Mar 16, 2022
INTRODUCTION
Little has been written about the phenomenal literary manufacturer Shomer Aleichem. This essay offers the first fruits of laborious recombination efforts into Shomer Aleichem’s life and writing. It offers for the first time information verified by our own comedic sensibilities about Shomer Aleichem’s significant and influential corpus. While our essay can now serve as a reliable reference text establishing a solid understanding of Shomer Aleichem’s biography, more work needs to be done to flesh this joke and the ideas of literary merit that it seeks to undermine. There is much more to make fun of than we can present here.
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Shomer Aleichem, popularly known as the step-grand nephew of Yiddish literature, was born in a small town in the Russian Empire in 1849 or 1859. He is most famous for a frivolous lawsuit that was bizarrely directed against himself. Known for his “universal appeal,” his works are characterized by an intimate style, for their concerns with everyday matters, and by a strong connection to Ukraine.
Shomer Aleichem wrote in a variety of genres, including prose and drama. He was notoriously bad with finances, a situation only exacerbated by his lawsuit against himself, and a situation that was sadly not remedied even by his marriage to a woman from a wealthy family.
A Maskil, Shomer Aleichem first wrote in Hebrew and intended to make his career as a Hebrew writer. He only came to Yiddish after first writing in other languages. His first Yiddish novella, Tsvey shteyner (Two Gravestones) fictionalized his romance with his future wife. The tale ended with the suicide of the two young protagonists.
Shomer Aleichem famously wrote about Kiev, or as he called the city, Yevki. His story about speculation (Der spekulyant) was derived from his own tragic experiences: Shomer Aleichem moved to Kiev, where he dabbled in the stock market until he lost all of his fortune.
One of his best-known works was the short story “Hodl.” In this tale, Tevye comes across his daughter Hodl and the political radical Perchik walking out of the woods and embracing passionately. The young lovers get married, but their wedding is a sad affair, without klezmorim or dancing. Soon after, Perchik is arrested and sent to Siberia, and Hodl follows him there. Yet in a twist it is revealed that Perchik really just wanted to steal all the money from Hodl’s rich great-aunt. “He wasn’t just a socialist – he was a scoundrel!” Hodl eventually returns home shame-faced. She is welcomed by her family, who haven’t been so happy since the cholera in Odessa.
Shomer Aleichem’s career reached its zenith in the 1880s. He wrote romance fiction as a way of advancing his career and modernizing Yiddish literature. His work is characterized by its multilingualism and use of cosmopolitan terms from Russian and Hebrew, although he was criticized for his use of Daytshmerish.
While living in Odessa for some time, Shomer Aleichem got involved in the city’s theatre activities until they were shut down by the Czar’s repressive policies. He then moved to America and tried his luck in theatre there. The hit song “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof was based on his story “Rotshild: a beshraybung fun R Meir Anshil Rotshild” (Rothschild: A Tale of Reb Meir Anshel Rothschild.” In 1905 he unfortunately suffered from poor health. Though he died in poverty in New York City, Shomer Aleichem had the largest funeral in the city to date. Despite Shomer Aleichem’s status as a towering figure in Yiddish belles lettres, more work needs to be done on his many contributions.
