The author of the Tevye stories was born Sholem* (Solomon) Rabinovich in 1859 near Kiev in the Ukraine and became one of the most prominent Jewish writers of the period. He was certainly the greatest to write in the Yiddish language. He used a number of pseudonyms; the best known, Sholem Aleichem, is a play on the Hebrew or Yiddish Shalom Aleichem. This literally means 'Peace be with you' but is used as a common greeting like 'Hello there'. The Shalom Aleichem is also a prayer which is sung on Friday evening at the beginning of the Sabbath.

His father was a well to do merchant, but lost money in a failed business and Sholem grew up poor; his mother died in a cholera epidemic when he was thirteen. At fifteen, having read Robinson Crusoe, he wrote a Jewish version. After graduating from school at seventeen he, like so many other educated Jewish boys, became a tutor to rich Jewish landowner's daughter whom he eventually married. This made him rich again, but he lost money in the Kiev stock market and, in spite of his success, was never wealthy again.

Aleichem's first stories were in Hebrew but, at the age of twenty-four, he started to use Yiddish, (the everyday language of the Jews of eastern Europe) for literary purposes, one of the first to do so. (It was then that he adopted Aleichem as his last name to disquise himself from his father.) The author of about 300 short stories, at least five novels and a number of plays, he wrote of everyday life and of how people survived by using humor. He is often called the 'Jewish Mark Twain'** and the 'Jewish Dickens', but his Jewish humor is different and, under the comedy, his writings are dark.

The pogroms of 1903 and 1905 sent him into exile in New York. He hoped to make a living by writing and staging plays but was unsuccessful and returned to Europe where he had left his family. There he made a precarious living by doing reading tours. He fell seriously ill with the tuberculosis which he had had for several years; he later wrote that he had "met the majesty of the Angel of Death face to face". For four years he was unable to do much work, and the family lived mainly on donations from admirers. (His 50th birthday in 1909 was celebrated all around the world.)

Aleichem urged the recognition of Yiddish as a national language as on a par with other European languages. He was also very involved with the early growth of the Zionist movement writing a lengthy article Why Jews Need a Land of Their Own, and serving as an American delegate to the eighth Zionist Congress in The Hague in 1907.

He died in 1916 and was buried in Queens (near Brooklyn in New York). He had asked to be buried among the plain people, not the elite, calling himself their folk writer. His funeral was one of the largest in New York history until that time with about 100,000 mourners. His will was printed in the New York Times and in the Congressional Record. In it he requested that his family come together on the anniversary of his death each year and read his comic stories aloud. He wrote, "Let my name be recalled with laughter or not at all." Such celebrations continue today.

*Sometimes spelled Sholom. Because of transliteration from Hebrew which uses a different alphabet, many of the words here and in other articles have various spellings in English.

** When Twain, who was also best known by his pseudonym, was told of this, he said "tell him that I am the American Sholem Aleichem".

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Revised February 2011
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