The Penknife

The author of a vast “human comedy” of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America in an age of upheaval, Sholem Rabinovitsh became known to hundreds of thousands of readers by his distinctive pen name Sholem Aleichem (“Mr. How-Do-You-Do”). It was under that name that he became by far the most popular serious Yiddish writer of his day and has been widely viewed since his death as the true genius of Yiddish prose. Born in Pereyaslav, Russian Empire (today in Ukraine) into an affluent merchant family, he received both a traditional education and, with his father’s encouragement, a Russian-language education. Initially aiming to become a Hebrew or Russian writer—he was a lifelong Zionist, sometimes-active Hebraist, and a deep admirer of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Chekhov—Sholem Aleichem precociously recognized the potential of Yiddish to reach a far-wider Jewish audience and, beginning in 1883, began to produce what would become a vast corpus of Yiddish novels, short stories, drama, feuilletons, sketches, and criticism. In the 1880s, Sholem Aleichem sought to recast Yiddish literature as a serious Jewish national literature. He wrote a half dozen “Jewish novels” (yidishe romanen) that sought analogues in Jewish social reality for the European novel’s core romantic plot. He moved to Kiev (Kyiv) in 1887 and in 1888 created a Yiddish literary almanac, Di yidishe folks-bibliotek (The Jewish People’s Library), funded by his wife’s dowry, that drew together the best Yiddish literary talents across the Russian Empire. He launched a blistering and funny indictment of much of the narratively and psychologically ridiculous shund (trash) literature that then inundated the Yiddish literary market. And he cast the middle-aged writer Sholem Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim) as the “grandfather” of a Yiddish literary family, that is, the founding figure of a maturing Yiddish literary canon, to which he, Sholem Aleichem, was the heir. Bankrupt from his failed ventures, he moved to Odessa in 1890. Throughout the 1890s, he was closer to Zionist and Hebraist circles than to the emerging Yiddish literary milieu, which was simultaneously more Romantic, more radical, and keener for dialogue with European modernisms than he. Driven by financial need to publish a tremendous amount in a newly burgeoning Yiddish popular press, he wrote a constant stream of brilliant short stories keyed to Jewish holidays, children’s experiences, or the outlook of characters drawn from across Jewish society, often presented as acutely “heard” monologues. Many of these stories took place in the imagined Ukrainian shtetl of Kasrilevke (Paupers’ Town); his fundamentally compassionate treatment of the blinkered but decent “little Jews” of the town trying to make their way through a complex and increasingly hostile world made Kasrilevke itself one of Sholem Aleichem’s most distinctive creations. In these same years, Sholem Aleichem began to write the linked stories that would become two of his great novels, starring three of his most indelible Jewish characters: the country Jew Tevye, the dairyman who can only comment as his daughters make their own choices as to which mate—and version of modernity—they wish to choose; the shtetl “businessman” Menahem Mendl, who loses money in a series of business ventures ever more tied to a global capitalism he does not understand at all; and Menahem Mendl’s desperate and all-too-comprehending wife Sheyne Sheyndl. Leaving Russia in fear and disgust after the pogroms of late 1905, Sholem Aleichem visited America. Although he failed in his attempt to conquer the New York Yiddish theater scene, the visit inspired his third great novel, Motl the Cantor’s Son: the story of a family driven by poverty to seek a life in America, the novel is narrated by the innocent and irrepressible Motl, who finds wonder amid what the reader understands to be difficult and sometimes tragic circumstances. By the last decade of his life, sick with tuberculosis, Sholem Aleichem had achieved unparalleled popularity among Jewish readers from Eastern Europe to the United States, where the press hailed him as “the Jewish Mark Twain.” Continuing to produce a tremendous amount of work and turning significant attention to drama, he also found time to write a penetrating two-volume memoir, From the Fair, and several quietly terrifying stories that wrestle with the precarity of East European Jewish life during World War I. His funeral in New York City drew hundreds of thousands of people.