This memoir of Sholom Aleichem by his youngest daughter is at once the first complete biography of a great writer and a warm and charming evocation of family life in pre-Revolutionary Russia.Although critics in many countries have commented voluminously on the world that Sholom Aleichem created in his stories – that world of simple villages, of humor and wisdom and moral sensitivity – his own life, astonishingly, has never before been fully told. And much of it may come as a surprise to the vast audience that has read his stories in English, in Yiddish, in almost every major language spoken today, or seen them transmuted as Fiddler on the Roof. For this man whose writing conjures up the naive magic of folklore was himself a Kiev stockbroker, urbane, sophisticated, an early supporter of Zionism, a contributor to literary journals – the memoir provides fascinating insights into literary and theatrical circles of the time – an intellectual and a man of the world.

Sholom Aleichem’s ebullient nature and intellectual civility, triumphing over early hardship, over ill health and the anguish of world crisis, pervaded even his will: he asked that the anniversary of his death be celebrated by reading one of the very merry of his stories, so that his name might be recalled with laughter .