{"product_id":"stardust-lost-isbn-9781400078035","title":"Stardust Lost","description":"In \u003ci\u003eStardust Lost\u003c\/i\u003e, Stefan Kanfer brings the colorful Yiddish stage roaring back to life. Born of ancient traditions stretching back to the drama of the Old Testament, the Yiddish theater was a vibrant part of the immigrant experience. Kanfer invokes the energy, belief, and pure \u003ci\u003echutzpah\u003c\/i\u003e it took to establish and run the thriving, influential theaters.  He reveals the nightly drama and comedy that played out behind the scenes as well as onstage, and introduces all the players—actors, divas, playwrights, directors, and producers—who made it possible. A richly evocative chronicle of its brief but dazzling existence in America, this is both an elegy for and a tribute to Yiddish theater—lost, but not forgotten.“Written in a crowd-pleasing style that ladles on the irresistible anecdotes. . . . Kanfer conveys the excitement and impact of Yiddish theater, not to mention its long shadow.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“A lively history, capturing the spirit of the times and the sensibilities of the actors, writers and impresarios who, with great energy, passion and no training created an altogether new art. . . . In stylish prose that’s a pleasure to read,  Kanfer fuels the narrative with anecdotes and insights.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Jewish Week\u003c\/i\u003e“Kanfer must be commended for conveying his narrative in such vivid, sensual and often hilarious terms. . . . More than worth the price of admission.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“Kanfer’s prose is clear, breezy, and entertaining. . . . Rivalry.  Jealousy.  Sabotage.  Histrionics.  Then as now, that’s entertainment.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Sun\u003c\/i\u003eStefan Kanfer is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Eighth Sin, A Summer World, The Last Empire, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eSerious Business. \u003c\/i\u003eHe was a writer and editor at \u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e for more than twenty years.  A Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and the recipient of numerous writing awards, Kanfer is currently in the Distinguished Writer program at Southampton College, Long Island University.  He lives in New York City and on Cape Cod.CHAPTER ONETHE FOUR INGREDIENTSFor almost five thousand years the Jews needed no theater to relate   their story. They saw themselves as participants in an epic teeming   with conquests and enslavements, revelations and miracles. A burning   bush that speaks, the parting of the Red Sea, a rod turned into a   snake, a woman turned into a pillar of salt—where was the playwright   that could match God's imagination? Even the setbacks were of a grand   scale: expulsions from Eden and Egypt, lost wars, subjugation. What   stage could reproduce these incidents?The scholar Max I. Dimont was so impressed by the theatrical quality of   Jewish history that he divided it into three acts. \"When the curtain   rises on the first 2,000 years,\" he wrote in \u003ci\u003eThe Indestructible Jews,\u003c\/i\u003e   \"we will note that it proceeds like a Greek predestination drama, with   God seemingly the author and divine director.\" But there was a   difference. In the classic Greek plays, the characters remain unaware   of their destinies. In the Jewish predestination drama, Jehovah gives   them their parts and tells them of His expectations—expectations that   will require martyrdom and perseverance.The Old Testament's pivotal scene is the essence of dramatic tension.   Abraham, the man Kierkegaard dubbed the Father of Faith, makes ready to   offer up his son Isaac—until Jehovah reprieves him. A covenant is   struck between man and Jehovah: if this true believer remains obedient   to the divine will, he and his descendants will be the Chosen People:   \"I will make of thee a great nation,\" promises the Voice, \"and I will   bless thee and make thy name great.\" From then on, human sacrifice is   no longer necessary in this tribe; worship and a moral life are   sufficient unto the day.Unlike the multitude of pagan gods who surrender to temptations and war   amongst themselves, Dimont observes, \"the God of Abraham acts with a   moral purpose and a preconceived plan. He is not a capricious god who   acts on a day-to-day basis. The Jews know what God expects of them and   can therefore make long range plans.