Sholem Aleichem

Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish and ; Russian and ) ( – May 13, 1916), was a leading Yiddish author and playwright. The musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on his stories about Tevye the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europe. (The Hebrew phrase "Shalom [or Sholem according to dialect] Aleichem" literally means "Peace be upon you", and is a greeting in traditional Hebrew and Yiddish, surviving in attenuated form in the modern Hebrew "Shalom" [Peace], the normal greeting in modern Israel).