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."

Addendum, November 2024:

I got Jeremy Dauber's biography of Sholem Aleichem back from the library (I'd read it a couple of years before) to look up anything about Wandering Stars. It turns out there were two versions published, the New York Yiddish version, and the Warsaw Yiddish version. Sholem Aleichem preferred the Warsaw version; the New York version changed the ending to be more sentimental. (Shades of Great Expectations.) The Warsaw version started its run in 1909, but the paper (The New World) printing it was going broke and couldn't pay, so Sholem Aleichem stopped supplying pages. It was only in 1910, after some time passed, that a new paper Moment was formed and finished publication.

Also there was a film version made in Soviet Russia in 1927, Sholem Aleichem's works were popular with the Soviet film board, but this one wasn't: the subject matter was considered too bourgeois and it was withdrawn.