Lost World

WANDERING STAR (314 pp.)--Sholom Alelchem--Crown ($3).

Some of the best modern writers have been self-conscious artists, working for the admiration of small followings and often requiring cabalistic analysis before they could be fully understood. Not, however, Sholom Aleichem, the Ukraine-born Yiddish humorist who died in The Bronx 36 years ago. Sholom Aleichem (real name: Solomon Rabinowitz) was a genuine folk artist. Between himself and his Yiddish public throughout the world there was an instinctive understanding; they could grasp his twists of idiom, his slightest reference to a Torah phrase or a ghetto custom.

In an effort to bring him to a wider audience, three of Aleichem's books have been translated into English in recent years. The first two (TIME, June 24, 1946 and Jan. 31, 1949), collections of stories, revealed him as a tender satirist and a wild humorist who sometimes capered off into the topsy-turvy world of surrealism. The third book, Wandering Star, is a rambling, picaresque novel about the life of Yiddish actors in the Europe of 50 or 60 years ago. Aleichem wrote best in the story form, but Wandering Star, for all its meandering pace, is often a funny and touching novel.

Kiss & Marry. When the traveling theater first came to the Bessarabian village of Holeneshti, it stirred a sensation. The little Jewish community had never seen a live actor. What was the theater? Did you eat it with a fork or a spoon? Did you sprinkle sugar or salt over it? Soon they found out. The wandering players had a wide repertory, all the way from Isabelle, Tear My Skirt to Dora, or the Rich Beggar, by Shakespeare, Revised and Improved by Albert Shchupak, Producer and Director.

Two village youngsters, Leibel and Reizel, ran off with the troupe, but circumstances separated them. Leibel became a stage star; Reizel changed her name to Rosa and became a singer. Not until both were performing in New York years later did they meet, reminisce, kiss and marry.

This cheerful excuse for a plot is taken seriously by neither Sholom Aleichem nor his characters. What matters is the vivid parade of penniless producers, starving actors, shrewd sharpers and keen-witted kibitzers who rollick through the book. This volatile world often seems like something out of the merrier parts of Dickens: a director with three wives, a sentimental actress always in search of a husband, and harmless scoundrels who are never happier than when plotting to steal each other's prima donnas.

A Cow Flew. Sholom Aleichem was a master at capturing the folk poetry and humorous abuses of Yiddish speech, and even in a rather stiff translation something of the verbal crackle comes through. When a character wants to dismiss a story as nonsense, he says: "A cow flew over the roof and laid an egg." The actors' scorn of domesticity is expressed in their saying: "The best marriage is the worst death." When a director wants to tell the angel that the best of plans take money, he cracks: "Without fingers you can't thumb your nose."

Like all of Sholom Aleichem's books, Wandering Star provides a glimpse into a world that is gone, the world of East European Jewry, with its piety and poverty, its pride in learning and isolation from Western thought, its constant fear of physical attack and, nonetheless, its great resources of self-ridicule. In the gas chambers of Auschwitz much of that world came to an end; in the writings of Sholom Aleichem it has found a wry and tender epitaph.

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