Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature and a folk hero in his own right. The creator of a pantheon of memorable characters who have been immortalized in books and plays, he provided readers with a fascinating window onto the world of Eastern European Jews as they began to confront the forces of cultural, political, and religious modernity that tore through the Russian empire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. But just as compelling as the fictional lives of his characters was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovitch in Ukraine in 1859, he endured an impoverished childhood, married into fabulous wealth, and then lost it all through bad luck and worse business sense. Turning to his pen to support himself, he switched from writing in Russian and Hebrew to Yiddish in order to create a living body of literature for the Jewish masses. He enjoyed spectacular success as both a writer and a performer of his work in Jewish communities throughout Europe and the United States, and his death from chronic tuberculosis in New York in 1916 was front-page news around the world. His funeral was attended by more than 150,000 people, and a New York Times editorial mourned the loss of "the Jewish Mark Twain." But his greatest fame lay ahead of him, as the English-speaking world began to discover his work in translation and his beloved characters were introduced to an audience that would extend beyond his wildest dreams. In this magnificent biography, we encounter a Sholem Aleichem for the ages.