\"By the time Abraham's descendants settle in Egypt, they are suffused   with the idea of monotheism. It will not be relinquished in the   presence of their enemies. There will be many such adversaries over the   course of history. Often these enemies come from without, like the   Philistines; but sometimes they come from within, irresistible temptations that change the individual and threaten his people.Those enticements become an integral part of the melodrama. The gods of   the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans are   subject to follies, passions, and mistakes. Jehovah never exhibits such   weaknesses. He leaves the scandals to his all-too-human followers, who   never experience a shortage of family violence. Cain murders Abel.   Jacob betrays his brother Esau. Absalom rebels against his father, dies   in the field, and King David's cry resounds through the eons: \"Would   God I had died for thee, O, Absalom, my son, my son!\" Joseph is cast   out by his jealous brothers, who rend his coat of many colors and   falsely report his death.And should the reader's attention flag, sexual adventures are there to   pique it. Sodom is destroyed because of the uncontrolled lives of its   citizens. David is so besotted by Bathsheba that he sends her husband   off to war so that he can disport with her. The mighty Samson, seduced   and weakened by Delilah, is destroyed for lust. The elders leering at   Susannah, the ruinous fleshpots of Gomorrah, and, on a higher plane,   the explicit love songs of Solomon (\"My beloved put in his hand by the   hole of the door, and I was moved by him\") all speak of the pleasures   and snares of carnal desire.And this is only the beginning. After the Holy Writ comes the second   part of the Jewish saga, when Jehovah can no longer be seen in a   burning bush or heard on Mount Sinai. Twice the great Temple in   Jerusalem is destroyed, first by the Babylonians in 587 B.C. After it   has been rebuilt and the city regained by the Hebrews, Roman troops   raze the Temple and slay thousands of Jewish men, women, and children.   This catastrophe in A.D. 70 marks the end of the Jewish state and the   beginning of the Diaspora.\"Without Zion,\" remarks historian Nathan Ausubel, the Jews are \"like   children deprived of their mother.\" Wherever they disperse, they   remember Jerusalem, setting up scrolls of the Torah—the first five   books of the Bible—in their makeshift temples, nourishing the hope of a   Messiah who will deliver them from their exile, endlessly poring over   the scriptures in search of meaning, speaking in prayer—and sometimes   in one-sided conversation with a silent Jehovah. This monological   style, popularized by the \"Tevye\" short stories of Sholem Aleichem, and   musicalized in \u003ci\u003eFiddler on the Roof\u003c\/i\u003e, can be heard to this day: \"Dear   God, why did you have to make my poor old horse lose his shoe just   before the Sabbath? That wasn't nice. It's enough you pick on me, bless   me with five daughters, a life of poverty. What have you got against my   horse? Sometimes I think that when things are too quiet up there, You   say to Yourself, 'Let's see, what kind of mischief can I play.' \"The going out from the Middle East is only the first of many such   sorrows. In the early Christian era, the Jews are singled out for   refusing to accept Jesus as the Messiah. Preachers find a ready target:   Gregory of Nyssa sees Hebrews as \"Murderers of the Lord, assassins of   the prophets, rebels and detesters of God.\" Saint John Chrysostom   thunders, \"Brothel and theater, the synagogue is also a cave of pirates   and the lair of wild beasts.\" The legend of the Wandering Jew, whom   Jesus condemned to roam the earth endlessly, though mentioned nowhere   in the New Testament, is related by Christian speakers and takes root   from the thirteenth century on.By the Middle Ages this antipathy hardens into doctrine. Pockets of   tolerance exist throughout Europe—the Jews enjoy an unprecedented   economic and religious freedom in the Arab-Christian culture of Spain.   Yet a sword dangles over them at all times. Some nations force them   into ghettos; others make them wear special clothing and caps to   identify them as outsiders. In Germany they are forced to swear an oath   of fealty on the carcass of a pig. The Passion Play at Oberammergau   features Jews in horned hats to suggest their connection to Satan, and   Jewish religious figures are portrayed as evil and sadistic. The sights   and sounds affront rabbis; they condemn theater as \"the seat of   frivolity.\"Jews are considered the devil's allies whenever a plague surfaces.   Martin Luther excoriates them when they fail to embrace his doctrines.   \"Therefore be on your guard against the Jews,\" he warns, \"knowing that   wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of   devils.\" Spain turns from oasis to killing ground during the   Inquisition. Jews are burned, murdered, tortured, and finally expelled   from the country in 1492, just as Columbus sets sail for America.For centuries they're forbidden to live in England. The absence of   Hebrews makes no difference; anti-Semitism without Jews is all the rage   during the Elizabethan era. In \u003ci\u003eThe Jew of Malta\u003c\/i\u003e, Christopher Marlowe   makes his villain a scheming, outspoken Jewish merchant named Barabas:   \"Now I will show myself to have more of the serpent than the dove.\"   Shakespeare, in his turn, seizes on the incident of Dr. Rodrigo Lopez,   a visiting Spanish convert who has been supplying information about his   native country to the queen. Lopez runs afoul of the Earl of Essex. The   aristocrat dislikes foreigners who have greater royal access than he   has, and attempts to frame the doctor for espionage. At first Elizabeth   will have none of it; but Essex persists and eventually gets his way.En route to the block, the crowd shouting with excitement, the   executioner's sword glinting in the sun, Lopez protests that he loves   Elizabeth even more than he adores Jesus Christ. It does no good; the   converted Jew is publicly hanged, castrated, his carcass pulled into   pieces by four horses, to the amusement of the crowd. Shakespeare   follows the incident with his own contribution. The Bard, states   Anthony Burgess in his biography, \"was not above exploiting the general   bitterness towards Jews by writing a play in which a Jew is the   villain—not a treacherous one, however, but a usurious one. Barabas is   a Machiavellian monster; Shylock merely, and literally, wants his pound   of flesh.\"Shakespeare, of course, is incapable of creating a two-dimensional   character, and the man is immortalized by his famous plea: \"Hath not a   Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,   passions?\" All very well for the modern playgoer, but in the Bard's   time and long after, audiences would see only a beaky moneylender   rubbing his hands, alternately purring at his Christian enemies and   planning their destruction.On rare occasions the Jews find a welcome. The city of Vilna is created   by Gedymin, ruler of the grand duchy, when he ventures out on a hunt   for game. He sleeps where one of his arrows falls, and dreams of a big   wolf wearing an iron shield and howling as loudly as a pack of a   hundred wolves. Awakening in fright, he asks his priest for an   interpretation. The wolf, says the holy man, represents an important   place that will rise where he stands, and the roar indicates its future   reputation. Accordingly, Gedymin builds a city on the site and names it   for the river Vilia flowing through it. Anxious for a population to   fill his new streets, he invites \u003ci\u003eall \u003c\/i\u003enewcomers regardless of their   religion, and Jews crowd into this newly safe place. But as always in   Europe, East and West, they remain subject to someone else's dream.They prosper for long periods in the Netherlands, where the heretical   Baruch Spinoza finds a home for his ethical philosophy. And in   post-revolutionary France there are Jewish statesmen, bankers,   musicians, and philosophers. In Berlin a free education becomes   available to indigent Jews willing to study German, French, and   European history. Still, menace is never far away. The nearest   approximation to Hitler's genocidal procedures comes in the   seventeenth-century Ukraine, where Cossacks, urged on by a maniacal   leader who blames the Jews for all evils, go on a lethal rampage.   Historian and Holocaust survivor Alexander Kimel describes the results:   The Ukrainian Jews \"were destined to utter annihilation, and the   slightest pity shown to them was looked upon as treason. Scrolls of the   law were taken out of the synagogues by the Cossacks, who danced on   them while drinking whisky. After this the Jews were laid down upon   them and butchered without mercy. Thousands of Jewish infants were   thrown into wells or burned alive.