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Jan. 31st, 2014 11:34 amWhile I was on last week's Yiddish literature binge, I was hugely delighted to discover that besides the Tevye stories, which I knew about, Sholem Aleichem had ALSO written a novel about ACTING TROUPES IN THE YIDDISH THEATER called Wandering Stars.
Wandering Stars begins in the tiny village of Holoneshti, where Reizel the fifteen-year-old cantor's daughter and Leibel the fourteen-year-old rich man's son get their first taste of theater when a wandering troupe comes through, and are IMMEDIATELY STARSTRUCK.
Sadly for Reizel and Leibel, both of them pretty soon end up grounded, which leads to a lot of extremely adolescent woe. There's one hilarious sequence in which Leibel imagines his own funeral in great detail. THEY'LL ALL BE SORRY THEN.
Anyway, these infants devise a genius plan to run away with the theater company! They're talented! They're in love! They're TOTALLY GROWN UPS! It'll be fine!
...and it sort of is, except for the part where the troupe accidentally gets separated because the director is running away from alimony issues with his three ex-wives, so Reizel and Leibel end up in completely different parts of the country.
So basically this is one of those books where the romantic leads get separated a third of the way through and spend the rest of the book wandering around various locations to find each other, helped and hindered along the way by various larger-than-life theater personalities, who are all attempting to make their own fortunes around these two talented kids.
The book follows Leibel more than Reizel, which is actually my biggest complaint because what we do see of Reizel's story is FASCINATING. She starts out as a cross-dressing vaudeville performer! She meets a famous opera singer who becomes her best friend and surrogate mother! IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN that alas we barely get to see. Then she has to deal with rising fame and increasing alienation from her roots and Jewish identity and a struggle to figure out whether her feelings for her violinist partner are actually love or just professional respect coupled with a violin fetish, all of which is also really interesting and barely on the page.
Meanwhile, Leibel grows up to be enormously talented as an actor, buuut also slowly becomes more and more of a self-centered dick. My sympathy for him took a huge hit when we hit the scene where he's confessing his woes to his director's naive sixteen-year-old sister, who has a giant crush on him. It's so great that he can tell her all about his long-lost love! She's just like a little sister to him! TOO BAD THAT LEIBEL GOT HIS DEFINITION OF 'SISTER' FROM JAIME LANNISTER.
However, I forgave Sholem Aleichem everything when we finally got to the end and Reizel and Leibel found each other at last after years of pining, and ( spoilers )
I'm going to conclude by saying my favorite write-up of this book that I've seen is from Goodreads: "as a former theatre kid, i can attest to the reality of the inevitability of incestuous romantic entanglements. this captures it perfectly, even made me a little nostalgic. im glad to know theatre people have been crazy for a while now." GREAT SUMMARY, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT ACCURATE.
Wandering Stars begins in the tiny village of Holoneshti, where Reizel the fifteen-year-old cantor's daughter and Leibel the fourteen-year-old rich man's son get their first taste of theater when a wandering troupe comes through, and are IMMEDIATELY STARSTRUCK.
Sadly for Reizel and Leibel, both of them pretty soon end up grounded, which leads to a lot of extremely adolescent woe. There's one hilarious sequence in which Leibel imagines his own funeral in great detail. THEY'LL ALL BE SORRY THEN.
Anyway, these infants devise a genius plan to run away with the theater company! They're talented! They're in love! They're TOTALLY GROWN UPS! It'll be fine!
...and it sort of is, except for the part where the troupe accidentally gets separated because the director is running away from alimony issues with his three ex-wives, so Reizel and Leibel end up in completely different parts of the country.
So basically this is one of those books where the romantic leads get separated a third of the way through and spend the rest of the book wandering around various locations to find each other, helped and hindered along the way by various larger-than-life theater personalities, who are all attempting to make their own fortunes around these two talented kids.
The book follows Leibel more than Reizel, which is actually my biggest complaint because what we do see of Reizel's story is FASCINATING. She starts out as a cross-dressing vaudeville performer! She meets a famous opera singer who becomes her best friend and surrogate mother! IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN WOMEN that alas we barely get to see. Then she has to deal with rising fame and increasing alienation from her roots and Jewish identity and a struggle to figure out whether her feelings for her violinist partner are actually love or just professional respect coupled with a violin fetish, all of which is also really interesting and barely on the page.
Meanwhile, Leibel grows up to be enormously talented as an actor, buuut also slowly becomes more and more of a self-centered dick. My sympathy for him took a huge hit when we hit the scene where he's confessing his woes to his director's naive sixteen-year-old sister, who has a giant crush on him. It's so great that he can tell her all about his long-lost love! She's just like a little sister to him! TOO BAD THAT LEIBEL GOT HIS DEFINITION OF 'SISTER' FROM JAIME LANNISTER.
However, I forgave Sholem Aleichem everything when we finally got to the end and Reizel and Leibel found each other at last after years of pining, and ( spoilers )
I'm going to conclude by saying my favorite write-up of this book that I've seen is from Goodreads: "as a former theatre kid, i can attest to the reality of the inevitability of incestuous romantic entanglements. this captures it perfectly, even made me a little nostalgic. im glad to know theatre people have been crazy for a while now." GREAT SUMMARY, ONE HUNDRED PERCENT ACCURATE.
