Aleichem, Sholom - Alfred Kazin (essay date 1956)

Alfred Kazin (essay date 1956)

SOURCE: "Sholom Aleichem: The Old Country," in Contemporaries, Atlantic-Little, Brown & Company, 1962, pp. 271-78.

[In the following excerpt, which was originally published in 1956 as an introduction to Selected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, Kazin assesses Aleichem's treatment of Jewish people and the Yiddish language.]

Saul Bellow comments on Aleichem's achievement:

Sholom Aleichem wrote for the family circle and his attitude was that of an entertainer. Hebrew was the language of serious literature among the Jews of the Pale; Yiddish the secular language and the language of comedy. A popular writer, a caricaturist and sentimentalist, Sholom Aleichem had much more in common with Dickens than he had with Mark Twain, to whom he has often been compared. He was a great ironist—the Yiddish language has an ironic genius—and he was a writer in whom the profoundly sad,...

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