Let me tell you about this fellow Sholem Aleichem, or Solomon Rabinowitz, or Rabinovich, or whatever his name is: the very famous Jewish writer of long ago whom this documentary fellow Joseph Dorman just made the movie about. Yes, I’ve seen it. It’s a very good movie. I promise you: you‘ll love it.

But I have to admit. It’s true, Sholem had problems. He couldn’t hang on to a nickel, and he threw all his money away once, lost it on the stock market, or, to be more truthful, lost the money his father-and-mother-in-law gave him. But we all throw away money, don’t we? Face it my friend: Who can hang onto some rubles or dollars in these times, except maybe the Rothschilds? Or whoever has their job now.

Anyway, back to Sholem. He‘s a boy from the shtetl, Voronko, in Pereyaslav, near Kiev, in the old days, the old country. Reads and loves books from when he was a child; his mother taught him. Loved Daniel Defoe‘s “Robinson Crusoe” and wrote his own Jewish version of it when he was a boy. (What was it called? I don’t know. “Rubinstein Krusowitz” maybe, something like that. How would I now? I‘m some mind reader of the dead now?)

But he had a way about him, Sholem. He married a rich girl in the rich mansion where he worked. He was the handsome well-spoken young tutor and her parents said “No,“ so he eloped with her, and they ended up having six children. And his in-laws gave them lots of money, and they lived well for a while and then he lost it, all. In the stock market, like I said. What does he know about money? Tell me the truth: What do you know? What do I know? What does the U.S. Congress know, even? Ay…But the man could write, let me tell you. He had that going for him, always ….No, I won’t say “Oy.” Say it yourself.

What’s important is: He works hard, he writes a story every week (or more) for 25 years, and people keep printing them and putting on his plays and reading his novels, and reading the books of his short stories, and God help us, they’re probably even on the Kindle now. He was, they tell us (how would I know, it’s not like I read all that much any more) the greatest Yiddish writer who ever lived, which of course maybe sounded, in the 19th century, like you would say now the tallest Romanian skyscraper, or maybe the best pizza pie in Saudi Arabia.

I‘m not being a disrespectful smarty-pants. It’s just that there weren’t many Yiddish respectable writers, God knows, when Sholem started back in the late 1800s, and he was the one who insisted on writing in Yiddish, the common people‘s words, instead of Hebrew and Russian, the classier, more literary languages. He edited a Yiddish literary magazine, on top of everything else. (No wonder he lost money on the stock market.) Leo Tolstoy wrote for him, can you believe it? Three stories. No, not in Yiddish, you meshuggeneh. In Russian. Sholem translated it into Yiddish. But think of it: Tolstoy.

We all read his new story in the paper every Friday. A story a week, for 25 years, come rain, come shine. Maybe not always, but almost always. Imagine it! You’ve got to give the man credit. And all those characters he dreamed up and put words in their mouths: Tevye, the milkman in the shtetl. Menakhem Mendl the bad-luck stock market speculator. Motl the cantor’s son. Tevye‘s daughters. You know, they called him the Jewish Mark Twain? And you know what Mark Twain said? “Tell him I am the American Sholem Aleichem.“

Imagine: When he died in New York City, in 1916, there were 100,000 people in the streets for his funeral. Or maybe 200,000: Depends on where you read. (They say 200,000 in the movie press book.) So many people. From the East Side, West Side, from Brooklyn, from Canal Street, from Bleecker Street, From Greenwich Village, from everywhere. And when he came to New York years before, you know, he wrote two plays, they opened them on the same night, and the critics blasted both of them. Yes, the Jewish critics — maybe some of the same ones who were later in the streets for his funeral, taking their hats off when he passed. They’re mean, some of these critics. They like to tear people apart, tear artists apart, especially people with a big name. And who had a bigger literary name in the community, in our whole world, than Sholem Aleichem?

After all, “Sholem Aleichem” is what you say fifty times a day whenever you meet someone, whenever you say hello, whenever you say goodbye. You say it to everybody, and it means: “Peace be with you.”

But they all read him, you know. My father, my mother. My sisters, my brother. The Goldbergs, next door. The Bernsteins, the Singers, the Matuschanskavaskys up the street: their son Walter, you remember, the kid who gambled, and his friends Billie and four-eyed Izzy. The Einsteins. The Cohens, The Konisbergs, the Greenbergs, the Garfinkels, the Malamuds, the Spielbergs, the Roths. Even Mr. Monicelli, who brought the milk. Faithfully, every Friday, we read him and he made us all laugh, Jewish or not. And it’s not like he was some Little Mary Sunshine you know. He knew about all those bad things, or intimated them: the pogroms, the prejudice, the poverty. He was aware of them. And of what was to come? Thank God, he didn’t know about that. Or maybe he guessed. They say Kafka and Chekhov were two of his favorite writers. Kafka! Chekhov! A couple of comedians!

So much pain all around him, around us, even in what a lot of us thought was, compared to the shtetls back in Russia, paradise. Compared to the pogroms in Russia, the next stop to the promised land. America! How beautiful it could be, and how beautiful it seemed, by comparison. How bad and bigoted it sometimes got, like for all the Jews on the black list. (Be thankful it wasn’t worse.) Yet, we all got together, America at the head, and we got rid of that murderer, Hitler, and his Nazi bums.

You know what Sholem Aleichem said about how to remember him at his funeral: “Let my name be recalled with laughter, or not at all.“ Think of it! Such a man. Such a mensch.

God knows, Sholem had a sad enough life: his mother dead when he was only 13, family sickness, that money he lost, those mean New York critics, and then the family, wandering all over Europe on lecture tours to make just a little money to live on. And tuberculosis, sick in New York City, sick as a dog maybe, his last four years. But he wrote still. Made people laugh…still. Go figure. “If I were a Rothschild…” What a joke, huh?

But you know why everybody knows him now? Of course you do. That play on Broadway, that big hit big-deal musical, so popular, what was it called? “Fiddling on a Hot Tin Roof?” No, well listen, it’s only a joke. You can’t kill a man for a joke. Yes, even for a bad joke, you can’t. Fiddler on the Roof, I know. Everybody knows, God knows. Book by Mr. Joseph Stein, my old college friend Danny’s father; music by Mr. Jerry Bock, with those klezmer style pop ballads, so pretty (“Tradition…!”); and lyrics by Mr. Sheldon Harnick with those words he sometimes gets, I swear, straight from the Tevye stories: “If I were a rich man deedle eedle eedle….All day long I’d bidi-bidi-bum, if I were a wealthy man.”