Writers and poets
Sholem Aleichem
March 2, 1859 — May 13, 1916
- Yiddish writer
Classic of Yiddish literature and author of Tevye the Dairyman. He lived in Kyiv in 1887–1890 and 1893–1905, portraying it as “Yehupets”; Kyiv has a museum in his honour.
Biography
Sholem Aleichem (born Sholem Rabinovich) was born in 1859 in Pereiaslav. As a young man he spent three years in Kyiv as a tutor to the family of a wealthy leaseholder, whose daughter Olga Loeva he married in 1883. He lived in Kyiv in 1887–1890 and again in 1893–1905, working in business and on the stock exchange while writing his best-known works, the Menachem-Mendel and Tevye the Dairyman cycles.
In his fiction Kyiv appears as Yehupets, the big city where Jews from the shtetls come to seek their fortune and run up against the restrictions of the Pale of Settlement. From the late 1890s until 1903 he lived at 5 Velyka Vasylkivska Street (the site is now a shopping centre where the Sholem Aleichem Museum opened in 2009), and in 1903–1905 at 27 Mariinsko-Blahovishchenska Street (now Saksahanskoho St), which has carried a memorial plaque with his portrait since 1988.
After the pogrom of October 1905 he left Kyiv with his family, living in Lviv, Geneva and Italy and, from 1915, in New York, where he died in 1916. A statue of him was unveiled in Kyiv in 1997; since 2001 it has stood on Rohnidynska Street, next to the Brodsky Synagogue.
Kyiv in their life
- 5 Velyka Vasylkivska St — his home until 1903; the site is now a complex housing the Sholem Aleichem Museum (No. 5-A, since 2009).
- 27 Saksahanskoho St — his flat in 1903–1905; memorial plaque (1988).
- Rohnidynska St — his statue (1997) next to the Brodsky Synagogue.
