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.

Sholom Aleichem's In The Storm

"Hearken, O ye nations! Heed, O ye peoples of the world, what my mouth will utter now. Waken from your slumbers, raise your eyes, look about you and see the darkening sky. Black clouds are gathering above, a mighty wind drives them with great speed and they cover the entire sky. Soon, soon, a storm will be breaking. Soon, soon, the thunderclouds will burst and a great storm will pelt down, not of water but of blood." [187]

That's the storm of In The Storm, Sholom Aleichem's novel set in the year 1905. Lippa Bashevitch, an uneducated wood-hauler, has been driven half-mad by events.

But it's not all in such a high register and even Lippa can't sustain that. Immediately afterwards one of the other characters says, "Reb Lippa! Perhaps you would like something to eat?"

1905 is an important year in Russian history. Russia has just--shockingly--lost the Russo-Japanese War. The events of the Russian Bloody Sunday--where peaceful marchers in St. Petersburg are fired on by police--is an important moment in the novel. The Tsar feels compelled to offer the people, temporarily as it turns out, a constitution. "Constitutzia, constitutzia!"

(It's also the time of the movie Battleship Potemkin, though none of those events show up in the book.)

The novel starts in Kiev: "Three different Pesachs were being prepared at No. 13 Vasilchikover Street." These Passover preparations are in the apartments of Itzikl Shostepol, Solomon Safranovitch, and Nehemiah the shoemaker. (Lippa Bashevitch supplies the building with firewood.) Itzikl Shostepol is a well-to-do merchant and religious; Solomon Safranovitch is a middle-class pharmacist and secularizing; Nehemiah is poor and lives in the basement. But all three have children who are engaged with the ideological currents flowing through Russia at the time.

At the start of the novel Tamara Shostepol and Sasha Safranovitch are about to return to Kiev for the holiday from St. Petersburg where they have been studying. They arrive on the same train, and, while as far as their fathers are concerned, they're not supposed to know each other since they're from different economic classes, they do, having grown up in the same building. 

The novel then flashes back to events in St. Petersburg and that Bloody Sunday in January. The second half of the novel returns to Kiev. The tsar revokes the constitution later that year and scapegoats the Jews for Russia's failures. A series of pogroms erupts including one in Kiev. Our characters have to make serious choices.

Sholom Aleichem himself lived through that Kiev pogrom, though he was well-enough off at the time to take his family and hole up anonymously in a hotel. But that was the event that led to Aleichem leaving Russia. "Palestine and America--what a choice!" [219]

Aleichem is often written off at the sentimentalizing chronicler of shtetl life, he of Kasrilevke and Tevye and Fiddler on the Roof. (Great as I find Fiddler on the Roof to be.) I already knew there was more to him than that, but still this novel was a surprise. It's a very urban setting. It also represents the division between a more politicized second generation and their more accommodationist parents, a novel of the sort you see in The Demons (Dostoevsky) and Fathers and Sons (Turgenev). It's also stylistically quite interesting, with various modes: a telegraphic biography of a police spy, e.g., or what seem to be excerpts from police reports. Reading it in translation the interplay between Hebrew and Yiddish will inevitably mostly go past me, but the translation by Aliza Shevrin seems strong and she's able to make some of that apparent.

A few years ago I read Jeremy Dauber's biography of Aleichem and I got it back from the library to see what he said about the novel. The novel was first serialized in the spring of 1906 in the left-wing New York Yiddish paper Varheit, under the title The Deluge. Aleichem rewrote it before it appeared as a novel under the current title. 

At that time Aleichem was new to New York, having fled the Kiev pogrom. His family was still in Europe, his older children at school in Switzerland. He had just had two failures on the New York Yiddish stage, possibly because Aleichem, not knowing New York, had offended the wrong claques. Already a pretty well-known writer, but never, it seems, very astute with money, he needed it badly at the time, and a contract for a serialized novel was a huge boon. (I also have to assume that the Yiddish press was not so well-established at the time that it could pay its authors all that well.)

Highly recommended.

"Come with me, reader, give me your hand, let us proceed--we have a long, long way to go!" [21]

"Why are we standing here? It's time to say goodbye!" [220] 

Not such a long way as all that at 220 pages, but a good one.  

Note: His name is usually transliterated Sholem Aleichem these days, but I spelled it Sholom throughout since that's the way it appears on the cover of my edition of In The Storm.