SOURCE: "Sholom Aleichem: The Old Country," in Contemporaries, Atlantic-Little, Brown & Company, 1962, pp. 271-78.

In the following excerpt, which was originally published in 1956 as an introduction to Selected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, Kazin assesses Aleichem's treatment of Jewish people and the Yiddish language.

Saul Bellow Comments on Aleichem's Achievement:

Sholom Aleichem wrote for the family circle and his attitude was that of an entertainer. Hebrew was the language of serious literature among the Jews of the Pale; Yiddish the secular language and the language of comedy. A popular writer, a caricaturist and sentimentalist, Sholom Aleichem had much more in common with Dickens than he had with Mark Twain, to whom he has often been compared. He was a great ironist—the Yiddish language has an ironic genius—and he was a writer in whom the profoundly sad, bitter spirit of the ghetto laughed at itself and thereby transcended itself...