Sholom Aleichem

Review By – February 13, 2023 Pack­ing a suit­case ready to go with 179 short retellings of his per­son­al favorites from tra­di­tion­al folk­lore, jokes, and rem­i­nis­cences, Zeitlin shares what he groks as the ver­bal heart and full­ness­ness of Jew­ish expe­ri­ence. He views Jews as cul­tur­al, reli­gious, and his­tor­i­cal trav­el­ers, car­ry­ing their own sto­ries as well as the time-hon­ored, forg­ing new con­nec­tions with encoun­ters.

Moshkeleh Ganev is also sig­nif­i­cant for Sholom Aleichem’s approach to his mate­r­i­al. Yid­dish lit­er­a­ture had long main­tained a tra­di­tion of edelkeyt, refine­ment. Yid­dish and Hebrew authors eschewed vio­lence, the dark­er side of life, and peo­ple on the fringes of respectabil­i­ty. But Moshkeleh Ganev sig­nals Sholom Aleichem’s lit­er­ary thrust away from this almost self-imposed silence.

Videos1 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews and Orthodox Christians live in the little village of Anatevka in the pre-revolutionary Russia of the Czars. Among the traditions of the Jewish community, the matchmaker arranges the match and the father approves it. The milkman Reb Tevye is a poor man that has been married for twenty-five years with Golde and they have five daughters.