A boy from Kasrilevke
Sholem Aleichem was born Sholem (Solomon) Rabinovich on 2 March 1859 (18 February in the Old Style calendar) in Pereyaslav, in the Poltava province of the Russian Empire, in today’s Ukraine. He grew up in the nearby shtetl of Voronkiv, which he would later transform into Kasrilevke, the poor, gossipy, irrepressible little town that is the setting of so many of his stories. His father, Nokhem Rabinovich, was a prosperous merchant until a failed business deal plunged the family into poverty.
When Sholem was thirteen the family moved back to Pereyaslav, where his mother, Chaye-Esther, died in a cholera epidemic. His father remarried, and the boy’s first literary effort was a mischievous alphabetical glossary of the curses and insults his new stepmother hurled at the children. At fifteen, inspired by Robinson Crusoe, he wrote a Jewish version of it. He received both a traditional Jewish education and a Russian secular schooling, an unusual combination that gave him command of Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian.
Tutor, rabbi, speculator
After finishing school in 1876 he worked as a tutor, and for three years taught Olga, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish landowner. The two fell in love, against the wishes of her father. From 1880 to 1883 he served as a “crown rabbi”, a government-appointed registrar of Jewish births, marriages and deaths, in the town of Lubny. In 1883 he and Olga married, and when her father died a few years later they inherited his estate. They would have six children.
The couple moved to Kiev, where Rabinovich tried his luck on the stock exchange. In 1890 he lost the entire fortune and had to flee his creditors. The disaster was personal ruin, but it was also material: the dreams and catastrophes of speculation would be immortalised in Menakhem-Mendl, his hapless luftmentsh hero who chases fortunes on paper from Odessa to Kiev while his long-suffering wife writes him furious letters from home.
“Peace be upon you”
Like his contemporaries Mendele Moykher-Sforim and I. L. Peretz, Rabinovich began by writing in Hebrew and Russian. In 1883 he published his first story in Yiddish and signed it “Sholem Aleichem”, the everyday greeting meaning “peace be upon you” roughly the Jewish equivalent of “how do you do.” The pseudonym was partly a disguise, since Yiddish was then widely dismissed as a mere “jargon” unworthy of serious literature. Sholem Aleichem set out to prove the opposite.
While he was still wealthy he used his money to champion other writers, publishing the almanac Di yidishe folks-bibliotek (The Jewish People’s Library) in 1888 and 1889, which paid authors generously and gave important exposure to new Yiddish talent. He was a passionate advocate of Yiddish as a modern literary language deserving the same respect as any in Europe. He was also an early Zionist, joining the Lovers of Zion movement in 1888 and attending the Eighth Zionist Congress in The Hague in 1907 as a delegate.
Tevye and his daughters
In 1894 Sholem Aleichem published the first story about Tevye the Dairyman, a poor milkman who lives outside a town near Kiev and delivers cheese and butter to the rich summer residents of Boiberik. Over the next two decades he returned to Tevye again and again, in a series of monologues in which Tevye, addressing “Mr. Sholem Aleichem” himself, recounts his misfortunes. Tevye is pious, garrulous and wry; he argues with God, misquotes scripture with comic aplomb, and endures blow after blow with a mixture of faith and irony.
Each daughter brings a new upheaval of the modern world into his house: one marries a poor tailor for love rather than the rich butcher he had chosen; another follows a revolutionary into Siberian exile; another marries a Christian, which Tevye experiences as a death; another drowns herself. The stories end bleakly, with Tevye widowed and expelled from his village under the tsar’s decrees. Out of this material, in 1964, the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof was made, a far gentler version that became one of the most successful shows in theatre history, performed around the world and filmed in 1971.
Laughter through tears
Sholem Aleichem’s great gift was the human voice. His characters talk, boast, complain, digress, quote, lament, and through their talk he captured the whole world of East European Jewry at the moment it was being torn apart by poverty, pogroms, revolution and emigration. Beyond Tevye and Menakhem-Mendl, he created Motl, the cantor’s orphaned son who narrates his family’s emigration to America with the cheerful obliviousness of a child, the comic travellers of his Railroad Stories, and an enormous gallery of shtetl characters.
