Sholom Aleichem

Ukrainian-born writer

• Born: March 2, 1859
• Birthplace: Pereyaslav, Russia (now Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky, Ukraine)
• Died: May 13, 1916
• Place of death: Bronx, New York

One of the first writers to explore the literary possibilities of Yiddish, Aleichem transformed a language in common use to mirror the joys and the terrors of being Jewish in tales that presented the humanity of Jews to a global audience.

Early Life

Sholom Aleichem (SHOH-lehm ah-LAY-kehm) was born into a family of Ukrainian Jews in the town of Pereyaslav during the reign of Czar Alexander II. In 1877, following the completion of his education at age eighteen, Aleichem took a position near Kiev as a private tutor to the daughter of Elimelech Loyeff; Aleichem remained two years and developed a romantic relationship with his pupil. Sent away by her father in 1879, he traveled to Kiev in an unsuccessful attempt to meet other Jewish intellectuals, and he was elected to the post of certified rabbi (a liaison position in the czarist bureaucracy) in Lubin. He held this for two and a half years, continuing to write for the Hebrew press. It was through his pieces published in the journal Ha-Melitz that Loyeff’s daughter regained contact with him. They eloped in May, 1883, and married without her father’s consent. Aleichem served his wealthy father-in-law as a secretary and a manager of the estate, but he had ample time to devote to writing.

Life’s Work

Aleichem wrote initially in Hebrew, but when Ha-Melitz began to issue a supplement in Yiddish, the first such publication in Russia, he enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to write for a much larger popular audience. His decision to adopt and to utilize Yiddish as the vehicle for his creativity was somewhat radical. In the late nineteenth century, Yiddish, while widely used in Jewish communities across the world, was not considered proper for formal intellectual works of lasting value and merit; such works were written in Hebrew. In response to this, he chose as his pen name the phrase “sholom aleichem,” a Hebrew greeting meaning “peace unto you,” which was in widespread use, so that his friends and family would not know that he was writing in Yiddish. The range of his literary creation would come to fill some forty volumes and would include short stories, poetry, novels, essays, and a significant number of plays and other stage productions; he explored nearly every literary form available to him. He also attempted to found an ongoing literary annual for the promotion of Yiddish writing, Di Yidishe Folks—Bibliotek (the Yiddish folk library). The contents of the two editions he succeeded in producing before his financial troubles in 1890 reflect his ability to enlist recognized Hebrew writers of the time and those writers already producing work in Yiddish.

After leaving Russia because of the pogrom of 1905 in Kiev, Aleichem lived for a time in Galicia, where he was well received by the local Jewish communities, and he embarked on a tour giving public readings of his works, with engagements in early 1906 in Romania, France, England, and Switzerland. In October, 1906, he first visited the United States with his wife and youngest son, and Jews in New York arranged a gala reception at which he was introduced to Mark Twain. The contrast between the diverse and active Jewish world of the United States and the limited life permitted Jews in Russia inspired Aleichem to write a statement of gratitude for the warm American hospitality he received. In this text, he debunked the stereotyped images of America widely heard in Europe and wrote about the bright promise of what American Jewry could achieve. His initial visit to New York ended in June, 1907, when he returned to his family in Geneva. Another reading tour in Poland and Russia in 1908 was cut short when he fell ill in Baranovichi and was diagnosed with acute pulmonary tuberculosis. After seven weeks, he was well enough to travel to Nervi, Italy, near Genoa, beginning a period of recuperation in healthy climates that would last for five years. News of his illness and dire financial situation (because of the fact that his publishers had bought the rights to his stories and novels and paid him little or nothing in royalties) was made known through a letter written by family friend Moshe Weizmann to one of the Yiddish newspapers, and it was quickly reprinted by the Jewish press worldwide. The response was a massive outpouring of financial and moral support, centering on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Aleichem’s first printed work. An article by poet Simeon Frug, castigating the Jewish community for its treatment of one of their leading intellectuals, was translated and appeared widely outside Russia. The matter was settled in the spring of 1909 when Aleichem’s wife and the anniversary committee in Warsaw confronted his publishers and threatened to expose the full extent of their abuse. One publisher was authorized to issue new editions of his works (for which there was increased demand) and to supply advances against yearly royalties, and the others relinquished all rights. The translation of his writing into Russian opened up another source of income, access to new literary journals, and praise from leading critics and authors alike. The beginning of war between Germany and Russia resulted in the family’s flight to Copenhagen and four months later to New York,

A passionate focus of Aleichem’s creative work was the stage, and as early as 1887 he composed a one-act play, A Doktor (1887; She Must Marry a Doctor, 1916), although there was no Yiddish theater in Russia at that time and the ban on private theaters just had been lifted. In writing for the theater (which he continued to do at every level of complexity, from skits to fully developed plays, up to 1914), he expressed both his skill at drawing vivid characters and his need to establish and to maintain close contact with the Jewish community. Following the successful reception of a translation of one of his plays in Warsaw, he determined to try his fortune in New York City, which possessed three major Yiddish theaters. Two of his plays, the drama Stempenyu (1907), an adaptation of Aleichem’s first novel, and the satirical four-act Samuel Pasternak (1907), were optioned by Boris Thomashefsky and Jacob Adler respectively. The works premiered in 1907 to solid critical acclaim from the city’s Yiddish press and to great popularity with audiences, although neither ran for more than two weeks. Aleichem died in 1916 in the Bronx, surrounded by those who appreciated the contributions he made to preserving the poignant aspects of their lives.

Significance

Aleichem was one of the first writers to see the literary potential in Yiddish at a time when all serious literature was written exclusively in Hebrew for a select audience able to read that language. His tales preserved the values and the culture of the vanishing world of Jewish life in the shtetl for Jews everywhere in the world and introduced the non-Jewish population to this dynamic segment of world history. The intricate humanity of his characters made his stories accessible to a broad readership, best exemplified by his story “Tevye the Milkman,” which was brought to the stage as the phenomenally successful musical (and, later, film) Fiddler on the Roof (1964). He was also the first to write in Yiddish for children, and his stage works were adopted as standard parts of the repertory of the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York. His stature in the Jewish community may be seen in its response to his death, when a crowd of some 100,000 people stood along the route of his funeral procession through New York to pay their respects. His plays would become part of the core repertory of the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York and in Moscow several years after his death.

Bibliography

Roskies, David G. “An-Sky, Sholem Aleichem, and the Master Narrative of Russian Jewry.” In The Worlds of S. An-Sky: A Russian Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, edited by Gariella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006. A comparative study of Aleichem’s output with that of another writer active at the same period in Russia.

Samuel, Maurice. The World of Sholom Aleichem. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. A thoughtful presentation of the ideas found in Aleichem’s work, using numerous examples drawn from the text.

Waife-Goldberg, Marie. My Father, Sholom Aleichem. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. A highly readable account of the writer’s life and the social environments he lived in, as seen by his daughter.