SOURCE: "Sholem Aleichem: Mythologist of the Mundane," in AJS Review, Vol. XIII, Nos. 1-2, Spring-Fall, 1988, pp. 27-46.

In the following essay, Roskies examines Aleichem's use of mythology in his short fiction and places his work within the context of Yiddish literature.

What could be more obvious for a writer who called himself How-Do-You-Do than to place folklore and folkspeech at the center of his work? After all, it was his childhood friend Shmulik who had inducted him into the world of storytelling; ever since then, the celebrated author could have mined the treasures of Jewish myth and legend as his natural legacy. But Shmulik's formative role in From the Fair was as much a fiction as the name Sholem Aleichem itself, which masked the true beginnings of a typical Russian-Jewish maskil named Rabinovitsh.¹ Everything in the program of the Haskalah, as in Sholem Rabinovitsh's early career, militated against...