Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son

Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), the pen name of Solomon Rabinovich, was born in Pereiaslav, Ukraine, and became the most beloved voice of Yiddish literature. His name is the traditional Hebrew greeting “peace be upon you.” At a time when Yiddish was dismissed by many as a “jargon,” he chose it as a literary language, and he championed its dignity by editing and funding the Yidishe folksbibliotek (Jewish People’s Library), which brought emerging Yiddish writers to a wide audience. His fiction centers on the Pale of Settlement and its fictional shtetl of Kasrilevke. Through humor tinged with sorrow, he captured a world of poverty, piety, family obligation, and communal solidarity. Tevye the Dairyman, his best-known creation, wrestles with faith, tradition, and the pull of a changing world, and the stories inspired the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Menachem-Mendl, the hapless dreamer and speculator, and Motl, the cheerful child narrator of a family’s migration, round out a gallery of characters that has come to represent Eastern European Jewish life.

Sholem Aleichem’s work is rooted in the historical upheavals that shaped modern Jewish life: economic precarity, the pogroms of the early 1900s, the pressures of assimilation and revolution, and mass emigration to America. After the 1905 Kiev pogroms he left Russia, eventually settling in New York, where he died in 1916. A reported 100,000 or more mourners joined his funeral procession, a measure of his place in Jewish memory. His stories endure for their wit, their moral warmth, and their affirmation of resilience, family, and humor as sources of survival. Often called the “Jewish Mark Twain,” he remains central to the Yiddish canon and to world literature.

Aliza Shevrin is the foremost translator of Sholem Aleichem, having translated eight other volumes of his fiction. She lives in Ann Arbor.