Sholem Aleichem

Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich or Solomon Naumovych Rabinovych (2 March [O.S. 18 February] 1859 – May 13, 1916), better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem, was a Ukrainian Jewish author and playwright who wrote in Yiddish and lived in the Russian Empire and later the United States. The 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on Aleichem's stories about Tevye the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

The Hebrew phrase שלום עליכם (shalom aleichem) literally means "[May] peace [be] upon you!", and is a greeting in traditional Hebrew and Yiddish.

Biography

Solomon Naumovich (Sholom Nohumovich) Rabinovich (Russian: Соломо́н Нау́мович (Шо́лом Но́хумович) Рабино́вич) was born in 1859 in Pereiaslav and grew up in the nearby shtetl of Voronkiv, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). (Voronkiv has become the prototype of Aleichem's Kasrilevka.) His father, Nokhem Rabinovich (Nokhim Volko's Rabinovich; Нохимъ Вольковъ Рабиновичъ), was a rich merchant at that time. However, a failed business affair plunged the family into poverty and Solomon Rabinovich grew up in reduced circumstances. When he was 13 years old, the family moved back to Pereiaslav, where his mother, Chaye-Esther, died in a cholera epidemic.

Sholem Aleichem's first venture into writing was an alphabetic glossary of the epithets used by his stepmother. At the age of fifteen, he composed a Jewish version of the novel Robinson Crusoe. He adopted the pseudonym Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish greeting meaning "peace be with you", like the Hebrew shalom aleichem.