April 29, 2009
Newly translated 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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It was an excellent book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read it, and I reviewed it in my blog in March.
http://jewwishes.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/jew-wishes-on-wandering-stars-by-sholem-aleichem/