On Sholem Aleichem’s Sesquicentennial, a New Translation of Wandering Stars
Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem, trans. Aliza Shevrin.
Viking Adult, 2009. 448 pages.
It is apt that the celebration of the 150th birthday of the great Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem comes during a time of great economic distress. Born in the Ukrainian city of Pereyeslav in 1859, Aleichem’s literary career was launched in the wake of a personal economic disaster involving his stepfather’s money and the Kiev stock exchange. Bereft of his fortune, Aleichem produced one masterpiece after another, becoming arguably the greatest Yiddish author in history. Moving from Kiev to Odessa to New York City, Aleichem left behind a large literary legacy of stories, novels, and translations. His funeral in 1916 was massive, with 100,000 New York City mourners in attendance.
To commemorate the anniversary of Aleichem’s birth, Viking Press is offering a sampling of new translations of his works, including a revised version of his forgotten novel, Wandering Stars. Featuring an erudite foreword by playwright Tony Kushner, the new edition of Wandering Stars takes the reader back to the dawn of modernity in the shtetl.
In the novel, the shtetl of Holeneshti is wracked by the simultaneous disappearance of Reizel, the cantor’s daughter, and Leibel, the rich man’s son: they have secretly joined a traveling Yiddish theater troupe, and disappeared without a word to their families. In a panic, the people of Holenshti launch a worldwide search. By the time the children are found, they have been transformed into international stars of the stage with new identities and new non-Jewish names.
While Leibel and Reizel move into the highest echelons of fame-and by extension, further and further from Holeneshti-change comes to the shtetl. Leibel’s mother passes away; his father loses his fortunes. A decade passes, during which time the two young people long for home as they traverse the globe. As the story draws to a teasingly romantic conclusion, this simultaneous movement away from and back to the hometown reaches no comforting end.
The title Wandering Stars is an overt reference to the novel’s two main players, but it also points to the physical and metaphysical movement of the whole of the Eastern European Jewish community in the latter years of the 19th century. Aleichem brings us into a world encountering mass transportation and communication for the first time-in the form of railroads and telegraphs-and uses the town of Holeneshti as a microcosm of global change. There is an unspoken, almost nostalgic hope borne out in the novel that change will not come to the Jewish shtetl, and an idea that the shtetl’s marginality protects its social structures from the upheavals of the secular world around it. But we find constantly throughout that change has indeed entered the town, at first in the form of the wandering Yiddish theater troupe, but even more so thereafter, as the town’s various socio-religious structures change, collapse, and resurrect themselves once more. Reizel and Leibel become metaphoric lynchpins that the whole of Holeneshti’s constitution depends upon: when they depart, their families fall apart, irrevocably changing the town’s Jewish community.
Of course, anyone familiar with Aleichem’s biography will also note that the “traveling artist” theme is fairly mimetic of the author’s own expansive wanderings. In much the same way that Reizel and Leibel travel westward in Wandering Stars, reinventing themselves along the way and ultimately finding fame and fortune, so Aleichem made his way toward the US to stake his claims in the Yiddish theater and literary world. He pursued a relentless touring schedule, always attempting to recover the financial losses he incurred as a young man. Perhaps most pertinently, the years he spent traveling were years spent far from his family, who chose to settle in Geneva before finally moving to New York in the last years of Aleichem’s life. Wandering Stars captures the sentiments of a man who spent the latter half of his life on the road, moving from town to town as an entertainer while maintaining the inner longings of a family man and spiritually rich individual.
For any Aleichem admirer, or simply a lover of Yiddish literature, the reissue of Wandering Stars is a welcome addition to the bookshelf. Aliza Shevrin’s translation is nimble and attempts to keep apace with Aleichem’s quick wit, preserving many Hebrew and Yiddish turns of phrase in transliteration. A tale about the world of Yiddish theater, of the Old World, of self-transformation and coming-of-age, Wandering Stars presents humanistic themes through a Jewish lens in a most passionate and endearing fashion, and testifies to the enduring character of Sholem Aleichem’s work.
