About this ebook
The 20 selections in this volume include some of Sholom Aleichem’s finest tales, among them “Progress in Kasrilevke,” “Summer Romances,” “Birth,” “There’s No Dead,” “Someone to Envy,” “Three Widows,” “Homesick,” “On America,” “A Home Away from Home," “To the Hot Springs,” and the title story.
Curt Leviant is the prize-winning author of several novels, including Diary of an Adulterous Woman, Partita in Venice, The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah, Passion in the Desert, and The Yemenite Girl.
About the author
Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916), a central figure in modern Yiddish literature, was born Sholom Rabinowitz in Voronko, Russia. Often called the “Jewish Mark Twain,” he published more than 40 volumes of work.
His merchant father’s business failed when Sholom was still a child, impoverishing the family. In the 1860s, Sholom attended a traditional cheder. Later, he attended the Russian district school in Pereyaslav, but wrote that the literature of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment movement, was the main source of his education. At 15, he wrote a novel inspired by his reading of Robinson Crusoe and adopted the popular Hebrew/Yiddish greeting meaning “How do you do,” or “Peace be with you” as his pseudonym.
After graduating from high school in 1876, he spent three years tutoring Olga (Golde) Loyev, a girl from a wealthy family. They married, against parental wishes in 1883, and had six children.
Sholom Aleichem was influenced by Haskala author Mendele Mocher Seforim, a founding father of modern Yiddish and modern Hebrew literature. Initially, Aleichem shunned Yiddish until he realized that his work in Hebrew and Russian would be understood only by the intellectual elite. In 1883, he switched to Yiddish. Characters from his short-lived Hebrew period were overshadowed by Tevye the Dairyman, luftmentch Menachem Mendl, and the chatty population of Kasrilevke.
After 1905, when major pogroms spread across Russia, Aleichem settled his family in Geneva, Switzerland and pursued a strenuous international schedule of lectures to supplement his writing income. The family moved to the lower east side of Manhattan in 1914. When he died two years later, his funeral attracted 150,000 mourners, then one of the largest crowds in New York City’s history.
Curt Leviant is the author/editor of 25 books, including translations from the Yiddish of five Sholom Aleichem collections, four novels by Chaim Grade, and anthologies of short fiction by Avraham Reisen and Lamed Shapiro. His translation of the Isaac Bashevis Singer memoir, More Stories from My Father’s Court, was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
He is also editor of Masterpieces of Hebrew Literature: A Treasury of 2000 Years of Jewish Creativity.
Mr. Leviant is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, The Yemenite Girl, Passion in the Desert, The Man Who Thought He Was Messiah, Partita in Venice, and Diary of an Adulterous Woman, works that have been praised by two Nobel Laureates, Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel.
A new two-novella collection, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet and Weekend in Mustara, appeared in 2002.
