Stories for the Hanukkah Season : The folk tales in ‘Legends and Traditions,’ many of which have been passed on orally through the generations, offer surprising views of Jewish culture.

A recent Bil Keane cartoon had one of his children asking why there aren’t any Hanukkah carols. An interesting question.

That lack--for Los Angeles, with America’s second-largest Jewish population--might be filled by “Legends and Traditions,” a collection of Jewish folk tales that has been playing at schools and playgrounds in the area for four years and is spending the season this year at West End Playhouse in Van Nuys.

Philip Sokoloff, the primary writer and producer of the show, says the idea came to him and a group of other actors as they looked around at the usual holiday entertainment.

Sokoloff, who can be seen in the upcoming TV pilot “Running Delilah,” which features Kim Catrall and Billy Zane, also produced this fall’s long-running “Judgment Days” at West End Playhouse. Sokoloff says: “While every other small theater company in town was doing variations on ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Nutcracker,’ there was nothing for Hanukkah. It seemed there was a void to fill.”

Sokoloff supervised the construction of the script because he’d had an Orthodox Jewish education and held a bachelor’s degree in literature. He researched traditional stories that were in the public domain and “did his own take” on them, he says, in addition to integrating the perceptions of collaborators.

In the current incarnation of the show, the stories are from many different countries: Israel, Tunisia, Morocco, Poland, Germany, Italy. At this point they are a combination of oral and written literature. Actually, most of the written stories come from oral sources, especially the North African material.

“A lot of Jewish folk tales,” Sokoloff says, “are borrowed from other cultures as well. The earliest antecedent of ‘Snow White’ is probably from the Jewish community of Egypt in the 5th Century AD. I was surprised to find it was originally a Jewish story.”

He found himself trying to dispel the notion that Jewish folk tales are all European-based. The program includes many stories from Asia Minor and the Middle East because, as Sokoloff says, “Jews are racially diverse.”

A number of stories contain strong female characters. Sokoloff says another stereotype about Jewish culture is that it is patriarchal. “In fact,” he says, “it has cycled. Patriarchal, matriarchal. It cycles.”

In choosing a story, one of the deciding factors was its adaptability to the stage. It had to be visual as well as literary.

Joseph Megel, a co-director (with Marianne Simon) of this year’s version of “Legends” who also wrote some of the scripts, says: “People can come and see these stories and just have a good time and not even think about the cultural diversity that’s represented, even though the stories show a folk-tale tradition that is traced back to biblical times and parallels other folk traditions.”

It is those parallels that fascinate Megel and Sokoloff. All the world’s major religions contain stories of the flood and a virgin birth. “The apple in Eden is similar to Pandora’s box, for example,” Sokoloff says.

Another fascinating facet of the stories, as Megel says, is that “in these stories you’ve got sorcerers, demons and werewolves and things like that, which most people may not connect with Jewish culture. The rich folk-tale culture shows us that indeed that’s false. Who’s to say who owns what? The point is that there is a connection of cultures. The show highlights things you might not expect.”

There is even a story about reincarnation, which is a tenet of Orthodox Jewish teaching.

With this folk-tale heritage, Hanukkah doesn’t need carols to celebrate a season that like the arbitrary setting of Dec. 25 as the date of Jesus’ birth, honors the winter solstice, a time of hope and rebirth each year.

Where and When

* What: “Legends and Traditions.”

* Location: West End Playhouse, 7446 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys.

* Hours: Noon and 3 p.m. Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays, through Jan. 31.

* Price: $10.

* Call: (818) 904-0444.