's backside. Most of her listeners were thrilled. The parents of one teenager complained afterward to the organisers. Later on in the pub, Shonaleigh winced: "They'll probably never ask me back." But this September, she is back.

The festival attracts storytellers from all over the world. They have come from African and Indian traditions, native American and Jamaican, European and, of course, Irish. Styles and performances vary, and even the reason for telling stories differs, but most agree that the power of story is underestimated.

"The Drut'syla was the keeper of culture in a community," explains Shonaleigh. "She dealt in gossip, folktale and what we now call urban legend. Men were taught Hebrew and studied sacred texts, but the Drut'syla spoke in Yiddish. Sometimes, during periods of persecution, sacred stories bled into folktales."

Shonaleigh's grandmother was the daughter of Dutch and Turkish Jews and grew up in Holland. When the war broke out she sent her daughter to England and, in time, escaped herself. Jewish community culture was blown apart by the war. Yiddish became unfashionable in favour of Israeli. Drut'sylas no longer appeared to have a role. But at family gatherings, Shonaleigh picked up the stories. "They used to tell the story of my great-aunt Maud who toured Vaudeville with a singing frog. It only dawned on me when I was 16 that she had actually run away with a Frenchman. When I asked, I discovered that she had performed in Berlin, which was not really acceptable for a good Jewish girl. So although she was a black sheep, she wasn't completely erased from the family record. The story kept her there."

School proved a nightmare. She was labelled stupid and lazy until, at the age of 11, she was diagnosed with dyslexia. "I had become a disruptive, angry young thing by then, but my mother's reaction to the news was wonderful. It was like, 'Einstein was dyslexic. We have a genius in the family'. It still amazes me how we measure intelligence in Western society by pieces of paper. Dyslexics think in patterns and make connections others wouldn't make. I think if I hadn't been dyslexic I wouldn't have remembered the stories."

She sometimes visits a Jewish folklorist, Del Reid, in London with a fragment of something she heard as a child. He'll trace it back, perhaps to 14th-century Poland or thereabouts, and come up with the tale. Together they'll work on it until Shonaleigh has it ready for the telling.

She graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama as the Best Interpretative Student, and began experimenting with music and storytelling in a group called Tashbain in 1998. "Nobody was doing anything like it, putting music and story together. They've gone together in the synagogue and Yiddish theatre for a long time. The chemistry was awesome. It took storytelling to the next level, and lasted until 2003."

She now takes her work to school and community projects, to festivals such as Cape Clear, to workshops on adult learning and literacy, and even to management seminars to help develop lateral thinking. She has more than 3,000 stories to draw on. There are new shows, Voiceless and Elijah's Violin, due to premier this season and a new band, Jovalicah, named after an ancient guild of merchants who wove maps into their stories.

On Cape Clear, it will be pared back to simple storytelling. It's a small island with a limited number of guesthouse beds, but plenty of space for pitching a tent. There are no hotels, only three bars and a coffee dock at the North Harbour. The very act of getting on a boat and leaving the mainland removes you from real life. "That's what I loved most about Cape Clear last year," says Shonaleigh. "You feel like you are crossing over into another world. And the company and craic were just great."

The Cape Clear Storytelling Festival runs Sept 2-4