SOURCE: "'Don't Force Me to Tell You the Ending': Closure in the Short Fiction of Sh. Rabinovitsh (Sholem-Aleykhem)," in Neophilologus, Vol. LXVI, No. 1, January, 1982, pp. 102-10.

In the following essay, Miller considers the problematic endings of Aleichem's short fiction.

The nonspecialist (I shall use a none-too-hypothetical undergraduate student as example) comes to the works of Rabinovitsh unaided by a sense of the world, or rather worlds, portrayed in his fictions: holidays, rituals, customs, folkways—the common cultural coin of Eastern European Jewry—all must be glossed and explained. If the student comes to these texts unaided, however, he or she also comes unburdened: the name Sholem-Aleykhem no longer conjures up visions of the public persona which Rabinovitsh labored so long to establish—the genial, wise, invariably middle-aged folk humorist and consoler of his people. To the contemporary student, the stories are but stories, to be approached with the...