Product Description

Even the most pious Jew need not shed so many tears over the destruction of Jerusalem as the women were in the habit of shedding when Stempenyu was playing.

The first work of Sholom Aleichems to be translated into Englishthis long out-of-print translation is the only one ever done under Aleichems personal supervisionStempenyu is a prime example of the author s hallmark traits: his antic and often sardonic sense of humor, his whip-smart dialogue, his workaday mysticism, and his historic documentation of shtetl life.

Held recently by scholars to be the story that inspired Marc Chagalls Fiddler on the Roof painting (which in turn inspired the play that was subsequently based on Aleichems Tevye stories, not this novella), Stempenyu is the hysterical story of a young village girl who falls for a wildly popular klezmer fiddlera character based upon an actual Yiddish musician whose fame set off a kind of pop hysteria in the shtetl. Thus the story, in this contemporaneous authorized translation, is a wonderful introduction to Aleichems work as he wanted it read, not to mention to the unique palaver of a nineteenth-century Yiddish rock star.