Sholom aleichem biography definition
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The Life, Times, and Legacy of Sholem Aleichem
For His th Yortsayt, May 13th
by Bennett Muraskin
SHOLEM ALEICHEM () is best remembered as the author of the stories about Tevye the dairyman, which were adapted in our time into the hugely popular Broadway play and Hollywood movie, Fiddler on the Roof. He is most often been depicted as “writer of the people,” a folk-writer, whose work captured the vanishing world of traditional Jewish life in the Russian shtetl with pathos and humor. For Americans who know little about him, he is often described as the “Jewish Mark Twain.” But there is far more to his career and legacy than conveyed in those tag-lines.
Sholem Aleichem was born Sholem Rabinowitz in in the Ukraine, within tsarist Russia. His father was well-to-do, but the lost his money and became an innkeeper. Sholem, who lost his mother as a boy, knew both wealth and poverty, and was subjected to the whims of an unpleasant stepmother, whom he entertained by alphabet
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Shalom aleichem
Traditional Jewish Hebrew-language greeting
This article is about the greeting. For the Yiddish writer, see Sholem Aleichem. For the Jewish liturgical poem, see Shalom Aleichem (liturgy).
Shalom aleichem (; Hebrew: שָׁלוֹם עֲלֵיכֶםšālōm ʿalēḵem[ʃaˈloːmʕaleːˈxem], lit.&#;'peace be upon you')[1][2] is a greeting in the Hebrew language. When someone is greeted with these words, the appropriate response is aleichem shalom (עֲלֵיכֶם שָׁלוֹם, lit.&#;'unto you peace').[3][4] The term aleichem is plural, but is still used when addressing one person.
This form of greeting is traditional among Jews worldwide, and typically connotes a religious context. It is particularly common among Ashkenazi Jews.
History
[edit]Biblical figures greet each other with šālōm lǝkā (šālōm to you, m. singular) or šālōm lākem (plural).
The term šālōm ʿālēkā (masculine singular) is first attested in the Scroll of Blessings
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Sholem Aleichem, the most beloved classical Yiddish writer, was born Sholem Rabinovitz in in Pereyaslav, Ukraine. His father — a merchant — was interested in the Russian Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), and the ung Sholem was exposed to modern modes of thinking in addition to traditional Judaism. Sholem attended the heder (Jewish school) in Voronkov, the town his family moved to when he was young, and in his teenage years he graduated with distinction from a Russian gymnasium.
Like his contemporaries Mendele Mokher-Sefarim and I.L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem originally wrote in Hebrew, and he contributed to a number of Hebrew weeklies. Literature was the purview of maskilim (proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment), and for the maskilim, Hebrew was the appropriate language of Jewish high culture. It was the traditional language of Jewish scholarship, and it was considered more sophisticated than Yiddish — the language of the people. Indeed, when the year old Sholem Rabinovitch pu