"Wherefore a novel, when life itself is a novel?' This epigraph to Sholom Aleikhem's autobiographical narrative From the Fair could be used for everything that came from the pen of that gifted Jewish writer.
Sholom Aleikhem's characters tell their own story. The Kasrils - inhabitants of Kasilovka - as the writer affectionately calls them, appear before the reader in all their direct and artless simplicity. They wear their hearts upon their sleeves. The very pen-name of the author (Sholom Aleikhem means "peace be upon you") serves him, as it were, as a kindly greeting to his people, encouraging them to "Speak for yourselves. Show yourselves to the world."
"Bard of the poor," Sholom Aleikhem carried his love and sympathy of the common people through all his life, and in his testament, read over his fresh grave, he wrote: "Wherever I die let me not be buried among the aristocrats, the rich and the notables. Let me be buried among the simple Jewish workingmen, the real people, so that the stone that will afterwards be raised upon my grave may adorn the simple graves around me, while the simple graves will adorn my stone, just as in my lifetime the simple people adorned their writer."
The present volume of selected stories published under the title The Bewitched Tailor will give the reader some idea of the pathos and quaint humor characteristic of both the author and the people he describes.
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