The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem The Remarkable

Part of the Jewish Encounters series

The first comprehensive biography of one of the most beloved authors of all time: the creator of Tevye the Dairyman, the collection of stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof.

Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of characters who have been immortalized in books and plays, he provided readers throughout the world with a fascinating window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they began to confront the forces of cultural, political, and religious modernity that tore through the Russian Empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

But just as compelling as the fictional lives of Tevye, Golde, Menakhem-Mendl, and Motl was Sholem Aleichem’s own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovich in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into fabulous wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish, in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. He enjoyed spectacular success as both a writer and a performer of his work throughout Europe and the United States, and his death in 1916 was front-page news around the world; a New York Times editorial mourned the loss of “the Jewish Mark Twain.” But his greatest fame lay ahead of him, as the English-speaking world began to discover his work in translation and to introduce his characters to an audience that would extend beyond his wildest dreams. In Jeremy Dauber’s magnificent biography, we encounter a Sholem Aleichem for the ages.

(With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations)

JEREMY DAUBER is a professor of Yiddish literature at Columbia University, where he also serves as director of its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and teaches in the American Studies program. His previous books include In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern and Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature. He lives in New York City.

Overture: In Which We Set the Stage

Act I. The Youth
1. In Which We Begin Near the Very End (1915–1859)
2. In Which Our Hero Is Born, Spends His Early Years, and Faces Personal Tragedy (1859–1872)
3. In Which Our Hero Gets—and Gives—an Education (1872–1877)
4. In Which Our Hero Suffers the Ecstasies and Agonies of Love (1877–1880)
5. In Which Our Hero Finds the Two Loves of His Life (1881–1884)

Act II. The Man of Business
6. In Which Our Hero Gains a Fortune, and an Enemy (1884–1887)
7. In Which Our Hero Publishes a Trial, and Endures the Trials of Publishing (1888)
8. In Which Our Hero, Writing About an Artist, Becomes One (1888)
9. In Which Our Hero Loves His People, Mourns His Father, and Dreams of Zion (1888–1890)
10. In Which Our Hero Loses His Fortune and Gains His First Great Character (1890–1894)
11. In Which Our Hero Meets a Dairyman (1894)

Act III. The Spokesman
12. In Which Our Hero Returns to Zion and Other Old Preoccupations (1895–1899)
13. In Which Our Hero Reads the Newspapers in Yiddish and
Becomes a Media Star (1899–1903)
14. In Which Our Hero Spends the Holidays with Us, Visits a Town He Has Created, and Fails to Get a Word in Edgewise
(1900–1907)
15. In Which Our Hero Confronts Pogroms and Politics
(1900–1905)
16. In Which Our Hero Gets Caught Up in Someone Else’s Solution (1902–1905)
17. In Which Our Hero Suffers a Revolution and Makes a Decision (1905)

Act IV. The Wanderer
18. In Which Our Hero Takes Longer Than He Thought (1905–1906)
19. In Which Our Hero Enters, and Exits, a New Stage (1906–1907)
20. In Which Our Hero Has Joyous Meetings and Tragic Partings, and Seeks a Buried Treasure (1907–1908)
21. In Which Our Hero Falls Ill (1908)
22. In Which Our Hero Rides the Rails, and Returns to the Stage (1909)
23. In Which Our Hero Looks Backward (1909–1911)
24. In Which Our Hero Fights Back Against Libels of a Frivolous and Tragic Nature, and Encounters His Alternate Selves (1911–1913)
25. In Which Our Hero Adapts (1913–1914)

Act V. The Old Man
26. In Which Our Hero Sees War and Warsaw (1914)
27. In Which Our Hero Makes His Farewells to His Vanished World, and Feels the Pain of Children (1914–1916)
28. In Which Our Hero’s Story Comes to an End, and a Beginning (1915–1916)

Epilogue: An Afterlife in Ten Scenes
Scene 1. New York/Washington, 1916
Scene 2. New York/London, 1912–1922
Scene 3. The Soviet Union, 1921–1929
Scene 4. New York, 1917–1939
Scene 5. Vilna, 1942
Scene 6. New York, 1943
Scene 7. New York, 1949–1959
Scene 8. New York, 1962–1964
Scene 9. Everywhere, 1964–2005
Scene 10. The Cloud, 2013
Acknowledgments
Bibliographical Notes
Index

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The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials