Posted on April 29, 2009 by Steve Pollak

Newly translated Sholem Aleichem

Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem

This week's edition of The New Yorker had a brief item about "Wandering Stars," a novel by Shalom Aleichem that previously was available only as an abridged version.

Here's more:

Best known for his stories of Tevye the Milkman, a character later brought to Broadway in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Sholem Aleichem was a Russian humorist sometimes referred to as “the Jewish Mark Twain.” In this romantic epic, previously available only in an abridgment, two lovers are enraptured when the Shchupak-Murovchik Yiddish theatre troupe arrives in their impoverished town, and they resolve to escape shtetl life and run off with the actors. Their gruelling journey takes them across continents and ends on New York’s Lower East Side, capturing, with whimsy and pathos, the experience of the Jewish diaspora at the beginning of the twentieth century. As one of the lovers tells the other the night they first meet, “Stars do not fall, stars wander.”

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Posted on April 23, 2009 by Steve Pollak

New book on Isaac Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld's Lives by Steven J. Zippersetein

A new book on Isaac Rosenfeld, Steven J. Zipperstein's "Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing," suggests that the late writer may have accomplished more than what the critics have given him credit for.

Yes, he died at the age of 38, having written just one critically acclaimed novel, "Passage from Home," and never reached the great heights of his buddy, Saul Bellow. But he still did a lot of noteworthy things in his 38 years on this earth.

At least, that's what Saul Rosenberg says in his review of the book for the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Zipperstein's account suggests, perhaps unintentionally, that the real story of Isaac Rosenfeld is less a matter of extremes: Yes, he was gifted, but he was never destined for greatness -- nor did he entirely fail. The highs were lower, and the lows higher, than the myth would have it.

As for the highs, Mr. Zipperstein notes that the critic Irving Howe faulted (not unfairly) "Passage From Home" for relying, weakly, more on rumination than on description. As for the lows, the Rosenfeld reviews and stories routinely collected under the rubric of a sorry falling-off from early promise are in fact "a marvel of output," as Mark Schechner has written. A 20th-century Jewish Hazlitt, Rosenfeld turned every subject to his own purpose, so that the judgments in nearly every review became an implicit manifesto, pointing to what writing should be. He was often more acute than the professional critics who would later lament his "failure."

Even so, the question remains: why didn't Rosenfeld produce more during his lifetime? Writing a review of "Rosenfeld's Lives," in the Forward, Glenn C. Altschuler takes us through some of the reasons why:

Was it his bohemian proclivity to live in the moment at the expense of all that is lasting? Was it his skeptical stance toward rationalism and science, which rendered his work abstract, vague and metaphysical? Was it his attachment to the wacky sexual theories of Wilhelm Reich?

Zipperstein isn’t all that certain. In his journal, Rosenfeld addressed his inadequacies: his failures as a husband and father; his intractable childhood phobias; his fears of homosexuality — and the toll they took on his writing. And yet, Zipperstein acknowledges, it’s by no means clear “how truthful, or better said, how truthfully characteristic journal entries are.” As vessels of angst, discontent, depression and self-loathing, journals, Cynthia Ozick has observed, “are notoriously fickle, subject to the torque of mutable feeling, while power flourishes elsewhere.”

So, we may never know why but Zimmerman receives kudos from Rosenberg for his handling of Rosenfeld's life in this first full biography of the writer: 

Mr. Zipperstein does a splendid job of sifting through the details of Rosenfeld's life, reminding us of his importance and acquainting us with his work. He does not, thank goodness, impose his reading of Rosenfeld's place in literary history too insistently, perhaps recognizing that, in a first full biography, the life must take precedence over the work. What he offers instead is the kind of attention for which Rosenfeld should not have had to wait, after his death, half again as long as he lived.

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Posted on April 21, 2009 by Steve Pollak

Israel to celebrate Amos Oz's 70th birthday

The Amos Oz Reader

As we approach his 70th birthday celebration, we can expect to see more and more about one of Israel’s foremost authors, Amos Oz.

He officially becomes a septuagenarian on May 4 and there will be a three-day celebration in Arad, Israel where President Shimon Peres will be in attendance on the opening night, according to Ha’Aretz. Later in the month, Ben-Gurion University will host a conference in honor of the author.

If you can’t make it to Israel for the festivities, there are two new books out that may help you feel like a true fan of Oz’s work.

First, Oz has come out with a new novella, “Rhyming Life and Death.” The New York Times’ Ethan Bonner called it a “somewhat brutal look at the life and sensibility of a literary celebrity.”

There’s also “The Amos Oz Reader,” a 400-page compendium of Oz’s work that draws from his novels as well as his nonfiction writing.

I was bored by the recent profiles of Oz I read in the Times and in Ha’Aretz (he seemed pretty bored by the interviews as well).

But, I’m always intrigued by the writing habits of authors and Ha’Aretz asked that obligatory question. Oz said he gets up at five without an alarm clock, sits down to write by six and continues writing until noon. In the afternoon, he eats and reads a bit and then goes back to his desk “to erase what I wrote in the morning,” he says.

I was surprised to learn that Oz always uses a pen for his first drafts. Here’s more from the interview in Ha’Aretz:

"I always write with a pen. I have a computer nearby, on the side, and when I've finished writing many drafts, I type very slowly with two fingers because I don't know how to touch-type. I type myself because no one else can read my handwriting. But I always write with a pen for sensual reasons, the arc between the pen and fingers, and the paper, the erasures and scribbles. You can't do that on a computer."

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