Sholem Aleichem, whose 150th anniversary was commemorated in March 2009, remains one of the most popular Yiddish authors. But few people today are able to read the original. Since the 1910s, however, Sholem Aleichem's works have been known to a wider international audience through, numerous translations, and through film and theatre adaptations, most famously Fiddler on the Root. This volume examines those translations published in Europe, with the aim of investigating how the specific European contexts might have shaped translations of Yiddish literature. The contributors are Gennady Estraikh, Alexander Frenkel, Roland Gruschka, Alexandra Hoffman, Kerstin Hoge, Sabine Koller, Mikhail Krutikov, Olga Litvak, Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, Gabriella Safran, Jan Schwarz, and Anna Verschik. Book jacket.

This first English translation of Sholom Aleichem's rediscovered novel, Moshkeleh the Thief, has a riveting plot, an unusual love story, and a keenly observed portrayal of an underclass Jew replete with characters never before been seen in Yiddish literature. The eponymous hero, Moshkeleh, is a robust chap and horse thief. When Tsireleh, daughter of a tavern keeper, flees to a monastery with the man she loves--a non-Jew she met at the tavern--the humiliated tavern keeper's family turns to Moshkeleh for help, not knowing he too is in love with her. For some unknown reason, this innovative novel does not appear in the standard twenty-eight-volume edition of Sholom Aleichem's collected works, published after his death. Strikingly, Moshkeleh the Thief shows Jews interacting with non-Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement--a groundbreaking theme in modern Yiddish literature. This novel is also important for Sholom Aleichem's approach to his material. Yiddish literature had long maintained a tradition of edelkeyt, refinement. Authors eschewed violence, the darker side of life, and people on the fringe of respectability. Moshkeleh thus enters a Jewish arena not hitherto explored in a novel.

Even the most pious Jew need not shed so many tears over the destruction of Jerusalem as the women were in the habit of shedding when Stempenyu was playing. The first work of Sholom Aleichem’s to be translated into English—this long out-of-print translation is the only one ever done under Aleichem’s personal supervision—Stempenyu is a prime example of the author’ s hallmark traits: his antic and often sardonic sense of humor, his whip-smart dialogue, his workaday mysticism, and his historic documentation of shtetl life. Held recently by scholars to be the story that inspired Marc Chagall’s “Fiddler on the Roof” painting (which in turn inspired the play that was subsequently based on Aleichem’s Tevye stories, not this novella), Stempenyu is the hysterical story of a young village girl who falls for a wildly popular klezmer fiddler—a character based upon an actual Yiddish musician whose fame set off a kind of pop hysteria in the shtetl. Thus the story, in this contemporaneous “authorized” translation, is a wonderful introduction to Aleichem’s work as he wanted it read, not to mention to the unique palaver of a nineteenth-century Yiddish rock star.

Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations. And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859–1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl.

Sholem Aleichem, whose 150th anniversary was commemorated in March 2009, remains one of the most popular Yiddish authors. But few people today are able to read the original. Since the 1910s, however, Sholem Aleichem's works have been known to a wider international audience through numerous translations, and through film and theatre adaptations, most famouslyFiddler on the Roof. This volume examines those translations published in Europe, with the aim of investigating how the specific European contexts might have shaped translations of Yiddish literature. With the contributions: Olga Litvak- Found in Translation: Sholem Aleichem and the Myth of the Ideal Yiddish Reader Alexander Frenkel- Sholem Aleichem as a Self-Translator Eugenia Prokop-Janiec- Sholem Aleichem and the Polish-Jewish Literary Audience Gennady Estraikh- Soviet Sholem Aleichem Roland Gruschka- 'Du host zikh a denkmol af eybik geshtelt': The Sovietization and Heroization of Sholem Aleichem in the 1939 Jubilee Poems Mikhail Krutikov- A Man for All Seasons: Translating Sholem Aleichem into Soviet Ideological Idiom Gabriella Safran- Four English Pots and the Evolving Translatability of Sholem Aleichem Sabine Koller- On (Un)Translatability: Sholem Aleichem's Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories) in German Translation Alexandra Hoffman- Laughing Matters: Translation and Irony in 'Der gliklekhster in Kodne' Kerstin Hoge- Lost in Marienbad: On the Literary Use of the Linguistic Openness of Yiddish Anna Verschik- Sholem Aleichem in Estonian: Creating a Tradition Jan Schwarz- Speaking Tevye der milkhiker in Translation: Performance, Humour, and World Literature

Part of the Jewish Encounters series The first comprehensive biography of one of the most beloved authors of all time: the creator of Tevye the Dairyman, the collection of stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof. Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of characters who have been immortalized in books and plays, he provided readers throughout the world with a fascinating window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they began to confront the forces of cultural, political, and religious modernity that tore through the Russian Empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of Tevye, Golde, Menakhem-Mendl, and Motl was Sholem Aleichem’s own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovich in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into fabulous wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish, in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. He enjoyed spectacular success as both a writer and a performer of his work throughout Europe and the United States, and his death in 1916 was front-page news around the world; a New York Times editorial mourned the loss of “the Jewish Mark Twain.” But his greatest fame lay ahead of him, as the English-speaking world began to discover his work in translation and to introduce his characters to an audience that would extend beyond his wildest dreams. In Jeremy Dauber’s magnificent biography, we encounter a Sholem Aleichem for the ages. (With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations)