Sholem Aleichem

Sholem Aleichem — writer (fiddler on roof) with roots in the Russian Empire

He was born Solomon Rabinovich in March 1859 at Pereiaslav in the Poltava Governorate and grew up in the nearby shtetl of Voronkiv, which he later rebuilt in fiction as Kasrilevka. His father was a prosperous merchant until a failed venture put the family into poverty; they moved back to Pereiaslav when the boy was thirteen, and his mother died there in a cholera epidemic soon afterwards.

His first known piece of writing was an alphabetical glossary of the insults used by his stepmother. At fifteen, having read Robinson Crusoe, he wrote a Jewish version of it. He took his pen name from the ordinary Yiddish greeting meaning peace be with you.

After school he spent three years tutoring the daughter of a wealthy landowner, Olga Loev, and married her in 1883 against her father's wishes. He served as a government-appointed rabbi at Lubny, lived in Odessa from 1891 and then in Kyiv - the city that appears in his work as Yehupetz - and from 1883 wrote almost entirely in Yiddish, having begun in Russian and Hebrew.

That choice was the significant one. Serious writing for Jews in the empire was in Hebrew, the language of the learned; Yiddish was what people actually spoke, and was widely regarded as beneath literature. He produced more than forty volumes in it and made it a literary language, and by 1890 was the central figure of Yiddish letters.

In 1904 he edited an anthology in aid of the victims of the Kishinev pogrom, translating three Tolstoy stories into Yiddish himself and gathering contributions from Chekhov and other Russian writers. The following year the pogroms reached Kyiv. He left with considerable reluctance and reached New York in 1906.

America went badly at first. He could not establish himself in the New York Yiddish theatre; his family had settled in Geneva and he could not afford two households, so he joined them in 1908 and lectured exhaustingly to pay for it. In July that year he collapsed on a train at Baranowicze during a reading tour and spent two months in hospital with acute tuberculosis. The war displaced the family to Copenhagen, and in 1914 they came back to New York, to the Lower East Side. His son Misha, who had tuberculosis, was inadmissible under American immigration law; he stayed behind in Switzerland with his sister and died there in 1915.

Sholem Aleichem died in New York in May 1916, aged fifty-seven, still at work on Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son. His funeral was among the largest the city had seen, with crowds estimated at between a hundred and three hundred thousand. His will was printed in the New York Times the following day and read into the Congressional Record.

His stories about Tevye the dairyman became, in 1964, the musical Fiddler on the Roof - the first commercially successful English-language stage work about Jewish life in eastern Europe, and for most of the world the only image of that life that survived it.

Tracing the roots — Pereyaslav (Ukr)

He left the Russian Empire after the pogroms of 1905 reached Kyiv and arrived in New York in 1906. His son Misha, who had tuberculosis, was refused entry to the United States under immigration law and died in Switzerland in 1915.

Born Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich at Pereiaslav, Poltava Governorate, and raised in the shtetl of Voronkiv, the model for his Kasrilevka. He lived in Lubny, Odessa and Kyiv before emigrating.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Pereyaslav (Ukr). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition