The Inspiration: Sholem Aleichem
“It almost embarrasses me when people read Sholem Aleichem, they see where I got the lyrics for ‘If I Were a Rich Man.’ I’m very smart. I know where to take from” – Sheldon Harnick
The creator of Tevye the Dairyman, the character who inspired Fiddler on the Roof, was a Yiddish writer born Solomon Rabinovich. Born in 1859, Rabinovich grew up in the shtetl of Voronkiv in the Russian Empire in what is present-day Ukraine. He began writing as a teenager, composing a glossary of his stepmother’s epithets and a Jewish version of novel Robinson Crusoe. After he graduated school in 1876, he began to work as a Russian tutor for a wealthy landowner’s daughter, Olga Loev. The pair fell in love and married in 1883 (against her father’s wishes as he was not wealthy) and had six children.
Because he and Loev had formed an attachment, Rabinovich was dismissed from his tutor role. From 1880 – 1883, he served as a “crown rabbi” in Lubny, where he served as an intermediary between the Jewish community and Russian government, recording such things as births and marriages. Despite the name rabbi, this was an administrative position, not a religious one. His ability to speak Russian made him an asset for the Jewish community, who spoke mostly Yiddish.
His first public appearance as a writer was a satirical account of local politics in a St. Petersburg’s Yiddish newspaper in 1883. He signed it Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish version of an everyday Hebrew greeting “shalom aleichem” meaning, “hello there!” or “may peace be with you,” as a play on his Hebrew name Sholom. He built a devoted following by popping up throughout Yiddish newspapers every now and again with delightful, humorous stories. People never knew when he would appear, which led to the charm. In 1894 he created the Tevye character based on a neighbor of his. He used the village from his childhood as his inspiration for his literary archetypal village of Kasrilevke where his stories often took place. These stories, which would pop up in many different newspapers over the years became a beloved part of the Jewish culture. Aleichem’s stories spread worldwide as pogroms caused a mass migration of Jews out of Russia. They were read to the three creators of Fiddler on the Roof when they were children.
By 1890 Aleichem had become the central figure in Yiddish literature. He was huge proponent of the Yiddish language and campaigned for it to be recognized as a national European language while also nurturing young up-and-coming Yiddish writers. His comedy acknowledged the suffering that the Jewish population were facing in Russia through pogroms and discrimination but did so in a tongue-in-cheek way that allowed them to laugh and deal with their circumstances. The characters were noted for their cheerfulness as their way of coping with adversity. This form of humor was very therapeutic, and a testament to his readership’s strength, joy and triumph through trauma. Aleichem was also notable for the naturalness of his character’s speech and life in the shtetl. While he had been called the “Jewish Mark Twain,” when Aleichem came to New York, Twain greeted him with “I understand that I am the American Sholem Aleichem.”
Very prolific, Aleichem wrote over three hundred short stories, five novels, and several plays. One play was an adaptation of his Tevye stories, Tevye Der Milkhiker: A Family Portrait in Five Scenes, which had played in New York at the Yiddish Art Theater in 1919 and was later adapted into a film. His work also inspired adaptations. Fiddler on the Roof was not the first adaptation of Aleichem’s works. In the 1950s Arnold Perl adapted three stories into the play The World of Sholom Aleichem and the play Tevya and His Daughters, which drew on the same stories as Fiddler, but with a different style. There was also even a previous musical adaptation called Teyve’s Daughters by playwright Irving Elman.
A Polish and Yiddish poster for Tevye the Dairyman
After witnessing the pogroms in 1905, Alecheim left Kiev and immigrated to Switzerland. There, experiencing poverty, he extensively toured with lectures to make ends meet. This exhausting schedule caused him to develop tuberculosis, and he lived on essentially bed rest for the next four years. He continued writing the entire time, and after friends were able to gift him the rights to his previously published stories, he was able to receive a dependable annual income. During World War I, he immigrated to New York City in 1914 and passed away only two years later in 1916 due to complications from tuberculosis. When Aleichem passed in 1916, his funeral had over a hundred thousand mourners and ran through three New York boroughs. At his yahrtzeit, or annual remembrance of a death, he instructed, “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."
Every year since then, his descendants have gathered on the anniversary of his death to read his stories together. Over one hundred years after his death, these stories still continue to inspire, reflect and laugh at it all.
