(Oregon Jewish Museum)

Out of all the Yiddish writers, Sholem Aleichem is the most famous for his darkly humorous anecdotes. While he describes the poverty of the Jew in the shtetl realistically, he does not allow it to overwhelm the characters in hopelessness and depression.

In one story Aleichem describes the story of Motl Peysi whose family is so poor they are forced to sell all of their possesions. Once all of their possessions have been sold his mother starts crying and his father, who is on his death bed, asks what’s going on to which the mother says “’Nothing,’ mother answers, wiping her red eyes, and the way her lower life and her whole face quiver you’d have to be made of stone not to burst out laughing.”

Aleichem in this way treats the tsarist pogroms with humor in order to lighten things up and expose a positive view of humanity where the Jews should not just submit to the obstacles in their way.

In his series of stories about Teyve the Diaryman (which served as a basis for the play fiddler on the roof) which describes erosion of societal values in a mircrocosm while maintaining a lighthearted quality. His plots have already been used but he instead uses humor to describe them to alleviate the seriousness of the situations.

His comedy is derived not from his stories themselves but from how he tells them. This is why his humor is likened with his speech.He himself admited it it 1884 when he said “Our jargon has more scope for satire than other languages: with a small shrug, an aside, a nickname, the slightest stroke of emphasis, a sentence turns satirical and evokes a spontaneous smile from the reader. Not to mention imitations of the individual speaker (practically every Jew has his own language with all his varied gesticulations)”

This is why Aleichem made a habit of publicly reading his works aloud and why his works are publicly recited and read more so than any other Yiddish writer.