- Person
- Sholem Aleichem
- Lived
- 1859–1916
- Field
- Yiddish literature
- From
- Russian-Ukrainian
The story
Sholem Aleichem was the pen name of Solomon Rabinovich, born in 1859 in Pereiaslav, in today's Ukraine. The name is a traditional Yiddish and Hebrew greeting. Writing mainly in Yiddish, he became one of the founders of modern Yiddish literature, and in his day he was often called "the Jewish Mark Twain" for his humour and his gift for dialogue in many different voices.
He also used his own money to help other writers. In 1888 and 1889 he published an almanac, Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek, "The Yiddish Public Library", which gave important exposure to young Yiddish authors, until he lost his fortune in 1890.
His best-known creation, Tevye the Dairyman, first appeared in 1894. Tevye is a poor, pious, talkative milkman in the village of Boyberik, modelled on Boyarka near Kyiv. In eight stories, he supposedly meets the author by chance and tells him the latest twists in his life: a windfall and its loss, and the choices of his daughters, who marry for love, for revolution or outside the faith, as the old order crumbles. The cycle ends with the family's expulsion from their village by the Russian government.
The stories were adapted many times. Sholem Aleichem's own stage version was first produced by Maurice Schwartz in 1919, and Schwartz filmed it in Yiddish in 1939. Arnold Perl's play Tevya and His Daughters led to the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and a book by Joseph Stein, which opened in 1964 and became the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europe. It was filmed in 1971 and has been revived many times.
Fiddler is now one of the most popular shows of all time, performed in Japanese, Hungarian, Hindi and many other languages. When Sholem Aleichem died in New York in 1916, an estimated 100,000 people attended his funeral, one of the largest in the city's history. Through Tevye, the world still hears his voice.
Why it matters
Through Tevye, Sholem Aleichem gave audiences around the world a warm, funny and honest portrait of a family facing change, a story that still speaks across cultures.
About Sholem Aleichem
The great humorist of Yiddish literature, creator of Tevye the Dairyman, Menakhem-Mendl and Motl, whose stories became the basis for Fiddler on the Roof.
More about Sholem Aleichem
- Sholem Aleichem's The Bloody Hoax exposed the blood libelIn The Bloody Hoax, Sholem Aleichem told of two student friends who swap identities, so that the Christian student becomes the victim of a blood libel accusation.
- Sholem Aleichem's last novel told an immigrant boy's storySholem Aleichem's last novel, Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son, follows a boy not quite nine from a poor shtetl to a new life in New York. It was unfinished at his death in 1916.
Sources
- Life and Times Sholem Aleichem: 100 Years
- Sholem Aleichem Wikipedia
- Tevye the Dairyman Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.