Early readers saw mainly the comedy; later critics came to see the darkness beneath it. His humour was a way of enduring the unendurable, a technique often summed up in the Yiddish phrase “laughter through tears.” In his own day he was so beloved that he was called “the Jewish Mark Twain” and his work was read and admired by Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. After the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 he edited an anthology to raise money for the victims, translating stories contributed by Tolstoy himself into Yiddish.
His range was wider than his comic reputation suggests. He wrote novels about the lives of Jewish musicians and wandering actors, including Stempenyu and Wandering Stars; Der blutiker shpas (The Bloody Hoax), a dark story in which a Christian student who swaps identities with a Jewish friend finds himself accused of ritual murder, confronted the blood libel head-on in the years of the Beilis affair. He also wrote plays, children’s stories and hundreds of feuilletons for the Yiddish newspapers whose readers followed his serialised work week by week.
Exile and illness
The pogroms that swept the Russian Empire in 1905, including in Kiev, convinced him to leave. He embarked on a reading tour across Europe and travelled to New York in 1906, where he hoped to succeed in the Yiddish theatre; the venture disappointed him, and he soon rejoined his family, who had settled in Geneva. Despite his fame he was always short of money and had to support his family through exhausting lecture tours, at which audiences packed halls to hear him read.
In July 1908, during a tour in Russia, he collapsed on a train near Baranovichi with tuberculosis and spent months recovering. He called it meeting the Angel of Death face to face, and the experience prompted him to begin his autobiographical novel, Funem yarid (From the Fair). In 1909 friends, led by the writer Jacob Dinezon, bought back the rights to his works from various publishers so that he could live on the royalties. He spent several years as a semi-invalid, often in Italian and Swiss resorts.
Last years in New York
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Sholem Aleichem, a Russian subject then in Germany, had to flee once more. He sailed for New York with most of his family and settled first in Harlem and then in the Bronx. His son Misha, ill with tuberculosis, was refused entry under American immigration rules and remained in Europe. In New York he kept writing, including new chapters of Motl’s adventures in America, and contributed to the Yiddish press.
He was famously superstitious about the number thirteen; his manuscripts never had a page 13, only a page 12a. He died in his Bronx apartment on 13 May 1916, aged 57, of tuberculosis and diabetes. His funeral was one of the largest New York had ever seen: estimates of the crowds that lined the streets of the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens range from about one hundred thousand to more than two hundred thousand. He was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens.
The will and the legacy
The day after the funeral his will was printed in The New York Times and later read into the Congressional Record. It asked his family and friends to gather on the anniversary of his death, read the will, and recite “one of my stories, one of the very merry ones” in whatever language they best understood. “Let my name be recalled with laughter” he wrote, “or not at all.” His descendants and admirers have honoured that request ever since, gathering each year in New York to read his stories aloud.
His family preserved his memory in print as well. His brother Wolf Rabinovich wrote a memoir, My Brother Sholom Aleichem, and his daughter Marie Waife-Goldberg published My Father, Sholom Aleichem. Translations by Frances and Julius Butwin, Hillel Halkin, Curt Leviant and Aliza Shevrin brought the stories to new generations of English readers, and the 1949 collection Tevye’s Daughters provided the immediate source for the Broadway musical.
His literary family continued too: his granddaughter Bel Kaufman wrote the bestselling novel Up the Down Staircase, and his son Norman Raeben became an influential painter and teacher. Streets in Kyiv, Israel and Birobidzhan bear his name, as does a crater on the planet Mercury. More than a century after his death, Tevye still argues with God on stages from Broadway to Tokyo, and the vanished world of the shtetl survives above all because Sholem Aleichem made it talk.
Sources & further reading
Sholem Aleichem, Wikipedia · The Ethical Will, sholemaleichem.org (Jeremy Dauber / Columbia University) · Who Was Sholem Aleichem?, sholemaleichem.org · Remembering Sholom Aleichem, Moment Magazine · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.