‘Lunga è la strada’ per Israel Becker. Pellegrinaggio biografico e artistico di una wandering star del teatro yiddish.

The essay remodels the ancestral mythologem of the “wandering Jew” in the light of the notion of “wandering star” (from the title of Sholem Aleichem’s novel), declining it on the case-study of Israel Becker, Jewish-Polish actor and painter born in 1917. The artist can be classified – although little frequented by scholars – among the most interesting figures of the Yiddish theater and cinema firmament. Wandering is, in fact, a leitmotif in Becker’s personal odyssey, combined with a rare stubbornness in enduring the traumatic shocks imposed by the historical events, faced with an exceptional creative strength and reconverted ¬– if needed – into playwriting material. Stage of life (Di bine fun mayn lebn) is – not surprisingly – the expression chosen by Becker himself to baptize his own memoirs, a catalogue of considerable dimensions edited in 1979, which contains a rich selection of paintings preceded by an accurate autobiographical note, which traces the salient stages of his life, fixing the inextricable union between existential journey and artistic adventure. The main object of the paper is therefore the reconstruction of Becker’s long career, with lunges on some works – cinematographic, theatrical or pictorial – particularly exemplifying of his pilgrimage.