The epitaph of the writer and humorist Sholem Aleichem [Fiddler On The Roof, the "Jewish Mark Twain"] tells the tragic story of so many famous personalities and entertainers:
Do ligt a yid a posheter
Geshriben yidish-daitsh far vayber
Un faren prosten folk hot er geven a humorist a shrayber
Di gantse lebn umgelozt geshlogen mit der velt kapores
Di gantse welt hot gut gemakht
Un er - oy vey - geveyn oyf tsores
Un dafka demolt geven der oylem hot gelacht
geklutchet un fleg zikh fleyen
Doch er gekrenkt dos veys nor Got
Besod, az keyner zol nit zeen
Here lies a Jew a simple one,
Wrote Yiddish-German (translations) for women
and for the regular folk, was a writer of humor
He circled the world like Kapparos
The whole world does well,
and he, oh my, was in trouble.
But when the world is laughing
applauding and slapping their knee,
he sickened - only God knows this
in secret, so no-one sees.
Shalom Aleichem's funeral
Sholem Aleichem’s funeral was the largest New York City had ever seen. On May 15, 1916, more than 150,000 mourners accompanied the writer’s coffin from his home in the Bronx to the Ohav Tzedek synagogue in Harlem, down Fifth Avenue to the Lower East Side, and finally to the Mt. Nebo cemetery in Cyprus Hills, Queens. The next day, The New York Times reported on the massive funeral, and on Sholem Aleichem’s request not to be buried “among the aristocrats, or the powerful,” but “among the people itself.”
And yet the facts were always superseded by the myth, starting with his folksy nom de plume, which replaced the more banal Sholem Rabinovich. Even his enormous funeral told only half the story. Mourners packed the streets to honor him after his death, but he spent his last days in exile in the Bronx, poor and frustrated and in ill health, his popularity waning and the world passing him by. It was the symbol of Sholem Aleichem that people mourned, more than the writer or the man.
