Sholem Aleichem Created Tevye—and the Modern American Jewish Sense of Tradition

In an excerpt from Nextbook Press’s new biography, the Yiddish master’s funeral at Carnegie Hall begins to shape a legacy

By Jeremy Dauber for Tablet

In his new biography The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber recounts the extraordinary life and career of the man who was dubbed “the Jewish Mark Twain,” a writer who created Tevye—the enduring character at the center of Fiddler on the Roof. Sholem Aleichem’s reputation continued to grow after his death in 1916, as Dauber describes in the following excerpt.

Arrangements had to be made.
It would have to be a public funeral, there was no doubt of that; and the Lower East Side had seen its share of those. Both respected figures like the Yiddish newspaper publisher Kasriel Sarasohn and the Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin and less respected ones like the Jewish gang leader Jack Zelig had been accompanied to their eternal rest by crowds and spectacle. (And at least once, during the funeral of the Orthodox rabbi Jacob Joseph in 1902, by a riot; an outbreak of violence that started when workers tossed bits of iron out of factory windows at procession members led to two hundred riot police “slashing this way and that with their sticks…shoving roughly against men and women alike.”) But the question transcended simple logistics and security: How do you bury, in the words of one of his eulogists, “the Jewish people in microcosm”?

First, the family decided, you needed an arrangements committee, and they asked Judah Magnes, the head of the New York Kehillah, to head it up. Though the Kehillah didn’t always succeed at its stated goal of unifying New York’s Jewish communal affairs, Magnes was still probably one of the few individuals who could draw together the multitudinous constituencies bridged by Sholem Aleichem’s appeal. Some backstage political struggles notwithstanding, Magnes and the rest of the committee—all friends or associates of Sholem Aleichem’s, as well as committed Zioinists—would produce a smashing success, a national pageant.

The committee’s first decision was to invite over a hundred Yiddish writers to watch over the body in fourteen consecutive three-hour sessions as it lay in state for two days at 968 Kelly Street. Twenty-five thousand people, alerted by black-bordered extra editions of the Yiddish papers, stood in lines stretching for blocks waiting to pay their respects. That Monday, May 15, 1916, three Pereyaslav landsmen, Jews from his hometown, purified and prepared the body. Everything was done strictly according to tradition, though few if any of the writers were traditional—a fitting tribute to Sholem Aleichem, whose own behavior was less traditional than his sensibility.

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