Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars

   "See how the stars are falling," said Reizel, her voice trembling, her heart beating rapidly.

    Leibel laughed. "Don't be afraid," he comforted her like an adult, although in truth she was a year older than he. "What is there to be afraid of? Stars don't fall--stars wander."

Reizel Spivak and Leibel Rafalovitch are teenagers in the (imaginary) village of Holeneshti in the Russian province of Bessarabia. She's the daughter of the town's cantor and he's the youngest son of the richest man in town. Though Leibel goes to the cheder (Hebrew school) run by Reizel's father, in the normal course of things the two of them would never meet.

But when the Yiddish theater comes to town, it's no longer the normal course of things, and they get happily squeezed together on a bench in the theater. (Normally the Rafalovitch barn.) 

Leibel befriends Holtzmach, the troupe's main comic actor. He steals food and cigarettes for Holtzmach, is caught and punished.

Reizel spontaneously bursts into the show's tunes, is overheard by the theater's manager Shchupak, and, since she's the cantor's daughter, she's got a beautiful voice. But when Shchupak proposes that Reizel go on the stage, her mother absolutely forbids this, and she's no longer allowed to go to shows. (Her father is intrigued, but it's not him who runs the house...)

What are a couple of fifteen-year-olds to do under such oppressive provocation? Run away, of course. When the theater leaves town, they'll join up and leave, too. But they'll have each other, and though it's a little early for them to formulate the notion, they're in love.

Did I mention they're both ridiculously good-looking? No? Ah, well they are.

The troupe decides to head for the nearest border, which is Romania, but Shchupak learns his ex-wife is now in Romania and threatening to sue. So his coach, with Reizel, changes course for the Austro-Hungarian border. But the coach with Leibel and Holtzmach makes it into Romania, and eventually Bucharest, only eventually realizing they're the only ones there. But Holtzmach figures he can manage Leibel, good-looking and with a good speaking voice, and make him into a successful (and lucrative) star; he's got no need for Shchupak any more. Shchupak has come to more or less the same conclusion with Reizel. There's going to be a lot of wandering for our heroes on their way to becoming stars. Czernivitsi, Lviv, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, and eventually New York. (Reizel passes through Chicago, too!) 

She becomes Rosa Spivak and he becomes Leo Rafalesco. Various troupes grow up around our heroes, hers complete with a genius violinist (male) and his with a ravishing leading lady. Various comic managers and hangers-on try to get the two of them married but never to each other. Aleichem is a little coy about dates, but it must be at least ten years that they wander before they're both again in New York. There's letters and pastiche press releases. It's funny.

On the way they both take their art seriously, apprenticing themselves to real-ish artists of the time. Rosa studies under Marcella Embrich; there's a celebrated real-life Polish soprano, Marcella Sembrich. He studies under Sonnenthal, that's Adolf Sonnenthal, who later had a von added to his name for services to the Viennese court theater. Their art moves from vaudevillean to serious. We see a fair amount about wandering theatrical troupes--think Nicholas Nickleby but even poorer and in Yiddish.

The ending, in New York, is both surprising and satisfactory.

Wikipedia tells me the novel was originally serialized in a Warsaw Yiddish paper from 1909 to 1911. The novel's been translated into English twice, in an abridged version by Frances Butwin in 1952 and the version I read by Aliza Shevrin in 2009. (With a pretty useless forward by Tony Kushner. The best thing about it was he correctly suggested you read it after.) While this was certainly fun, I didn't think it was as good as In the Storm, which I read a couple of years ago, and certainly not as good as the most famous things, such as the Tevye stories (the basis for Fiddler on the Roof) or the stories about Motl, the cantor's son, which I read pre-blogging. Shevrin was the translator for In the Storm and a collection of the best-known stories. This came out twenty-five years later, and while I have no way to compare with the original, the translation of the earlier work felt more convincing to me. But it's also possible this novel is somewhat slack in the original.

The Russian province of Bessarabia is now the country of Moldova, which makes it my visit there for this year's European Reading Challenge:

"Ach, what can compare with our Bessarabian summer nights? One at a time the stars light up like candles in the sky."

Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross (#ccspin)

"The National Socialist state relentlessly prosecutes anyone who commits an offense against the national community; it protects that which is worth protecting; it punishes those who deserve punishment; it destroys that which should be destroyed."

Or so says Commandant Fahrenberg of the Westhofen concentration camp. But he's just had a breakout of seven prisoners from his camp, and it's a big black eye to his leadership. Will he recapture them all? Is the National Socialist state that powerful?

No. We already know from the prologue that one (but only one) will make it to freedom. It's a novel with thrills and narrative drive. But not just that.

We spend most of our time with George Heisler, the one who makes it safely to Holland, but we see all seven as they attempt to escape the Nazis. One is killed just outside the camp boundaries, another is betrayed, a third despairs and turns himself in, the next to last to be found can think of nothing but revenge against the fellow politician who framed him.

But it's not only the escapees who feature in the novel: it's also the people who help him and hinder him, family, friends, strangers. Also the SS and the SA troopers who pursue him. He escapes one checkpoint because he's so beaten down by his years in the concentration camp he no longer matches the picture that's distributed. George steals a gardener's prized jacket to cover up his prison clothes; the gardener  at first wants George caught, but then starts to think of George as 'his' escapee and lies about the jacket when it's found, sending the searchers astray. In a letter of 1938, cited in the afterword, Seghers writes of her novel that it's 'a tale, then, that makes it possible to get to know the many layers of fascist Germany through the fortunes of a single man.'

That one man escaped gives the resistance, both inside the prison and out of it, hope. It only seems that that the state is all-powerful whatever Fahrenberg may say in that opening quote. It's not true. A childhood friend Paul Roeder, one of the key figures in helping George to escape says, "But they are not the slightest bit all-knowing. They only know what you tell them." And you don't have to tell them anything.

