Becoming a storyteller was a natural direction for Lynn Rogers’ career to take. She had been a practicing therapist for 20 years, which, as every patient knows, is all about drawing out and listening to other people’s stories. The only thing that slowed her down was her misapprehension that storytelling required special skills she didn’t have.
“To be a storyteller I thought you had to be an actor, a performer and know how to use your voice,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in San Rafael. But when David Roche, creator and star of the one-man show “The Church of 80% Sincerity,” invited Rogers to join a circle of women to tell their stories, she discovered that she was a natural at it.
That was five years ago. Since then Rogers has cut back on her therapy practice and devotes half her time to storytelling. But storytelling is only part of what Rogers does. Sometimes she’s hired by family or friends to record stories for a milestone birthday or anniversary. She does oral histories for memorial services or when someone is nearing the end of life. She also teaches people how to collect their own or their family’s stories.
Rogers will be sharing these skills in workshops on “Family Heirlooms: The Gift of Story” at this year’s Bureau of Jewish Education’s “Feast of Jewish Learning.” She will speak on Tuesday, Feb. 12 at Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo and Sunday, Feb. 24 at Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati at events that are open to the public.
Rogers said her topic garnered the most sign-ups of all the classes in the monthlong series of events, titled “Our Family Matters: Jewish Memory & Storytelling.”
“It shows how hungry people are for this,” says Rogers. “We are now in a time where everything moves so fast. We don’t have several generations living in the same house. There are no grandparents sitting at the dinner table telling their stories. The whole way we had of remembering from generation to generation is lost with technology.”
These days Rogers spends about two weeks a month in Florida with her 83-year-old father who has Parkinson’s disease, recording his stories as well as those of others who live in his and a neighboring community.
“There are so many people wanting to tell stories,” says Rogers, whose mission is twofold — listening and preserving a legacy for future generations. “Once the generation of our parents is gone, that Yiddishkeit culture will be gone and the only way to preserve that is through stories.”
And storytelling is integral to Judaism; holidays and liturgy revolve around stories. The best-known biblical judge, King Solomon issued his decisions through stories. The Jewish way of making a point is through a story.
“Stories give us a way to look at things from a different angle,” says Rogers.
But sometimes people have a hard time accessing their personal stories and that’s where Rogers comes in. At her workshops, which Rogers often leads at synagogues, Jewish community centers and other organizations, she’ll start out by telling one of her own personal stories and then ask who remembers a story about his or her own grandparents.
“And we’re off,” says Rogers, adding that once people start talking they see how good it feels. “Most people are really helped by the coaching. When you have a live audience to listen, the stories come alive.”
Some of her workshops meet only once while others run for several weeks. Often Rogers records the stories that a group tells and gives each member a copy of the tape as a personal record. Sometimes groups continue meeting on their own. Once the group knows the rules — don’t talk over each other, don’t criticize, listen in a way that invites others to tell more — a facilitator isn’t necessary.
Nor is there any magic to a storytelling group. Recording one’s own stories and gathering those of family members are things anyone can do. Some of the techniques Rogers suggests include prompting people by having them picture a scene in their lives, thinking about childhood friends, their first job or whether perhaps they had a label in their family, and from this the stories will flow.
“It’s important to ask the questions that don’t get answered so quickly,” says Rogers. And that’s where being a good listener comes in, being able to sit with the silence.
Even though it means commuting to Florida, Rogers feels fortunate to be able to spend this time with her father. It also has yielded many stories like the one about when he was flying for Pan Am and was stranded in a small African village waiting for an airplane part.
He saw a mask in a store that he wanted to buy. He didn’t speak the local language and the shopkeeper didn’t speak English. As they were trying to negotiate a price, a woman’s voice came from the back room.
“Kum arayn un essen [Come in and eat],” the woman said in Yiddish.
“Vait a vile, yakh hob a lebedike doh, [Wait awhile, I have a live one out here],” the shopkeeper responded in mixed Yiddish.
“Ayer lebedike yets geshtorben [Your live one is about to die],” her father responded. For years afterward, her father kept in touch with the shopkeeper and his wife.
It’s a wonderful story but one Rogers never heard until recently.
“It’s a blessing that I’m able to spend this time with [my father], to give something back and hear in his older age how he’s reflective in a way he wasn’t [when he was young],” says Rogers.
It also has been a healing experience for both of them, making up for lost time and connecting in a way they hadn’t before.
“Storytelling is therapeutic without being therapy.”