Biography
Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich (Salomon Nochem Vevik) was born in 1859 into a Hasidic family in Pereyaslav and grew up in the nearby shtetl (small town with a large Jewish population) of Voronko, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (now in the Kiev Oblast of central Ukraine). His father, Menachem-Nukhem Rabinovich, was a rich merchant at that time. However, a failed business affair plunged the family into poverty and Solomon subsequently grew up in reduced circumstances. When he was 13 years old, the family moved back to Pereiaslav, where his mother, Chaye-Esther, died in a cholera epidemic.
His first venture into writing was an alphabetic glossary of the epithets used by his stepmother. At the age of fifteen, inspired by Robinson Crusoe, he composed a Jewish version of the novel. He adopted the pseudonym Sholem Aleichem, a Yiddish variant of the Hebrew expression shalom aleichem, meaning "peace be with you" and typically used as a greeting.
In 1876, after graduating from school in Pereyaslav, he spent three years tutoring a wealthy landowner's daughter, Olga (Golde) Loev (1865 – 1942). On May 12, 1883, they married, against the wishes of her father. They had six children. Their son, Norman Raeben, became a painter and an influential art teacher and their daughter Lyalya (Lili) Kaufman, became a Hebrew writer. Lyalya's daughter Bel Kaufman, also a writer, was the author of Up the Down Staircase, which was also made into a successful film.
In 1905, as pogroms swept through southern Russia, he resettled in New York City. His family set up house in Geneva, Switzerland, but when he saw he could not afford to maintain two households, he joined them in Geneva. Despite his great popularity, he was forced to take up an exhausting schedule of lecturing to make ends meet. In 1914, the family moved to the Lower East Side, Manhattan. His son Misha, ill with tuberculosis, was inadmissible under United States immigration laws. He remained in Switzerland with his sister Emma and died in 1915.
Read more about this topic: Sholem Aleichem
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