\"Russia handles its Jews with slow-motion malice. Beginning in the   eighteenth century its hundreds of thousands of Hebrews are forbidden   to travel beyond the rural towns—\u003ci\u003eshtetls\u003c\/i\u003e—in which they already live. An   invisible moat rings the Jewish communities of Poland, the Ukraine, and   Russia. The Romanov czars, fearful of revolution in the wake of foreign   wars and increased taxes, use them as convenient scapegoats. Pogroms   are encouraged during the frequent periods of social unrest.The mortality rate among Jews is twice as high as for Christians in the   territories. That rate is accelerated by the military draft, which   sweeps up Jewish boys and puts them into training schools far away from   their homes. The Russian author Alexander Herzen witnesses one forced   march in 1835. The officer in charge confides that less than half of   the children will reach their destination. \"They just die off like   flies. A Jew boy, you know, is such a frail, weakly creature, like a   skinned cat; he is not used to tramping in the mud for ten hours a day   and eating biscuit-then again, being among strangers, no father, no   mother, nor petting; well, they cough and cough until they cough   themselves into their graves. And I ask you, what use is it to the   government? What can they do with little boys?\"This method is judged insufficient to deal with the Jewish Problem.   Some fifty years later Czar Alexander III resolves to find a way to   deal with the obdurate, stiff-necked people once and for all.   Konstantin Pobiedonostev, procurator of the Holy Synod, offers a   three-pronged scheme: \"one-third conversion, one-third emigration, and   one-third starvation.\"And yet, wherever Jews congregate, a saving remnant always manages to   survive. What is the formula for their endurance against millennia of   savagery, persecutions, murders, evictions? There are four ingredients.The first is literacy. These, after all, are people of the Book.   Sometime around A.D. 200, an epochal resolution is made. Some of the   greatest wise men and teachers have perished at the hands of the Romans   and they have left nothing behind. From here on, Judaism's traditions   must be set down on paper, lest they be forgotten and lost forever.The product of this decision is the Mishna. It deals with Jewish laws   of diet, behavior, worship, justice, marriage. During the centuries   following the writing of the Mishna, rabbis write down their   discussions and commentaries in a series of books known as the Talmud.   Together, the Torah, Mishna, and Talmud provide Jewish children with   their moral education even in the worst of circumstances. Such study   stays with them for a lifetime.Well over a millennium later, the power of this textual base was still   evident. An old book, preserved from the millions burned by the Third   Reich and now housed in a New York City library, bears the stamp of the   Society of Woodchoppers for the Study of Mishna in Berditchev. These   axmen required no literacy to do their jobs, but that was beside the   point. They were Jews, and therefore they met regularly to discuss   Talmudic matters. The outside world, with its threats and exclusions,   is forgotten during those hours. If they argue about religious matters,   they agree about the special nature of their lives: gentiles drink away   their leisure time; Jews analyze the Law.The Yiddish novelist Mendele Sforim describes the education of a   typical \u003ci\u003eshtetl\u003c\/i\u003e boy during this long period. From the Middle Ages to the   eighteenth century there is hardly any variance: \"Little Shlomo had   accumulated before his bar mitzvah as much experience as if he were a   Methuselah. Where hadn't he been and what hadn't he seen! Mesopotamia,   the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Persia, Egypt and the Nile, the   deserts and the mountains. It was an experience which the children of   no other people knew. He could not tell you a thing about Russia, about   Poland, about Lithuania, and their peoples, laws, kings, politicians.   But you just ask him about Og, King of Bashan. He knew the people who   lived in tents and spoke Hebrew or Aramaic; the people who rode on   mules or camels and drank water out of pitchers. . . . He knew nothing   concerning the fields about him, about rye, wheat, potatoes, and where   his bread came from; didn't know of the existence of such things as   oak, pine and fir trees; but he knew about vineyards, date palms,   pomegranates, locust trees. He knew about the dragon and the leopard,   about the turtledove and the hart that panteth after the living waters;   he lived in another world.\"","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301221322981,"sku":"NP9781400078035","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400078035.jpg?v=1767737254","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/stardust-lost-isbn-9781400078035","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}