Educational Media Reviews Online

This is the story of the man known as the "Jewish Mark Twain." Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) was a storyteller and humorist in Czarist Russia during the time of the pogroms and the violent political upheavals of the late nineteenth century. He founded the first Yiddish literary journal, was branded a revolutionary, yet helped with the emergence of a new Jewish identity that reverberated throughout the world. His light-hearted stories about Tevye the Milkman became the basis for the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. The video enacts some of Aleichem's stories and balances them with old photographs of shtetl life in Russia. Commentaries by his 100-year-old granddaughter Bella Kaufman (author of Up the Down Staircase) along with other experts on Jewish life and history are included. Aleichem's funeral in 1916 in New York City was the largest funeral that city had ever witnessed, attended by over 200,000 people, and began the American Jewish movement. A powerful documentary of this insightful and courageous writer.