Introducing Sholom Aleichem

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, January 4, 2008

Perhaps the most famous story told about the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, the pen name of Shalom Rabinowitz, is about his meeting with Mark Twain. We are told that Mark Twain greeted him with these words: “ I wanted to meet you, because I understand I am the American Sholom Aleichem.”

Shalom Rabinowitz was born in a shtetl in the Ukraine in 1859. During his youth his family moved to other small towns, making the transition also from wealth to poverty with the failure of his father’s business, and from happiness to sadness with the death of his mother in 1872. We find a hint of the trauma of this loss in the fact that Shalom Aleichem’s first serious work was an alphabetical collection of his step-mother’s curses.

As a young man Sholom Rabinowitz wrote for several years in Hebrew, and only after his marriage to Olga, in 1883, began to publish in Yiddish. His marriage is a romantic story. He was hired to teach a wealthy Jewish landowner’s daughter. They fell in love and she married him over the objections of her father.

When writing in Yiddish, Shalom Rabinowitz chose to use a pen-name, because of the low regard, his father, a Hebraist, and other members of the Haskalah, had for Yiddish. They considered it, not even a language, but just a jargon of the common people.

Defying his father and others of that generation and along with the other two writers also considered the fathers of modern Yiddish, Mendel Mocher Sforim and Yehudah Leib Peretz, Sholom Aleichem created Yiddish literature.

When he was financially secure, Sholom Aleichem, was a benefactor of other struggling Yiddish writers and sponsor of the first Yiddish journal, but with the loss of his fortune in 1890 and with the increasing difficulties of Jewish life in Czarist Russia, Sholom Aleichem, shared the experience of his people, fleeing from the pogroms of 1905 and coming to America.

Sholom Aleichem never really settled down in New York and he spend the last ten years of his life traveling and supporting his family by giving talks. Ill during those years with tuberculosis, there were period when he depending on gifts from friends and supporters. Just a year after the devastating loss of his beloved son to disease, Sholom Aleichem succumbed and died in 1916 in a South Bronx apartment. Much loved by his people, 100,000 mourners were present at his funeral.

Sholom Aleichem’s character comes through in his will, in which he instructs his family to mark his yarzheit in this way each year. He told his friends and family to gather, "read my will, and also select one of my stories, one of the very merry ones, and recite it in whatever language is most intelligible to you." "Let my name be recalled with laughter," he added, "or not at all." The gatherings continue to the present-day, and a very special one was held on the 75th anniversary of his death.

While humorous, Sholom Aleichem’s stories and plays deal with real issues in the changes taking place in the Jewish community and in the world at the end of the 19th , beginning of the 20th century. There is playfulness, but underneath an understanding of the uncertainty of the future and the dangers to the world he was recording. The stories on which Fiddler on the Roof is based, Tevye the Milkman, are much darker than the Broadway play. Tevye ends up a widower, his 4th daughter commits suicide when rejected by a rich Jewish suitor, though interestingly, his third daughter returns to the fold following the pogroms leaving her non-Jewish husband. The stories end with Tevye ironically quoting the words in Genesis with which the story of the Jews begins: “Lech Lecha, go forth from your land, from your birthplace from the land of your fathers.” Yet even with the darkness, there is great tenderness and playfulness, a humor that Jews and non-Jews could enjoy. We hope everyone will enjoy our Sing Along Fiddler on the Roof, later this evening.