Sholom ALeichem - Spokesperson of Jewish dreams.
Every one lives his own or her own life but a writer
along with living his own life, documents what is happening to him and around him with a socioeconomicopolitical backdrop. So, a writer is booned to live the same life twice as much. One such gifted writer who lived life to the fullest and wrote the most fruitful writing is Sholom Aleichem, born Russian in 1859 who influenced Yiddish literature and carved his niche.
Tevye's
Daughters is an anthology of stories written by Sholom ALeichem. The theme of these stories is very simple. In a remote
village of Tsarist Russia, there lived a milkman named Tevye, his wife Golde, and their seven daugthers. Tevye's sole ambition in life is to become a rich man one fine day and get his 7 daughters married off to well-off families. In his poverty, he argues with god, talks to god, gets angry with god, quotes from holy books, and finds solace in the roots of scripture and the feel of god like any naive villager. The village is self-content and happy in its poverty like Tevye is with his life. But life cannot be that simple. Revolutionary struggle against Tsar empowered Russia brings in changes everywhere. The village too is going to be affected which the villagers are not aware of.
Tevye is thrown to the conflicts of these changes. His own daughters love and marry men they choose bringing in a seed of change to the threshold of the house. As opposed to his own belief in tradition, his daughters choose modernism, free will, and liberalism as a way of life.
Because of revolution, politcal conflicts, the villagers had to leave the village in which they had lived all their lives, so close to soil, and move on to other places.
Though the story ends with a sad note, naveity of characters, Russia under Tsar Government, how changes, be it revolution or evolution, affect peoples' lives has been depicted in an astonishingly simple style.
These stories are staged, filmed, and translated across the globe. This is an instance which shows the popularity and significance of Tevye's Daughters.