His play “Tevye the Milkman” performed posthumously in 1917.
47 years later, the play to be reincarnated as ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ on Broadway in 1964.
Sholem Aleichem (b. Shalom Rabinovich in 1859 in Russia; d. 1916 in NY) – author of numerous Yiddish plays and popular short stories – became probably the preeminent writer in Yiddish of his time for the Russian and Lithuanian Jewish “masses,” inasmuch as the “educated Jews” wrote, spoke and used Hebrew…
Employing a distinctive “folk wisdom” genre, and often compared to Mark Twain because of their markedly parallel styles….when the American icon met the Jewish newcomer in the USA, Twain remarked to the press (with apparently as straight a face as he could muster) that he (Mark Twain) was “the American Sholem Aleichem”.
With Yiddish in almost total eclipse among post–Holocaust contemporary Jewry (except in Hasidic circles – which are not his natural audience) Sholem Aleichem’s sun does indeed gently set…
…the English translations achieve some traction, but the market for his works is now minuscule, outside of various genres of libraries… he was the author of dozens of works, plays and stories.