Sholem Aleichem’s novella STEMPENYU

	Sholem Aleichem’s novella STEMPENYU newly reissued & now available in paperback!!!
Amazon Product Description: This funny tale of a fiddler whose music stirs villagers to the heights of romantic frivolity supposedly inspired Chagall's famous "fiddler on the roof" painting. A classic, it is the humorous and touching saga of shtetl life and what happens when one young woman falls for a fiddler as famous as a rock star.

But how do they know this???

According to correspondence from Melville Publishing House,
the source for this statement is… Jan Lisa Huttner!

Click HERE to order the new Melville edition of STEMPENYU from Amazon.

Click HERE to read Jan’s original article EVERYBODY’S FIDDLER.

Click HERE to read more about Boris Aronson.

Click HERE to read Jan’s review of two 40th Anniversary productions.

How I Found the Missing Link:

It’s often the case that once something is “found,” it’s hard to remember a time when it was “lost.” Now that Sholem Aleichem’s novella STEMPENYU is back in print again, I’m here to tell you that I had a very hard time finding it back when I first started to look. But why was I looking for it in the first place?

The answer is quite simple: My research on FIDDLER had led me to a wonderful book called THE THEATRE ART OF BORIS ARONSON by Frank Rich with Lisa Aronson. Here’s how dumb I was back then: I was sitting at a table in the “Billy Rose Theatre Collection” at the New York Public Library, staring at the book & shaking because it contained information I’d been searching years to find.

Finally I went up to the desk clerk, & tremulously asked him: “Can you tell me how to find out if someone is still alive?” He said: “Who are you looking for?” I said: “Um, Frank Rich?” He looked at me as if I were the stupidest person in the world: “Frank Rich is the theatre critic for the New York Times!” “Oh,” said I with a grimace. “I’m from Chicago.”

The Rich/Aronson chapter on FIDDLER was enormously helpful, but then I noticed this tiny item in the chronology section (page 294):

And my search for STEMPENYU began!

I contacted Joel Berkowitz & asked him to post an inquiry for me on the YIDDISH THEATRE FORUM, but got no reply:

So what was STEMPENYU: a play? a story? I had no idea!

Then one day I received a book in the mail from my Aunt Bernis. Bernis Hecht has been active member of Brandeis University National Women's Committee for decades, & she frequents used book sales in search of buried treasure. The note with the book said she’d found this Yiddish book, she saw it was by Sholem Aleichem, & she thought I might like it. Well, I knew just enough Yiddish to sound out the Table of Contents: STEMPENYU!

A message from above: Keep looking, Jan! So I took the book from Bernis to my Yiddish teacher, Nathaniel Stampfer, & together we searched Spertus Library until we found an English version of STEMPENYU in a collection of stories translated by Joachim Neugroschel (now out-of-print). And as soon as I read the prologue, I knew in my heart that I’d found the “missing link.”

There’s still no proof positive for this chain of influence from Sholem Aleichem’s STEMPENYU to Chagall’s GREEN MUSICIAN, but I believe it with all my heart, & I think you will too once you’ve read this lovely story.