Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich (Russian: Соломон Наумович Рабинович; 2 March [O.S. 18 February] 1859 – May 13, 1916), better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem, was a Jewish author and playwright who wrote in Yiddish and lived in the Russian Empire and in 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.
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.
In 1876, after graduating from school in Pereiaslav, he began to work as a teacher. During 1877–1880 in Sofijka village, Bohuslav region, he spent three years tutoring a wealthy landowner's daughter, Olga (Hodel) Loev (1865–1942). From 1880 to 1883 he served as crown rabbi in Lubny.
On May 12, 1883, he and Olga married, against the wishes of her father, whose estate they inherited a few years later. Their first child, a daughter named Ernestina (Tissa), was born in 1884. Business ventures gradually depleted the family fortune, and by 1890 Sholem Aleichem was bankrupt. The family left Kyiv for Odessa, and his mother-in-law subsequently reached a settlement with his creditors. His second daughter Lyalya (Lili) was born in 1887; as Lyalya Kaufman, she became a Hebrew writer. A third daughter, Emma, was born in 1888. In 1889, Olga gave birth to a son. They named him Elimelech, after Olga's father, but at home they called him Misha. Daughter Marusi (who would one day publish "My Father, Sholom Aleichem" under her married name Marie Waife-Goldberg) was born in 1892. A final child, a son named Nochum (Numa) after Solomon's father was born in 1901 (under the name Norman Raeben he became a painter and an influential art teacher).
After witnessing the pogroms that swept through southern Russian Empire in 1905, including Kiev, Sholem Aleichem left Kiev (which was fictionalized as Yehupetz) and he embarked on a tour in Galicia, Bukovina, Romania, France, England and Switzerland. He then traveled to New York City in late 1906. His wife Olga and their six children lived in Geneva, Switzerland. After his first period in New York, he returned to Europe and was living with his family in Geneva by 1907. Despite his great popularity, he was forced to take up an exhausting schedule of lecturing to make ends meet. In July 1908, during a reading tour in Russia, Sholem Aleichem collapsed on a train going through Baranowicze. He was diagnosed with a relapse of acute hemorrhagic tuberculosis and spent two months convalescing in the town's hospital. He later described the incident as "meeting his majesty, the Angel of Death, face to face", and claimed it as the catalyst for writing his autobiography, Funem yarid [From the Fair]. He thus missed the first Conference for the Yiddish Language, held in 1908 in Czernovitz; his colleague and fellow Yiddish activist Nathan Birnbaum went in his place.
Sholem Aleichem spent the next four years living as a semi-invalid. During this period the family was largely supported by donations from friends and admirers (among his friends and acquaintances were fellow Yiddish authors I. L. Peretz, Jacob Dinezon, Mordecai Spector, and Noach Pryłucki). In 1909, in celebration of his 25th Jubilee as a writer, his friend and colleague Jacob Dinezon spearheaded a committee with Dr. Gershon Levine, Abraham Podlishevsky, and Noach Pryłucki to buy back the publishing rights to Sholem Aleichem's works from various publishers for his sole use in order to provide him with a steady income. At a time when Sholem Aleichem was ill and struggling financially, this proved to be an invaluable gift, and Sholem Aleichem expressed his gratitude in a thank you letter in which he wrote,
“If I tried to tell you a hundredth part of the way I feel about you, I know that that would be sheer profanation. If I am fated to live a few years longer than I have been expecting, I shall doubtless be able to say that it’s your fault, yours and that of all the other friends who have done so much to carry out your idea of ‘the redemption of the imprisoned.’”
Sholem Aleichem moved to New York City again with his family in 1914. The family lived at first in Harlem at 110 Lenox Avenue (at 116th Street) and later moved to 968 Kelly Street in the Bronx. His son, Misha, ill with tuberculosis, was not permitted entry under United States immigration laws and remained in Switzerland with his sister Emma.
Sholem Aleichem died at his Bronx apartment in 1916. He is buried in the main (old) section of Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, New York City.
Like his contemporaries Mendele Mocher Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and Jacob Dinezon, Sholem Rabinovitch started writing in Hebrew, as well as in Russian. In 1883, when he was 24 years old, he published his first Yiddish story Yiddish: צוויי שטיינער, romanized: Tsvey Shteyner, using the pseudonym Sholem Aleichem for the first time.
His first full-length novel, Natashe (later retitled Taybele), appeared in 1884. In 1888 he founded the literary almanac Di yidishe folks-bibliotek (The Jewish People’s Library), modeled on contemporary Russian literary journals. The YIVO Encyclopedia describes the appearance of its first volume as a milestone in modern Yiddish literature that helped establish Sholem Aleichem as a central figure in the field.
By 1890, he was a central figure in Yiddish literature, the vernacular language of nearly all Eastern European Jews, and had produced over forty volumes in Yiddish. It was often derisively called 'jargon', but Sholem Aleichem used this term in an entirely non-pejorative sense.
Apart from his own literary output, Sholem Aleichem used his personal fortune to encourage other Yiddish writers. In 1888–89, he put out two issues of an almanac (Yiddish: די ייִדישע פאָלקסביבליאָטעק, romanized: Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek, lit. '"The Yiddish Public Library"') which gave important exposure to young Yiddish writers.
In 1890, after he lost his entire fortune, he could not afford to print the almanac's third issue, which had been edited but was subsequently never printed.
Tevye the Dairyman (Yiddish: טבֿיה דער מילכיקער, romanized: Tevye der Milchiker) was first published in 1894.
Over the next few years, while continuing to write in Yiddish, he also wrote in Russian for an Odessa newspaper and for Voskhod, the leading Russian Jewish publication of the time, as well as in Hebrew for Ha-Melitz, and for an anthology edited by Yehoshua Hana Rawnitzki. It was during this period that Sholem Aleichem contracted tuberculosis.