Shomer (Nokhem Meir Shaykevitch)

Born into an affluent family in Nesvizh in the Russian Empire (today Nyasvizh, Belarus), Nokhem (or Nahum) Meir Shaykevitch received a traditional upbringing and primary education, although he did encounter Haskalah literature in his youth. Shaykevitch began his writing career submitting stories to the Hebrew-language newspaper Ha-Melits in 1869. Moving to Vilna, he began writing chapbooks under the pseudonym “Shomer,” a pen name he would keep for the rest of his career. During the Russo-Turkish war beginning in 1877, Shaykevitch lived in Bucharest, where he made the acquaintance of Yiddish theater impresario Abraham Goldfaden. Drawn to the burgeoning Yiddish theater scene, Shaykevitch helped Goldfaden assemble a company to play in Odessa in 1882 and began writing for the stage; he would go on to write more than fifty plays. His plays garnered popularity in New York City especially, and in 1889, Shaykevitch immigrated there. His work as a playwright was only part of a truly prolific literary production; already by the close of the 1880s, Shomer was perhaps the best-known author of a new wave of popular fiction in simple Yiddish that transfixed readers with elaborate and improbable romances, adventures, melodramas, and stock characters. It was in this role that his work was pilloried as shund (“trash” fiction) and declared an obstacle to the development of intelligent and worthwhile Yiddish literature by the emerging Yiddish fiction writer Sholem Aleichem in 1888 (see “The Trial of Shomer” in Cultural Thought and Pedagogy). In all, Shaykevitch composed in excess of two hundred Yiddish novels and short stories in addition to his plays and fifteen novels in Hebrew. He died in New York City.