Sholem Aleykhem

Étoiles vagabondes

Wandering Stars

A Novel
March 12, 2020
Novel
700 pages
151 × 198 mm
25 €
9782370552235
978-2-3705-5223-5
Translated from the Yiddish by Jean Spector and covert art by Brecht Evens
																Sholem Aleykhem, Étoiles vagabondes
																Sholem Aleykhem, Étoiles vagabondes

With this novel, inexplicably unpublished until today, Sholem Aleykhem reveals his immense talent as a storyteller. With the grace of a Chagall, the truculence of a Chaplin and the verve of a Twain, he honours the art and the life of people of few, irresistible, picturesque, kneaded with humanity and humour in the face of fate. For “the stars do not fall, they wander...”

Leybl Rafalowitch, thirteen years old, is the son of the richest man in the village. Reyzl Spivak, fourteen, is the daughter of a poor singer. We are at the dawn of the twentieth century, in a small Jewish village on the borders of Europe. These two are going to fall in love, don’t you think? But no one would have predicted that an incredible travelling theatre company would precipitate their romance into an extraordinary adventure.

The author

“Let my name be associated only with laughter or not be celebrated at all.” Born in the Ukraine in 1859, Sholem Aleykhem is a major figure of European literature, yet remains unknown in France. Calling himself a Luftmensch (literally a man of the air, the opposite of a materialist), popular and enchanting, he is the author of a prolific body of work. He has left us characters who have become universal and has been able to describe with tenderness and humour the colourful world of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. Settled in New York in 1905 to flee the Russian pogroms, he was considered the Jewish Mark Twain. He died in 1916 and his funeral remains among the most grandiose in New York history.

The novel Wandering Stars was published as a serial between 1909 and 1911 in the pages of a Polish newspaper.

March 12, 2020
Novel
700 pages
151 × 198 mm
25 €
9782370552235
978-2-3705-5223-5
Translated from the Yiddish by Jean Spector and covert art by Brecht Evens