Solomon Nohumovych Rabinovych (Sholom Aleichem) is a Jewish writer, playwright and educator, one of the founders of literature in the Yiddish language.
He was born on March 2, 1859, in Pereyaslav (now Kyiv region). He spent his childhood in Voronkovo town, located near Kyiv. In his youth, inspired by the story of Robinson Crusoe, Solomon wrote his own Jewish version of the story and adopted the pseudonym Sholom Aleichem, which means “Peace be with you” and is a traditional Jewish greeting.
He studied at the primary Jewish school for boys – Heder, then at the Pereyaslav District School (1873–1876). In the heeder, Sholom Aleichem got acquainted with the works of Avraham Mapy (1808–1867) and, under the influence of this enlightened writer, began to write his own novel. The writer's first works in Yiddish were published in 1879. After graduating from school, he became a tutor to the wealthy Elimelich Loev (1877). In 1883, Sholom Aleichem married his daughter Olga (Golda). The couple had 6 children.
The writer's father-in-law died soon after, leaving a rich inheritance. Sholom Aleichem and his wife moved to Kyiv and engaged in commercial activities. Due to inexperience, he quickly went bankrupt and went abroad. Wandered through the cities of Europe, lived in Vienna and Paris.
In the second half of the 1880s, Sholom Aleichem presented a program for the development of Jewish literature. Led the fight against tabloid literature, organized the annual “Jewish People's Library” (1888−1889), around which famous writers united.
In the writer's novels “Stempenyu” (1888) and “Iosele-Solovei” (1889), the images of talented people from the people, doomed to a tragic fate in the conditions of the trading environment, are presented. In the early 1890s, the writer became a central figure in Jewish literature. He wrote mainly in Yiddish, but also in Hebrew and Russian.
Returning to Russia, he settled in Odesa (1891), where the following year he began publishing novels from the Menachem-Mendl cycle, and in 1894 – chapters of the novel Tevye the Milkman. Work on these works (along with their publication) lasted 20 years. Sholom Aleichem wrote 10 novels, 20 plays, hundreds of novels and short stories, many articles.
In October 1905, Sholom Aleichem experienced the horrors of a pogrom in Kyiv. Impressed by what he saw, he went to America, and from there to Geneva (1907). In the same year, the first part of the story “Mottle Boy” appeared. In 1908, the writer returned to Russia again, but soon fell seriously ill and had to be treated abroad.
The First World War found him in Germany, from where Sholom Aleichem moved to New York. The feeling of loneliness, intensified by the news of the death of the eldest son, accelerated the development of heart and kidney disease.
Died May 13, 1916 in New York; buried in Brooklyn Cemetery. 300,000 people accompanied the writer on his final journey.
Ukraine honors the memory of its great compatriot, one of the streets of Kyiv, Lviv, and Chernivtsi is named after him. In our city, one of the city's central streets, on which the “Golden Rose” synagogue is located, is named in honor of Sholom Aleichem. To the 150th anniversary of the writer, March 2, 2009, in Kyiv, on the street The Sholom Aleichem Museum was opened at Velyka Vasylkivska, 5. In 1997, a monument to Sholom Aleichem was erected in Kyiv.
An important place in Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” (Dnipro) belongs to the figure of the talented Jewish writer, to whom a number of exhibits are dedicated.
Liudmyla Sandul, Darya Yesina