Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

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A little over a century ago, in 1883, an aspiring writer of comic talents named Sholem Rabinovich, who was then serving as a “crown rabbi,” a state-appointed clerical functionary in a small Jewish community in the Ukraine, published a satirical account of local politics in the St. Petersburg Yiddishe Folksblat and playfully signed it “Sholem Aleichem”—that is to say, “Hello There!” It was not his first alias. He already had, and would continue to assemble, a precocious collection of pseudonyms, including such curiosities as “Solomon Bikherfresser” (Solomon Bookeater), “Baron Pipernoter” (Baron Ogre), “Terakhs an Eynikl” (Terach’s Grandson), and “Der Yiddisher Gazlen” (The Robber Jew). Compared with these titles, however, which had at best a slapstick humor, the ancient Hebrew salutation first employed in the Folksblat (its Arabic cognate of salaam aleykum can be heard today throughout the Middle East) was a prescient choice. Meaning literally “peace be upon you,” the phrase is used in Yiddish not as an everyday greeting but as a more emphatic one that is reserved for either old acquaintances long unmet or new ones just introduced; thus, besides encoding in the form of a pun Rabinovich’s own name of “Sholem,” it pithily anticipated the career of an author who, over the next three decades, was to come and go in the Yiddish press from one newspaper and magazine to another, delighting an ever-growing audience with his unpredictable appearances before vanishing again until the next time. Gradually he used the new pen name more and more.

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