Tevye on King Street: Charleston and the Translation of Sholem Aleichem

Abstract

In June 1946, barely a year after the end of the war in Europe, Crown Publishers in New York printed a collection of twenty-seven stories translated from the Yiddish of Sholem book was called Old Country. By mid-summer 1946 Old Country was on New York Times bestseller list where it remained through Sep tember. It was reviewed widely, by Ben Hecht in New York Times, Irving Howe in Partisan Review, and Robert Warshow in Nation. During the summer of the Nuremburg trials, no reviewer could resist the association of these recent translations with a memorial for what Maurice Samuel had already called World of Sholom Times decorated Hecht's review of Old Country with one of Marc Chagall's pre-war lithographs of the shtetl above their caption—not his: The Vanished World of Sholom Aleichem. Ten years later when Irving Howe dedicated his ground-breaking Treasury of Yiddish Stories To the Six Million, nearly half of his selections of Sholem Aleichem came from Old Country.z