1: Short story with audio, Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye Strikes It Rich," 1895, Yiddish with translation.

1: Short story with audio, Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye Strikes It Rich," 1895, Yiddish with translation.

From resource kit: Tevye the Dairyman

Here, in the second paragraph of one of the earliest Tevye stories, Tevye sets the scene, and Sholem Aleichem gives the reader a sense of who he is as a character.   

Suggested activity: Listen to the audio in Yiddish and have the students read along in English. Read the English aloud. Ask: what do you notice about the way the character, in the audio version, speaks? What impression does this passage—written and spoken—give us of Tevye as a character and storyteller? Why would Sholem Aleichem have Tevye begin this way?

Sources: Sholem Aleichem, "Dos groyse gevins," in Ale verk Sholem Aleichem (The Collected Works of Sholem Aleichem), vol. 5 (Vilna, Warsaw: B. Kletskin, 1925), 16, retrieved from the Yiddish Book Center's Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, <www.archive.org/details/nybc203813>, accessed March 1, 2016.

Sholem Aleichem, trans. Hillel Halkin, "Tevye Strikes It Rich," in Tevye the Dairyman (New York: Schocken, 1987), 3.

Israeli theater artist Shmuel Atzmon reading the work of Sholem Aleichem, Tevye der milkhikher (Tevye the Dairyman), Yiddish Book Center's Sami Rohr Library of Recorded Yiddish Books  <www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/audio-books/smr-251SholemAleichemK..., accessed March 1, 2016.