Anna Seghers herself was arrested in 1933 after Hitler came to power. She'd married a Hungarian Communist and was involved in Communist organizations. Once the Nazis felt solidified in their power, she was released, but she was of Jewish extraction and felt it safer to leave the country, first for France and then later for Mexico. Her mother was killed in a concentration camp in 1942.

This novel was written in 1938-9, and is set in 1937 or early '38. [Heisler while on the run picks up a discarded newspaper which discusses the battle of Teruel in the Spanish Civil War.] The novel came out with a German emigré press in Mexico in 1942, but was quickly translated into English and became a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. In 1944 it was made into a movie with Spencer Tracy as George, and Hume Cronyn earned a Best Supporting Oscar nod for his role as that friend. 

A couple of years ago I read Seghers' subsequent novel Transit and thought it also was very good. Both novels turn around a suspenseful plot of escape from the Nazis, but both novels also have ambitions larger than simple suspense.

Seghers was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize, though she didn't win, and based on the now two novels I've read of hers, I'd have to say she would have been a good choice. After World War II, she returned to Germany, eventually pitching up in East Germany, where she died in 1983.

It was my spin book, and while I thought I might read it last month for Women in Translation month, I didn't get around to it. But it was pretty great whenever I read it. Did you join in the Classics Club spin this time? Did you have a good read?

Yeats' Sailing To Byzantium (#poetry, #humblebrag... ;-)

 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds on the tree

--Those dying generations--at their song,

The salmon falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in the sensual music, all neglect

Monuments of unaging intellect.

 

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap his hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there any singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire,

As in a gold mosaic on a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre

And be the singing masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fasted to a dying animal

It knows not what it is, and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take 

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Out of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

-W. B. Yeats

Not exactly an unknown poem, but a good one. I've had it in my head lately because (here comes the humble brag part...) I'm now halfway through that 'monument of unaging intellect' Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1500 out of 3000 pages), which was going to be my summer reading project, but it's clear it will extend into the fall. The Roman empire has fallen in the west, Odoacer is the Gothic king of Italy and I will be sailing to Byzantium myself now. 

 

There are better (and shorter!) histories of the Roman empire these days, but one reads Gibbon now for the style and the wit. I've been collecting quotes, which will likely show up in a separate post someday.

 

 

Also: am I the only person who thinks that poem is meant (at least a little bit) to be funny? Sure, Cormac McCarthy stole the opening for his novel (which I haven't read) and then the Coen brothers made it into a movie, which wasn't particularly funny, but still.

 

I was poking around on the internets and it certainly seems like nobody does agree with me. But consider: studying those monuments of unaging intellect is useful for what? Keeping a drowsy emperor awake? Doesn't sound like Yeats is exactly praising study here. 'Perne in a gyre' feels to me like Yeats making fun of his own habits in diction. Gyre is a favorite of his (and one, I see, unknown to my spell-checker) which means a corkscrew motion, also used as a verb. The only other work I recall seeing it in is Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky', where it's usually taken as another one of Caroll's made-up words. And really, can anybody doubt Yeats thinks he would be happier sleeping with Maud Gonne (or Iseult) than being whacked into some sort of gold sculpture?

 

I kind of think there might be a clue to Yeats' approach. The eight-line stanza it's written in is ottava rima. According to Dr. Oliver Tearle (whoever he is) in this post, it's an 'an appropriately august form for the ancient and the timeless'. Well, no... The most famous English poem in ottava rima is Byron's Don Juan, certainly deeply ironic and occasionally uproarious. Byron uses the meter because its the meter of Orlando Furioso, one of the world's great mock-epics. (And also very funny.)

But, however you read it, it is a great poem.

Ezra Pound, from Hilda's Book (#poetry)

Child of the grass

The years pass Above us

Shadows of air All these shall Love us

Winds for our fellows

The browns and the yellows

    Of autumn our colors

Now at our life's morn. Be we well sworn

Never to grow older

Our spirits be bolder At meeting

Than e'er before All the old lore

Of the forests & woodways

Shall aid us: Keep we the bond & seal

Ne'er shall we feel

    Aught of sorrow

 

    Let light flow about thee

    As     a cloak of air

 

-Ezra Pound 

 

This is the first poem in Ezra Pound's Hilda's Book, a hand-assembled book of poems on vellum that Pound gave to his girlfriend, the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) in 1907. Pound was 22 and H.D. was 21. This is the first poem in the book (and the first poem in the Library of America volume of Ezra Pound shown above). But, except for a few poems that were recycled into Pound's first published volume A Lume Spento, none of the poems in Hilda's Book were known until after H.D. died in 1961. The two of them talked of getting married, but never did. (Her parents were opposed.)

This appears now because I'm reading Guy Davenport's collection of essays The Geography of The Imagination of 1981, but reprinted earlier this year with a new introduction. Superb. In one of his several essays on Pound, he quotes this poem, remarking how much the early Pound was influenced by Yeats. (Now that I've had it pointed out to me, I have to agree...I tend to think of the best of Pound being all about Browning, but maybe not always.)

Of course, Pound. In an era when politics are all, Pound's are about as objectionable as they come. At the end of a passage describing Pound's rabid anti-Semitism, Davenport writes, "Southerners take a certain amount of unhinged reality for granted," which is not, of course, justification. (Davenport was from Kentucky.) It's possible I'll have more to say about the Davenport.

 

But anyway, the young Pound could write love poems with the best of them: 'Be we well sworn/Never to grow older...Let light flow about thee/As   a cloak of air".

 

I'm in the Internet-free Zone as this appears.